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February19February 19, 2021

The Many Looks Of Peter Wright

Over the years, Darts has shown itself to be no stranger to some of sports biggest characters.

In fact, it has provided a safe haven for many of Britain’s zaniest and quirkiest sportsmen.

In earlier times, notable names from the game would include Jocky Wilson, Bobby ‘King of Bling’ George, Ted ‘The Count’ Hankey, Steve ‘The Muffin Man’ Hine or Andy ‘The Viking’ Fordham, who all held legitimate claims to be among darts biggest personas of their time.

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But in the modern era few are as eccentric than Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright.

The Snakebite character he has portrayed over the last decade has made him one of the most recognisable sportsman in the UK, even for a game such as Darts.

His dancing intros, jigged to Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party,” and his themed mohawk and matching outfits have been delighting darts fans for years now and have helped to establish him as a firm fan favourite on the PDC circuit.

The birth of Peter Wright, the showman

But that’s not what he looked like we first met him back in 1995 so what’s with the reinvention?

Well, back in 1995, at the now defunct BDO World Darts Championship, we witnessed the unremarkable debut of a young Peter Wright.

No mohawk, no beard and no loud outfit, what we got instead was a young, clean shaven Peter dressed entirely in black with normal short black curly hair.

Losing at the Lakeside 3-1 in the first round to Richie Burnett, that was the last we saw of Peter Wright as he left the game of darts to return to labouring work and be forgotten about entirely. Or so we thought at the time.

Never letting go of the dream, and knowing full well the extent of his capabilities, he returned to the game, playing in the 2010 PDC World Championship at the Ally Pally with a new look and a new attitude.

He had a new character too. This was the first time we were introduced to Snakebite, named, many falsely believed, after his favourite drink. In fact, the player has since claimed that he simply has a love for snakes, and they were the inspiration for his new look.

In his own words, he did not want to be a typical European player, looking grumpy, playing and going home but instead wanted to find something different, a new stage persona which led to the outfits and the crazy hair, which he describes as warpaint.

The new look worked, and he famously made it all the way to the World Championship final in 2014 in his mid-40s, before becoming the oldest winner in the competition’s history when he finally took down the main prize aged 50 in 2020, at last putting to bed all of the “all hair, no flair” tags, made by those who claimed he was little more than style over substance.

So, while we know his greatest achievements at the oche, what are his biggest triumphs in the clothing department?

Some Of Peter Snakebite Wright’s Most Memorable Looks

Comic Relief

A bit of Red Nose Day fun at the oche on one Premier League night.

Halloween

A spooky night at the oche.

Valentines

Love was in the air for this Premier League night in 2017.

You Can’t Beat A Bit Of Bully

A fitting tribute to Jim Bowen, the host of ITV’s cult 1980’s gameshow, Bullseye.

Stateside

Living it up in Las Vegas in 2017.

A Land Down Under

Chucking in Sydney in 2014.

MacSnakebite

Peter returned to his Scottish roots for this look.

Remembering The Crafty Cockney

A salute to the much missed Eric Bristow.

A Festive Snakebite

Snakey dresses as an elf for the 2020 Worlds, a tourney he would go on to win.

How Snakebite Stole The Ally Pally

For the 2020 World Champs, Peter found a great way to incorporate his face mask into his Christmas outfit.

The 2021 Darts Premier League, which would normally be getting underway about now, has yet to receive new and confirmed dates for the 2021 renewal following the PDC’s postponement.

January28January 28, 2020

Gerwyn Price Move From Rugby To Darts – Examining Sports Stars That Have Switched Sports

By Peter FryersIn

All About Darts

As recently as 2013, Gerwyn Price, known as The Iceman to darts fans the world over, was employed as a hooker for the lower league professional rugby team Neath RFC in South Wales. Earning as little as £25k a year, the player took a job working behind a bar of the local Welsh valleys rugby club Markham Welfare to make ends meet but never let go of his dream of representing Wales at senior level.

After leaving school at 16, Price represented Wales at every age group save for senior-level, while also carving out a playing career with Glasgow Warriors and Cross Keys, the latter of which he would get to represent at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. After more than a decade playing, and with injuries piling up, he finally contemplated walking away from the game he loved and leaving behind his dreams of making it as a pro-sportsman. Then fate intervened.

Despite not throwing a single dart since leaving school, Price would, on a quiet day in the bar, gradually begin to chuck a few darts at a board mounted on the walls of the bar before getting skilled enough to play for the pub at weekends, playing in a local League.

