An 18-Year-Old Prodigy May Be Darts' First Global Superstar

New York Times

5 hours ago

Luke Littler doesn't remember when he first threw a dart at a dartboard, but there's a video of him doing so at 18 months old. The year was 2008, in Cheshire, England, where Littler was born. His father drove a taxi and his mother worked in a candle shop, and like many families in the area, they watched professional darts on TV at home. The pastime had grown over the decades from a working-class hobby to a national fixation, and by the 2000s, the prize money for winning the Professional Darts Corporation's World Darts Championship, the biggest tournament in the sport, was over 100,000 pounds. (It might as well have been deposited directly into the pocket of Phil Taylor, who won the event 14 times between 1995 and 2013.) For families like the Littlers, darts' popularity meant new dreams. Your child didn't need to be the next Beckham — he could be the next Taylor.
In that home video from 2008, you can sense a nascent promise. Littler, wearing a diaper and a baseball hat too big for his head, lifts his right arm and flings a dart at a magnetic board. For all his toddler awkwardness, the movement is instinctive, even graceful, his fingers pointing downward for a moment before they quickly grasp another dart from his left hand. When he finishes his third throw, he holds his final pose for a second, his torso twisting slightly, as Taylor's often did, and then turns toward the camera, an open-mouthed smile plastered on his face.
'Luke was in his nappies, and he was throwing like a professional,' Polly James told me on a recent spring night in Newcastle. James covers darts for Sky Sports, England's largest sports-television network, and she was sitting backstage at the Utilita Arena watching a broadcast of the event there. It was the eighth night of the Premier League, a six-month-long competition run for the world's best darts players, and the arena, which seats 11,000 people, was sold out. Many were there just to see Littler. 'He's all anyone wants to hear about,' James said.
After making the finals of the 2023-24 world championship as a 16-year-old, Littler completed the most successful rookie season in darts history, winning 11 titles, including the Premier League and the 2024-25 World Darts Championship, and earning more than a million pounds in prize money. Now 18, he is widely considered to be the best darts player in the world: He is already ranked No. 2, after just a year and a half of professional play. (Darts rankings are based on tournament winnings over a two-year period.) Starting tomorrow, he will compete against 15 other top pros at the U.S. Darts Masters in Madison Square Garden.
In a sport that has been historically dominated by middle-aged men with paunches, his talent seems to both fascinate and disorient fans. Many, like James, bring up the 2008 video as an attempt to account for what can otherwise seem like a magical ability. 'It just seems so effortless,' one fan told me in Newcastle. 'He just gets up there and does it.'
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