Darts: The Point Is to Have Fun

It’s a little like taking out an appendix across a crowded room in the middle of a cocktail party.

The smoky air is filled with the sound of rattling glasses, genial chatter, the occasional yelping laugh. A little low-decibel rock ‘n’ roll filters through.

Into the middle of all the conviviality step the surgeons. They stand motionless, hard-eyed, mouths drawn, staring, concentration turning their faces to masks. Then come three quick, flicking motions and three sharp instruments slice into the target with an authoritative thonk .

And another dart game has begun.

Once considered an almost exclusively British institution, the favorite pastime of generations of Andy Capps, darts has become a weekend mania for thousands of Southern Californians--the indoor sport of choice in hundreds of Southland taverns. New recruits join a growing cadre of true believers dedicated to the joys of flicking delicately balanced missiles into tinier and tinier spaces.

Their haunts are like many other taverns: The talk is bright, edgy and sometimes loud, the air is often pungent with tobacco, and jeans and T-shirts almost always outnumber suits and sport coats. But in one corner of the room--and sometimes along an entire wall--dart boards glow in the heat of high-intensity lamps and chalk dust floats in the heavy air, the residue of nonstop scorekeeping at nearby blackboards.

“Once you’re into it,” said Ed Chamberlin, a regular at Anaheim’s Rose and Crown British Pub and Restaurant, “You can’t get out of it. It gets to you.”

There are as many as 15,000 dart players in Southern California serious enough about the sport to compete in league play, estimated Tom Fleetwood, the founder and general secretary of the American Darts Organization, which is headquartered in Bellflower.

‘Really Mushrooming’

“But heaven knows how many others there are playing at home in their garages,” he said. “It’s really mushrooming in the United States, and particularly in this area.”

The last 10 years have seen nearly a threefold growth in the number of dart players in the Southland, said Carl Pedersen, owner of Pacer Darts, a manufacturer in Torrance.

One of the most compelling reasons for the boom, Fleetwood believes, is that darts is both universal and inexpensive.

“You can be young, old, tall, short, fat, skinny--anything, and still learn the basics very quickly and play well,” he said. “And you can do it for a small investment in equipment.”

With as little as $11, anyone can acquire a serviceable set of modern darts. The only other thing that’s needed is a place to play.

In most cases, that means a tavern, or what frequent players call a dart bar.

Noise may rage in other sections of the room, but around the board no one speaks while a player is throwing. No one shuffles around behind. The scorekeeper at the chalkboard next to the dart board freezes motionless. The shooter steps to the line, leans forward, chin jutting and, for a moment, turns to stone. Some players in this attitude--the dart delicately held just next to the eye they aim with--look balletic. Others look like cranes at a water hole.

Regardless of appearances, however, the best of them can group three darts in an area about the size of a dime.

Among the best of the best is Sandy Reitan, a cheerful short-haired woman from Torrance who was rated the No. 1 women’s singles player in the world in the 1983-’84 season. The winner of five United States championships, she was rated third in the country last year. Reitan, 35, estimated that she wins “upwards of $15,000 each year playing in tournaments in the U.S. and abroad and probably spends 40 weekends a year playing darts on the road with her Australian born husband, Andy Green, 41, who is also a top-rated international player.

“I’ve always been athletic,” said Reitan, “and darts takes a special kind of eye-hand coordination. But it’s mainly concentration. It takes a positive attitude to win. You have to look at that last double and say, ‘This one’s mine’ and just punch the finish. Because you look at that little space at the end, that double, and you realize it can be anybody’s game.”

Whooping and Celebrating

“Punching the finish” is the dart player’s equivalent of a touchdown in football, and can trigger almost as much whooping and celebrating among teammates in a team game. It refers to the final dart, thrown into the outer--or “double”--ring of the board to end the game.

The most common dart game involves each player throwing three darts at a time and subtracting each score progressively from 301. Narrow wedges of the board are assigned numbers (scores) from one to 20. A dart thrown into the inner ring of the board is worth triple the number, while one thrown into the outer ring is worth double. The outer circle of the bull’s-eye is worth 25, the bull itself, 50.

