Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. ~Salvador Dali
As someone who struggles with the most basic of physical tasks, the prospect of truly mastering a sport could barely seem further away. But where I’d happily settle for being vaguely competitive in anything, there exist a few professional sportsmen for whom just being above-average is unacceptable, for perfection is their goal. Think of the greatest moments in the careers of the greatest athletes in recent times: the Barbarians’ famous try vs. the All Blacks in 1973, Maradona’s second goal against England in 1986, or Nadal’s 6-1 6-3 6-0 demolition of Federer in last year’s French Open – and it is hard to dispel the notion that the protagonists have, at least for the briefest of moments, achieved sporting perfection.
Yet the very fact that we consider these individual moments to be career-defining illustrates the transient nature of sport. The Barbarians are, by their very nature, a transient, evolving outfit. Maradona’s public fall from grace in the 1990s left him long, long way from perfection, while Nadal has recently returned from a serious injury barely resembling a top 10 player. So in pursuit of true, as opposed to momentary greatness, we need to look for those who have reached perfection and sustained it. Sustained perfection might include, say, unprecedented dominance in one’s sport for 15 years. Or being a 12-time World Champion. Or not just destroying your competitors on a regular basis, but constantly improving while doing so. Thus I present to you the only sportsman to ever really sustain perfection, Phil ‘the Power’ Taylor.
(If we could just leave aside the inevitable grumbling that fat, sweating men throwing pointy things at a cork board isn’t a real sport and carry on with the eulogy…)
Even by Taylor’s standards, his performance at this year’s Grand Slam of Darts was extraordinary. The tournament is in many ways a more gruelling test than the World Championships. It consists of the best players from both professional codes (the PDC and BDO) and, after a challenging short-format round-robin stage where anyone can, and does, beat anyone else, the tournament evolves into best of 31 legs match-play, with the semis and final held within hours of each other on the Sunday night. In short, the winner truly merits the victory.
This year’s winner, for the third straight year since the tournament’s inauguration, was of course Phil Taylor. This much raised little surprise: Taylor now holds all the TV majors (not including the Premier League) for the first time in darts history. It was the manner of the victory that was most arresting. Taylor won his four knockout stage matches 10-4, 16-7, 16-6 and 16-2. The third of those was against Raymond van Barneveld, the only player to ever suggest that he can remotely live with Taylor’s unbelievable high standards; the fourth to Scott Waites, the strongest candidate offered by the BDO. And yet Taylor just gets better and better. His three-dart average comfortably exceeded 100 in all of the matches. For any other players, hitting three figures in a long-format match would be a phenomenal achievement; with Taylor, it is merely par for the course.
The match against van Barneveld was in turn both awe-inspiring and thoroughly dispiriting. Awe-inspiring in the way that Taylor has comprehensively pulled away from a man who was once his greatest rival, but is now merely a bit-part player in Taylor’s rewriting of the history books. Taylor-Barney clashes used to be something to savour, but the Dutchman evidently understands as well as the rest of us that no mere mortal can live with Phil Taylor. You can see it in van Barneveld’s demeanour now the moment Taylor takes a leg. Whatever kryptonite Barney once possessed is powerless; however well he plays himself, Taylor will always find a way to get the better of him.
And this is where, for fans of darts, the situation becomes depressing. It’s not like the other players aren’t improving themselves: by every discernible measure (3-dart average, number of 180s etc.) the opposition are getting considerably better year on year. The likes of van Barneveld, James Wade, Terry Jenkins and Gary Anderson are very, very good players. But as long as Taylor is around and motivated, they don’t stand a chance. And this is bad news for the sport: competition is essential to maintain interest and at the moment, to draw a parallel with the tediously predictable SPL, Taylor is like Rangers and Celtic rolled into one.
Darts continues to draw huge crowds and is probably the surprise sporting success story of the last 10 years. But, frankly, it’s getting to the stage where Taylor is becoming more of a hindrance than a help. People’s admiration can only lend itself so far; there are only so many times that you can watch the same result over and over again. Instead, Taylor is a top-priced 8/15 to win the PDC title for a 13th time this January. The expression ‘fill your boots’ springs to mind.
In the last leg of Sunday’s final against Waites, Taylor – who had taken out the maximum 170 checkout earlier in the match - hit two consecutive 180s, followed by a treble-20 and a treble-19. He was one throw away from winning the tournament with the ultimate nine-dart finish. As he took aim at double-12, I realised that this man had nowhere left to go. He had already reached darting perfection and by now was just rubbing the rest of our noses in it.
Taylor missed the double 12 by the width of the wire.
Perfection? Not quite.
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