Luke Littler, the world’s best pro darts player, is just 18 — and he’s helping put his sport on the map.
Credit...Robbie Lawrence for The New York Times
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By Oliver Whang
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.