A player must finish the game by reducing his or her score to exactly zero by throwing a double or a bull’s-eye.

It can be like doing needlepoint across a room, but many, like Reitan, get the hang of it quickly.

“When I started, I found out it was something I could immediately do,” said Reitan. “I won my entry fee back in the first tournament I entered. One of the reasons I love it has to do with the fact that it’s the only sport in the world where on a Saturday evening, for an $8 entry fee, you can play against the pros in a blind draw.”

Which is exactly what happened to Kelli Hodges on a recent night at the Crest Restaurant and Bar in Torrance, a mecca for area players. Hodges, 24, an occupational therapist from Redondo Beach, was teamed with Paul Lim, a cook at the Crest.

Hodges, a relative novice, has been playing for a year. Lim, 33, was ranked fourth in the world last year.

The Crest is not a noisy place. The concentration is palpable. Players throw quickly, ignoring the vintage Rolling Stones on the jukebox.

When Lim, in his warmup tosses, flips one dart after another into the bull’s-eye, several eyebrows raise and looks of gloom are exchanged among opponents. Lim remains affable. Hodges looks jittery. Lim and Hodges play well, but lose and are eliminated.

“When they called my name with Paul’s in the blind draw, I got really nervous,” Hodges said afterward. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m shooting with one of the very best.’ But this is a game that you don’t just play against other people, you play against yourself. I think it’s relaxing.”

Remains a Tavern Sport

While large tournaments are becoming more common in the United States (the recent Las Vegas Open offered $20,000 in total prize money), darts remains a tavern sport. And competition in the neighborhood bar often is keen.

On a recent night at the Rose and Crown British Pub and Restaurant in Anaheim, the house team, the Crown Royales, were on a roll. The regular league play was going their way after team member Steve Eckhart closed out a game with a bull’s-eye.

“The best of all is when you’re in a best-of-seven match and you come from behind to win,” said Paul Howard, a team member and the manager of the restaurant. “There’s a lot of yelling if that sort of thing happens.

“It’s a lot of fun, and also an excuse to get together and have a few drinks, and that’s why everyone gets into it--for fun. But it eventually brings out the competitiveness in you.”

And a bit of the zaniness. Ed Chamberlin , a member of the Crown Royales and a confessed darts maniac, once came to a Halloween party dressed as a giant dart board. He later gave the costume to the owner of the Rose and Crown, who hung it on the wall over the dart board area of the restaurant, next to an Australian flag.

Even the best players often throw in tavern league play. Reitan, Green, Fleetwood and Lim, for instance, all play on a team known as the Unicorns. Their home ground is a restaurant and bar in Downey called the Library, a dim and cozy place except for the dart area, which is, characteristically, brightly lighted.

If they want to play against the most consistent winners in the world, however, they go to Great Britain.

“The British are the best,” said Andy Green, because they’ve got such a lot of depth. They’ve been playing the game for a very long time.”

The origin of the game, said Green, is somewhat cloudy. Some maintain it evolved from the habit of knights during the Crusades of hurling their weapons at tree stumps for practice. Another theory holds that an ancient archer, wanting to keep his skills sharp in a warmer environment than the winter fields of England, cut down his arrows and took to throwing them at the bottom of a wine cask in the local tavern.

Grew Up in Pubs

Whatever its beginnings, the game grew up in the pubs of Britain, where boards evolved from elm, to today’s sisal bristle boards, which can last for years and cost just over $30. Darts, too, evolved from wooden projectiles with feathers attached (called “widdys”) to today’s high-tech missiles of nickel tungsten alloy.

But the Yanks are coming. Paul Badger, a regular player at Ye Olde King’s Head, a Santa Monica pub frequented by that city’s large expatriate British population, jerked a thumb toward the main bar during a recent round of Saturday-night darts in the place.

“You’ll find more of the Brits back there than you do up here playing darts these days,” he said, raising his voice over the din in the bar behind him. “A lot of Americans play, and we beat the pants off some of the really good English guys, too.

He smiled. “And they don’t like it at all.”