Why do you need the ability to control nerves when you already possess the ability to control a crowd?
Luke Littler was after a ‘Big Fish’ — a 170 finish, the highest possible in darts. It requires hitting two treble 20s followed by a bullseye — a red circle half an inch in diameter, located smack in the middle of the board. Pulling it off in a televised event is a significant achievement; doing it in the quarter-finals of a World Championship is something else.
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But to do it aged just 16? That is unheard of.
Yet this is where Littler, darts’ new teenage sensation, found himself on New Year’s Day, as he aimed to win the leg which would decide the opening set against Brendan Dolan, who had already knocked out two of the competition’s favourites.
Under the World Championship format, players begin on 501, racing to be the first to reach zero. They need to finish on either a double (the ring on the outside of the board) or the bullseye.
After two perfect first darts, the teenager just needed to hit a ‘bull’.
Just Luke Littler casually getting the crowd involved with that Big Fish attempt 🐟😅 pic.twitter.com/QTC2pJsVJ7
— Sky Sports Darts (@SkySportsDarts) January 1, 2024
He held his throwing arm out, performatively, before turning his head to the crowd as if to ask: ‘Should I go for it?’.
The fans — squeezed onto long tables in Alexandra Palace, a vast Victorian exhibition hall perched on a hill in north London, and all in varying degrees of drunkenness — were univocal. Dolan, a veteran Northern Irishman more than three times Littler’s age, looked on impassively.
Littler aimed for the bull… and missed.
That detail is immaterial. He went on to win the set in his next visit, followed by the match, 5-1. But the more important revelation was the attitude; the confidence to exhibit such showmanship at such a young age, plus the ability to back it up.
“I’ve known Luke since he was 10 years old,” says another player, Deta Hedman. “The boy is fearless.”
Now, after beating Rob Cross 6-2 in Tuesday’s semi-final, Littler is just one match away from becoming world champion and earning £500,000 ($630,000). He is already guaranteed £200,000 ($250,000). In that semi-final, with a massive 106.1 average, he dispatched a former world champion who himself averaged a very creditable 102.8. One finish, a 132 featuring not one, but two bullseyes, was one of the many highlights.
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Even if he fails to win on Wednesday night, his run is unprecedented in the sport’s history. Emerging through the youth ranks, Littler’s talent was never in question — a prospect who was a cut above his competitors. But to put it all together on debut, on television, against seasoned professionals?
That is why this 16-year-old is special.
As fingers and conversations interlace over pints of beer, Littler has become the most discussed figure in British sport.
The UK is darts’ spiritual home, a game traditionally played in smoky pubs but which is now evolving at a rapid rate under the auspices of the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), the body run by sports promoter Eddie Hearn.
Two women qualified for the PDC World Championship, players no longer sup pints or smoke on stage, while players from 27 different countries — including the U.S. — appeared at this year’s tournament.
That said, the sight of a player two years off the UK’s legal drinking age in the competition’s final is still startling. Though Littler’s habit of buying a kebab after every late-night win is a throwback (one London kebab house has offered him free food for life if he wins the world title).
There have been constant comments about Littler’s age since his first-round demolition of Dutchman Christian Kist back on December 20 — that is inescapable. During that win over Kist, Littler produced a three-dart average of 106.2, the highest ever achieved by a World Championship debutant.
Sporting a full beard, Littler looks much older than his 16 years, and though his voice carries lightness, he bears the mannerisms of a seasoned professional. Sure enough, the most impressive aspects of his games are elements which are typically measured in decades rather than years, such as his board management (choosing shots which leave the greatest probabilities of winning a leg) and ability to cope with pressure.
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“We’ve known about Luke for a couple of years because of his feats on our junior circuit,” Matthew Porter, the PDC chief executive, tells The Athletic. “He was marked by experts in that environment as being at a different level early.
“I think it’s his maturity and level-headedness; in any sport, talent is one thing, but having the mindset and mentality to achieve it is another. Luke has been very calm, taken it all in his stride, especially the increased media attention. And you can see from his results that it isn’t putting him off his stride.”
There are odd signs of his tender years, such as his mother posting a picture of him sitting under the Christmas tree to open his presents on Christmas Day.
Just a 16 year old opening his prezzys 🥰🥰🥰 pic.twitter.com/ms1bvCFlbE
— Lisa Littler (@LisaLittler3) December 25, 2023
Another is his nickname — ‘Luke the Nuke’ — which is endearingly clumsy but also apt. With the tenderness of his age allied with the depths of his talent, the record books could face darting evisceration. The previous youngest winner of the event was Michael van Gerwen, who was 24 when he won in 2014. Littler is already the youngest finalist by five years.
Aside from sports such as gymnastics and diving, where the suppleness of youth is a major physical advantage, the list of teenage world champions is rare. Perhaps the closest comparisons are Boris Becker winning Wimbledon at 17 in 1985 and Martina Hingis claiming three Grand Slams by the age of 16, or Katie Ledecky winning Olympic swimming gold at 15 in 2012. Or, in team sports, Pele, the Brazilian football legend who won a World Cup in 1958 aged 17.
But this is a new generation of darts player; those who are coming through a fully professional system, rather than emerging through pubs and local leagues.
“I first picked up a magnetic dart when I was 18 months old and, to be honest, everything has been darts, darts, darts since,” said Littler, who can be seen in grainy YouTube footage playing on a magnetic dartboard at just two and a half years old. The caption reads ‘Phil Taylor’, a nod to the 16-time world champion widely thought of as the sport’s greatest of all time.
