Darts Legends Who Became Drug Addicts

📖 THE DARK SIDE OF DARTS — 192 pages on every conviction, every match-fixing ban, every doping case, every scandal the broadcasters won't touch. Sourced from court records and tribunal rulings. 🔥 LAUNCH PRICE €9.99 (€5 off €14.99, this week only) 👉 https://darksideofdarts.com/ For most of its history, darts was a game played in the corner of a pub. A pint in one hand, a set of arrows in the other. And for decades the bar came with the players, right onto the television stage, right into the biggest arenas in the sport. Behind the walk-on music and the roaring crowds, some of the biggest names this sport ever produced fought private battles that had nothing to do with checkouts or averages. Battles with the bottle. Battles with gambling. Battles with substances that cost some of them their health, their fortunes, and in the cruellest cases, their lives. Andy Fordham won the BDO World Championship in 2004. By his own admission, in the year he won that title, he was drinking close to a bottle of brandy and two dozen bottles of beer before a match. He weighed thirty-one stone. He was rarely sober. And he explained exactly why: the first time he qualified for the Lakeside, the thought of a big crowd watching made him so nervous he began to drink more and more. The alcohol steadied his hand. It quietened the fear. It worked. And that is the trap — when a substance appears to solve the very problem standing between you and success, the descent into dependency can feel less like a fall and more like a sensible professional decision. In January 2007 he collapsed behind the scenes at the World Championship and was rushed to hospital with cirrhosis of the liver. A doctor told him a huge proportion of it was already dead. He went on the transplant list. He gave up alcohol, lost seventeen stone, and spoke openly about all of it so others might understand. He died in July 2021, aged fifty-nine. The tributes poured in from across the darting world. Jocky Wilson's story is different, and deserves to be told carefully. His closest friend Bobby George pushed back firmly on the caricature — insisting Wilson was genuinely a gentleman, and that the label of addict was both unfair and inaccurate. What is not in dispute is the sadness of how his life unfolded: two world titles, a hard working-class background, a strange kind of fame, and then a quiet, difficult decline back in Kirkcaldy. He died in 2012, aged sixty-two. The modern game has changed enormously. Testing was introduced in 2006. Dom Taylor was removed from the 2025 World Championship, had his £25,000 prize money forfeited, and lost his Tour Card — a second offence. The PDPA now provides access to Sporting Chance, offering confidential counselling and residential treatment. That support exists because the people running the sport today understand these problems are real and ongoing. And then there is gambling — perhaps the most insidious issue of all, because it is invisible, because betting companies bankroll the biggest tournaments, and because a wager can be placed on a phone at any hour without anyone in the room knowing. This is not a story about villains. It is a story about human beings, some of them world champions, who got caught in something far bigger than a game of darts. RIGHT NOTICE: The Copyright Laws of the United States recognize a "fair use" of copyrighted content. Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act states: "Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." This video and our YouTube channel, in general, may contain certain copyrighted works that were not specifically authorized to be used by the copyright holder(s), but which we believe in good faith are protected by federal law and the fair use doctrine for one or more of the reasons noted above. Fair Dealing: Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 (UK) section 30 states "Fair dealing" with a work for the purposes of criticism or review, of that or another work, does not infringe any copyright in the work provided that it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement. Copyright in a work is not infringed by the use of a quotation from the work (whether for criticism or review or otherwise).----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact: [email protected]