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After winning a handful of tournaments locally, Price went down to a PDC qualifying school at the Robin Park Tennis Centre in Wigan on the advice of Welsh darts professional Barrie Bates and managed to bag himself a tour card. After securing his place at the UK Open in Minehead – the exact same venue of his first major televised PDC final two years later – the rugby player finally became the darter.

Rugby helps Price find success in darts

Despite not sharing much in common, rugby actually provided some transferable skills for the rookie chucker’s new discipline; composure, resilience and raising his game under pressure. Plus, years on the rugby pitch gave the would-be Iceman a physique out of step with his beer-bellied opponents. In 2016, he broke into the top 32 on the PDC Order of Merit.

Another thing that followed him from the pitch to the oche, was his aggression particularly in his knack of celebrating by bellowing at in the faces of his opponents. While such ferocity hasn’t always won him an army of fans, such emotion is commonplace in rugby and second nature to a rugby players, thus, to a degree, understandable.

Things reached a peak at the 2018 Grand Slam of Darts, when he beat double world champion Gary Anderson in a bad-tempered final to win his first major TV title. Anderson took issue with Price’s extravagant celebrations which set up his bad boy of darts reputation and the crowd sided with the Scotsman, raining down the boos on Price’s big moment. It would also prove to be a costly moment, as Price was issued the biggest fine in darts, some £21,500 which was later halved on appeal. The boos followed him into the new season, following him to every stop in the Darts Premier League, save for Cardiff naturally.

In 2019, Price repeated the trick, winning the Grand Slam of Darts once again, this time brushing aside the formidable world No 1, Michael van Gerwen, and in the process and banishing the hoo-doo that the dutchman held over him. A much-tipped victory at the World Championships at the Ally Pally in December wasn’t to be, however, as he lost out to Peter Wright in the semi-final.

It is clear though that the volume of dissent is getting lower tourney by tourney. Admitting that he wishes to put his rugby past behind him, Price is said to want to “park this rugby thing” and become known as a superstar darts player in his own right. With the new season kicking off with the Darts Masters in Milton Keynes this Friday, this represents the perfect opportunity to lay down a marker in the very first event of what could be a very big year for the would-be superstar darter from Markham.

Five Sport Stars To Switch Sports

Gerwyn Price is not the first professional sports star to switch sports and try his hand at a new and different discipline. Plenty of others have made the jump with various degrees of success. So, who else has tried it and how successful were they?

Usain Bolt (Athletics to Football)

Having won everything in sight for almost a decade, eight-times Olympic champion, Jamaican sprint legend Usain Bolt decided to pursue his dream of becoming a footballer.

In 2018, Australia’s Central Coast Mariners gave him the opportunity to show what he could do with a ball at his feet. Not very much was the resounding answer after he made a 30-minute cameo appearance coming off the bench with The Mariners already 6-0 to the good with Bolt having very little effect. Soon after, he did manage a brace against the amateur side Macarthur South West United in a 4-0 win for the Mariners but, sadly, that world-famous stride that served him so well on the track was to prove incompatible with a football.

Ian Botham (Football to Cricket)

While Beefy might be synonymous with English cricket, many have no idea that he was, at first, a professional footballer. After his career peaked with lowly Scunthorpe United of the Football League, his decision to switch events would prove to be a wise one as Botham would go on to rack up more than 5,000 runs in 102 test matches, many as captain, at an average of 33.54 after making his test debut in 1977.

In 2009, he was knighted by the Queen, the same year that he was also inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.

Victoria Pendleton (Cycling to Horse Racing)

Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth champion cyclist Victoria Pendleton broke records in the Keirin for Team GB during the 2012 London games but within three years had announced her intention to become a national hunt jockey instead.

After winning her first race in March 2016 when she rode Pacha Du Polder to victory at Wincanton, she mounted the same steed two weeks later when they took a shot at the Cheltenham Festival where they could only manage a fifth place. Despite her haul of gold medals and broken records, Pendleton cites her time as a jockey as her biggest professional achievement.

Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff (Cricket to Boxing)

TV personality and former England International cricketer, Andrew Flintoff, better known as Freddie, has enjoyed a multifaceted career since retiring from cricket. One of the best all-rounders of all time, Freddie is, among other things, a presenter of Top Gear, They Think It’s All Over team captain, Australian I’m a Celebrity winner and fish and chip flogger and, to some, a one-time ugly baby.

He even had a gig hosting his own darts show, when he took the mic for the short-lived Sky One flop One Hundred and Eighty. In all, Freddie played 79 test matches and 141 One Day Internationals scoring more than 8,700 runs. After retiring in 2010, Fred trained as a professional boxer, winning his first and only pro bout against America’s Richard Dawson in November 2012 before going back on the telly. In December 2010, Flintoff became a guest commentator during a number of matches in the 2011 PDC World Darts Championship.