Born in Runcorn, a town in north-west England on the banks of the River Mersey, Littler was fortunate to come from a darting hotbed. He was a member of the nearby St Helens Darts Academy, with local players also including the likes of Stephen Bunting, quarter-finalist Dave Chisnall, and last year’s world champion Michael Smith.
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“(Former world champion) John Part made a great point,” says darts commentator Chris Murphy. “He’s young but not inexperienced. He will have learned all about board management and finishes and throwing techniques during childhood without realising he was learning them.”
Littler was also driven by childhood competition — with his brother, Leon, also a talented player, ferried around by their father, taxi driver Anthony. By the time Luke was nine, he would roundly defeat the under-14s at the academy; by 12, he had won £7,500 in prize money from competitions, regularly scoring 180s, the maximum possible with three darts.
“I first met Luke when he was 10 at the Isle of Man darts festival, watching this young lad practising,” says Hedman. “What I liked was that he practised as if he was playing, rather than mucking about like a lot of the youngsters.
“In those early days, he was quite a shy lad and extremely respectful, but his talent was there for all to see. My partner, Paul, was also on the youth executive of England Darts — and that weekend he said that if Luke keeps level-headed, he will be a world champion.”
U14s elite winner Leon beating his brother 😂, thanks sponsors @TargetDarts @Garryplummer @bocbocsth @Woodward_Sols pic.twitter.com/9Bfd9vISiU
— DARTS ACADEMY STH (@DartsAcademySTH) August 1, 2016
During the COVID-19 lockdown, which began when Littler was just 13, Leon began to play less but Luke just became more obsessed. Over the coming months, he began to enter both boys’ and men’s events, usually run concurrently at a single venue, and often winning both. He also found the time to win two JDC world championships (darts’ junior circuit), the most recent coming just days before the PDC World Championship began last month.
“Just going over the last couple of years, there probably aren’t that many darts players who’ve had as much experience as him at actually playing,” says Murphy. “It’s incredible that he is where he is — but when you roll the tape back, the signs were there that he was capable of playing better than anyone else.”
So far, his path has been sedate, losing just six of the 30 sets he has played. He has averaged over 100 — seen as the benchmark of super-elite players — in four of his six games, while usually hitting his doubles (the high-pressure darts at the end of a leg) over 40 per cent of the time.
If anything, the greatest challenge has come away from the board, dealing with the glut of media attention, though the JDC asked him to do dozens of interviews in an attempt to get him used to the impending storm. Nevertheless, over the past week, the darts community has come together in protection of their young star.
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“If it goes tits up with Luke, give yourselves a pat on the back,” the former world champion Gary Anderson told reporters last week. “Let the boy play darts. I’ve been downstairs and he’s got cameras, zoom calls, meetings… Let the boy play darts.”
There has been coverage of his love life, and a minor row sparked when Littler was photographed holding up a kebab and a copy of The Sun after an interview. Much of Liverpool, just a 30-minute drive from Runcorn, boycotts the newspaper after its coverage of the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989, in which 97 fans were unlawfully killed. Littler wrote an apology on Twitter soon after, stating: “The media attention I have been getting is very new to me and I didn’t fully understand at the time what I was being asked to do.”
Littler admitted there had been “some nice things and some horrible things” about his new-found status, but the PDC are trying to ensure one of their prize assets is safeguarded and Porter has been speaking to Littler’s manager multiple times each day during the tournament.
“He’s remarkably calm,” says Porter. “There are adequate duty of care provisions in place, but obviously things have snowballed. We make sure he’s OK, give him the opportunity to voice concerns, and make sure he can concentrate on his matches.
“But in the same vein, we don’t want to hold him back. If he’s ready to win the world championship, he needs to have the opportunity. It’s not for somebody to take that away from him just because they feel he’s too young.”
There has been a simplicity to Littler’s path to sporting superstardom so far — as easy as ticking off the levels of one of his beloved video games. Asked to describe his daily routine recently, he replied: “Just wake up, play on my Xbox, have some food, have a chuck on the board and go to bed. That’s it.”
Ahead of the final, he will stick to a routine which could just as well be a GCSE revision plan. “I’ll do what I’ve been doing,” he said. “In the morning, go for a ham and cheese omelette, then come here have a pizza and then practice! That’s what I’ve done every day.”
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“I think in one of the early rounds, he was asked what he was going to spend his prize money on,” says Porter. “And I think he said Xbox credits. So that gives you a dose of the reality of what life is like away from darts.
“He doesn’t have a mortgage, he doesn’t have kids, he doesn’t have overheads. He’s just a boy who lives with his parents. His life away from the world darts championship is that of a normal teenage boy, being with his friends and playing computer games.”
The past weeks have seen Littler live out those video-game fantasies. He has been invited to soccer matches at Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur: he sat with Spurs midfielder James Maddison’s family at the latter, while Declan Rice, the most expensive English player ever, asked Littler for a photograph at Arsenal.
A Manchester United fan — though his greatest love is local rugby league team Warrington Wolves — Littler was also excited to receive messages from Jonny Evans and Gary Neville ahead of his match against Raymond van Barneveld, another of his childhood heroes.
During that game, the crowd sang: “You’ve got school in the morning.”
That is not strictly true — Littler left Warrington’s Padgate Academy in the summer after doing his GCSEs, knowing he would imminently turn professional. On his final day, he received what he described as his “one and only school award” — a certificate naming him the most likely student to become famous. That prediction was proved correct quicker than many might have thought.
Judging by his current progress, the burden of both his talent and celebrity is not weighing heavy yet.
(Top photo: Tom Dulat/Getty Images)