Five underrated stars of darts: The first player to beat Phil Taylor in a TV major is on Paul Nicholson's list of unsung heroes

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Since joining the Sporting Life team back in February, former major winner and commentator Paul Nicholson has revealed his all-time heroes, the best players never to win majors, his favourite matches and the great characters of the oche.

This week he turns his attention to five players who he doesn't think received the credit they deserved down the years, and one of them is even a world champion!

The Asset has now revealed all his five choices, starting with a player who conquered the world not once, but three times...

JOHN PART

My impression of John Part is one of greatness and everyone who follows darts avidly around the world will understand the impact he’s had on the game.

He was the first Lakeside winner post-split – as well as being the first overseas champion of the tournament – and he’s also lifted all three of his world titles at different venues, including the Circus Tavern and the Alexandra Palace.

The 2003 victory over Phil Taylor was not only iconic and thrilling, but it also inspired others to believe the Power could be beaten even at the very height of his dominance.

However, he goes into this ‘underrated’ list for three main reasons, and the first of those is because of the unfair caveats that are often attached to some his greatest achievements.

In 1994, some said it was easy for him because Bobby George had a broken back in the final. Well no, John was the best player statistically in that tournament, deserved his title and probably would have won against a fully fit Bobby anyway.

Until then people thought only British people could win world darts titles but his triumph took the sport forward globally. I’m sure Raymond van Barneveld will say that helped his belief to break the mould.

In 2008, the critics claimed everyone struggled with Ally Pally and had the flu, while Taylor was eliminated by Wayne Mardle, who then got knocked out by Kirk Shepherd in the semi-final. “All he had to do was beat Kirk Shepherd!” No, John was the best player that week! What more do you want? He had the highest tournament average and was the closest to reaching 100 in a single match.

The fact he was famously left off the wall at the Ally Pally – much to his disappointment – just proves that he’s sometimes forgotten.

Even when he enjoyed his swansong at the 2018 UK Open, where he rolled back the years to reach the quarter-finals, there was yet another caveat because the freak snow storms forced the event behind closed doors.

It’s bewildering why there can’t just be a normal John Part story!

I’ve admired him for many years and back in 2007 he came over to my local darts club in Melbourne to do a question and answer session. It went on for almost 90 minutes because he was so engaged with the audience and I was hanging on every word he said.

As I got to know him, he became even more impressive in my eyes and it still makes me shake my head to this day that he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.

The second reason is how under-appreciated he is in his own country. If you go to Canada and ask people on the street who John Part is, hardly anyone will know!

They have a three-time world darts champion and Hall of Famer living in Ontario yet he can just walk amongst his public unrecognised.

The third reason is the perception people have of his game strengths.

If you think about the likes of Michael van Gerwen, Gary Anderson and Dave Chisnall, you instantly think of their awesome scoring ability, whereas others it’s the clinical doubling.

But when it comes to John, many would describe him as ‘dogged’ and one of the best ‘scrappers’ in the world. He’s a lot more than that, and certainly one of the most intelligent players that’s ever walked the planet.

He’s shown incredible character to repeatedly come back from lulls in his career to achieve great success and I really hope in 50 years time his name is remembered in the way it deserves to be. I fear he may get forgotten about and that would be wrong.

MARTIN PHILLIPS

Way back in the very early 1990s there was obviously an incredible pool of talent including the likes of Eric Bristow, Phil Taylor, Bobby George and John Lowe, while Raymond van Barneveld, Steve Beaton and Richie Burnett were also soon to come through. It was a who’s who of superstars present and future.

But in that mix was this bin man from north Wales. An astonishing player who didn’t really want to travel the world like the others and gain the same kind of ranking points and prize money.

To this day, I firmly believe that if Martin had done this with the right backing – and I have plenty of friends who’ll back me up on this – then he would have won a world title or two.

He played the game in a relaxed way with a smile, never got angry when he lost and just moved onto the next tournament.

His victory at the World Masters – the oldest major in the game – in 2014 at the age of 54, has got to go down as one of the most popular in darts history and I can’t think of a more fitting storybook winner of a title in the last 20 years.

You could say it was rivalled by Rob Cross and his Roy of the Rovers-style World Championship triumph, but when Martin hit that winning double the entire darting community erupted, especially the old guys.

He’s been around in this sport for over 30 years and finally got what his incredible – yet underrated - talents deserved.