Rebecca Romero (Rowing to Cycling)

Romero picked up a silver medal at the Athens 2004 Olympics in the quadruple sculls and followed that up with the 2005 World Championships. A year later, however, a back injury forced her retirement after which she took up track cycling and won another Olympic gold medal, this time in the 2008 Beijing Olympics individual pursuit.

In doing so, she became the first British woman – and second woman of any nationality – to win medals in two different sports in the Summer Olympic games (German swimmer and handball player Roswitha Krause being the first). In 2019, she was rewarded the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

June28March 30, 2022

Top 5 Funniest Darts Moments

By Peter FryersIn

All About Darts

With drunken crowds, crazy characters and bizarre nights, darts has provided us with some very funny moments over the years. From the greats getting it all wrong to steady hands proving to be anything but and even accusations of nasty odours at the oche, here is our rundown of the top 5 funny darts moments.

Miscounting Power

In the twelfth week of the 2014 Premier League of Darts, 16 times world champion Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor gave hope for the rest of us, proving his own mortality and demonstrating that even the greatest of all time can make simple amateur pub-night mistakes, when he fluffed his lines and got his sums wrong in a match against Gary Anderson in Manchester.

In a match that would ultimately end in a 6-6 tie, The Power weirdly and uncharacteristically miscounted 129, shooting for double 16 instead of double 11 leaving Anderson to take the leg. Taylor nearly conceded the match after getting his checkout wrong but despite his bad counting, he managed to salvage a point against Anderson who would go on to win that year’s competition.

China

In the 2016 World Cup match between England and China, Adrian Lewis faced Wenge Xie and was dominating proceedings when, out of nowhere, Xie rattled off a 171 before celebrating like he had won the entire tournament on a moment the crowd and Lewis both enjoyed. Despite the wild celebrations, Jackpot checked out for 40 in one shot immediately after.

By the end, Jackpot and his partner Phil Taylor strolled into the last eight of the World Cup after the Chinese duo of Xie and Yuanjun Liu both lost 4-0 so they were forgiven for enjoying themselves as much as possible while still in the competition.

Almighty Spill

For a man who has made a very healthy living off the back of having incredibly steady hands, Michael van Gerwen proved to be decidedly clumsy in Sydney during a Darts Masters match against Raymond van Barneveld. Not only did he get shot down 8-2 Down Under but, feeling the heat, MVG felt the need for some refreshments in between throws.

Unfortunately for Mighty Mike, he was having an off night all round and as he reached for his water he fumbled the tumbler over sending it crashing to the floor and putting poor Barney off his shot. Oops.

Sun Goes Down

At the 2017 PDC World Darts Championships Chinese qualifier Qiang Sun didn’t get off to the best start when making his entrance. While Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright bounces out to Pitbull’s Don’t Stop The Party and Gary Anderson makes his entrance to Jump Around by House of Pain, Sun enters the arena to Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum. On this occasion, however, instead of goin’ on up, he was goin’ on down and it wasn’t his walk on music that caught the eye as he stepped up to the oche to play Australian Corey Cadby at the Ally Pally.

Having been introduced to the packed crowd, Sun made his way over to the officials to shake the hands, a common pre-match courtesy, before tripping over the raised oche and falling flat on his face and sending the rowdy crowd into hysterics as he hit the deck. Sun’s night went from bad to worse when play finally got started as he went on to be eliminated from the competition losing 2-0 to his Aussie opponent.

Fartgate

Fartgate dominated the headlines during the 2018 Grand Slam of Darts when a match between Gary Anderson and Wesley Harms led to one player accusing his rival of an atrocious, potentially game-altering offense that left a stink on what was otherwise a good match that finished 10-2 to the Scotsman.

It all started with Harms, who in his post-match interview, claimed to have suffered on stage fragrant issues, before directing the blame for the rancid stinkers squarely at the feet his opponent. Said Harms, ”I think it will take me two nights to lose this smell from my nose”.

The Flying Scotsman’s response, in turn, led to one of the most bizarre sporting interviews of all time when he replied, “I thought that Wesley had farted on stage, it smelled awful. But I swear on my kid’s life that it was not me. I thought it was him, and I went, “that’s dirty.” It was bad. It was a stink. I thought it was him, and he started playing better. I went, he must have needed to get some wind out. It definitely came from table side. It smelled like eggs, rotten eggs.”

With neither player fessing up to foul play, fans were left to make up their own minds about the foul-smelling saga until, a few days later, the real culprit was unveiled when a security guard confessed to be the source of the pongy problem.