To achieve this feat he beat Andy Boulton 3-0 with a 100 average in the first round, whitewashed both Rhys Hayden and Mark McGeeney, before edging out Glen Durrant of all players 6-5 in the semi-finals - and Jamie Hughes for the title!

Bear in mind this was 23 years after he won World Cup Singles in 1991! His longevity alone deserves a place on this list.

I think it’s possible that his success inspired the likes of Peter Wright, Wayne Warren and other veterans to think that it’s never too late to reach their ultimate goals.

Wayne is obviously a fellow Welshman who knows Martin exceedingly well from many years on the circuits while Peter was about 44 at the time and it coincided with when he really started to move up in the world.

Perhaps Martin’s success had a much bigger impact on darts than just a standalone fairytale in his own career although he wouldn’t dream of saying that himself because he’s more humble than any player I’ve ever met. That’s one of the reasons he's so loveable.

Big darts fans will put that down as a “where were you” moment because we all wanted it so badly for him.

If you also look at Welsh darts and where it’s come from, Martin’s impact can’t be understated.

Leighton Rees is obviously at the very top of the pyramid, but the likes of Burnett, Mark Webster and Martin should also be held in such great esteem by the younger players coming through.

He’s waved the Welsh flag so proudly as captain for his country, which means the world to anyone in the BDO system, and that’s why he commands so much respect.

MARK WALSH

If you hang around in the circles that I do, with the likes of Dan Dawson, Chris Murphy and Burton DeWitt, who is a leading darts statistician, we all love Mark Walsh.

I’ve travelled all around the world with Mark down the years and although he’s a man of few words, he always let his darts and reputation do the talking throughout his career.

He was playing his best darts during the 2008 to 2010 seasons and if we had social media back then like we do now, then his performances would have broken Twitter.

When it came to competing with Phil Taylor and Raymond van Barneveld, there was nobody better in the world than Mark at that time and he won seven PDC titles, including four in 2009.

His action and poise were superb, while his double shooting was lethal. If he left tops, you were finished.

Nobody wanted to play against him because he was the most dangerous guy out there despite his struggles to produce his best on the big televised stages, which I think was partly down to him never warming to the razzmatazz side of darts and the walk-ons.

He once called me a “red carpet darts player” which sums up his old school approach to the game and how he felt people like me were more at ease with the cameras, music, vibrancy and chanting from the fans.

Before his trouble with dartitis he reached the 2005 UK Open final, where he lost to Taylor, but his best run in the World Championship was the last 16 and that doesn’t do him justice at all.

When he beat Ted Hankey 16-14 in the quarter-finals of the 2011 Grand Slam of Darts – a round after edging a classic with Dean Winstanley 10-9 – his reaction said it all.

He’s usually like stone but after all those years of frustration you could sense how much it meant to him to go that far in a big major.

Mark had also defeated Michael van Gerwen in the group stages and although he ran out of steam against Gary Anderson in the last four, it was still a superb run and I just wish we had witnessed many more.

We all knew he had it and perhaps all the analysts and pundits put too much pressure on him. In some ways he was the Ian White of that time.

If he had made that semi-final a few years earlier then he could definitely have overcome Gary and then beaten Taylor for the title. I think the amount of mental scar tissue when it came to not getting over the line on TV had a detrimental effect on Mark and that’s why we saw such an emotional reaction to beating Ted.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same from Ian if and when he gets the monkey off his back and reaches the major final that he so dearly deserves.

We also admire Mark for overcoming his long traumatic battle with dartitis and turning into a better player in spite of it, which I can’t comprehend.

I could have easily included him in my list of best players never to win a major, but I wanted to write about him in this feature.

Ability-wise he really must go down as one of the best players in darts history, especially in an era when the sport was really on the rise.

RUSSELL STEWART

Anyone who has been watching darts since the 1980s will know exactly who Russell Stewart is – and I was very privileged to get to meet him in 2007 when I started playing in Australia.

When I was a kid, the one player I tried to mimic the action of was him, because even at about the age of five, I thought it was the best throw in the world.

It was so smooth and technically perfect so that’s who I wanted to emulate it.

Many players, fans and even seasoned pundits of today have no idea how good he was, which is incredible considering he was once the world number two!

And that was in the late 1980s when he was competing with the likes of Eric Bristow, Phil Taylor, Jockey Wilson, John Lowe, Bobby George and Bob Anderson – to name just six of greats in that era.

Most Australian players were confined to where they could play back then but Russell was a pioneer for travelling around the world in a bid to rack up ranking points.

He won the Australian Grand Masters six times, including four in a row, and the Australian five times in a similar period was a huge achievement. It underlines how much better he was than anyone else in that area of the world – and most of everyone else as well!

You can understand why he wanted one ‘last dance’ so to speak, many years later when the game had become more lucrative, and he qualified for his first and only PDC World Championship alongside me on my debut at the 2009 edition.

He won the Oceanic Masters to earn his spot and I topped the Order of Merit after going toe to toe with him for a year. It was a real dream for me at that stage of my career but it also showed what a talented player Russell still was, and he went on to push Adrian Lewis really hard at the Ally Pally.

If the same opportunities for Australian players were around in the 1980s and early 1990s, then Russell Stewart would have been a major winner.

He’s held in such high esteem over in Australia that there’s a big tournament named the Russell Stewart Classic, which he won in 2008 because I took the weekend off (!), and even in recent years he’s pulled off some very good results despite not being in the best of health.

To finish this segment, here's a great nugget of darts trivia for you. Who do you think was the first player to beat Phil Taylor in a televised major?

Yes, that's right, Russell Stewart in the 1988 BDO Masters. Enjoy...

ANDY JENKINS

If you asked 100 darts fans what their impression of Andy Jenkins is, they’ll probably think a larger than life player who is probably the life and soul of any party.

But when you get to know him really well like I have, you’ll realise just how much this game still means to him and how seriously he treats it.

If you took darts away from him, it’d be like losing part of his soul.

However, before I get on to why he’s so underrated, here’s one of my favourite stories about him from the time he went over to Asia to play in the Japan Open in 2001.

He was in tremendous form and thrashed the overwhelming favourite Tony David 5-0 in the final to win one million Yen, which equates to around £12,000. Now that was a huge sum of money back then, especially when you consider what they used to get in the first round at the Lakeside.

Andy went back to his hotel room with his prize money in cash, threw it up into the air and announced: “I’m a millionaire!”

That story always makes me smile, but as far as underrated talents go, it’s very hard not to have Andy in this kind of a list purely because of the sheer longevity of his achievements in darts.

He’s up there with the likes of Steve Beaton, Mervyn King and Ronnie Baxter from that perspective, having operated towards the top of the BDO in the 1990s before becoming a dangerous PDC player since the turn of the century.

Andy may have lost his Tour Card in recent years but he has a glorious stubbornness to stick around and keep trying to win it back.

He’s can still throw fabulously well and nobody he plays will underestimate him.

Andy has travelled all over the world plying his trade from Europe, the United States and Canada to Australia and the Far East but while he doesn’t earn the same plaudits as the likes of Beaton and King, he should be very proud of what he’s achieved.

I think he also deserves a huge amount of praise for being able to find another level to his game after joining the PDC around the turn of the Millennium along with the likes of Kevin Painter, Baxter and Beaton.

I first met Andy for the first time in 2001, when he lost a brilliant final of the Gold Cup to Richie Burnett despite going agonisingly close to a nine-darter, and it was becoming clear by then how good a money player he was turning into.

When money was on the line, he’d be more aggressive and hungrier than his rivals to go after it even though it was perhaps against the nature of the game back then.

As the money in the PDC ranks continued to increase, that played to his strengths and is the main reason why his form improved compared to what he was like in the old BDO system.

He may not have won any of the big majors, but he was exceptional at handling the pressure in the regular tour events that helped him continually earn enough ranking points to qualify for 10 World Championships, 11 World Matchplays, eight World Grand Prix and two Grand Slam of Darts.

Put 5p on the floor and he’ll play you for it. Put £5,000 on the floor and he’ll play you for it.

One of the biggest matches of his career was the quarter-finals of the 2007 World Championship when he faced Colin Osbourne and it went to a deciding set. The difference in prize money between winning or losing that set was almost £10,000, which was huge back then for most players.

His ability to handle the money pressure was crucial to his success that night and while Osbourne would go on to blossom in later years, he perhaps lacked the experience that Andy had at the time.

Players like Andy were able to exude this confidence in big money matches – whether it was the way they walked or the speed they played at – and this intimidated opponents who lacked the experience.

The fact he decided to give the Challenge Tour a serious crack and has been so active in the Modus Live Leagues during lockdown further underlines how much hunger he has for the game, and while he's perhaps doing it more for the love of the game than the money, don’t expect him to stop playing any time soon.

Return here on Thursday afternoon for Paul's third underrated star

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