A special version of our regular Talking Points column that focuses on the World Championships and its main features:
The Venue
RECENT months and years have seen a number of claims from venues wishing to be known, or thought of, as the “Home of World Darts”. Surely the Alexandra Palace has as good a claim as any?
Although the Indoor League, rightly, gets much of the credit for bringing darts to television, the News of the World tournament was also in the early 1970s vanguard. During those remarkable days, the finals were held in front of a raucous crowd in excess of 3000 at the same London venue used for the PDC’s annual showpiece since 2008, the Alexandra Palace.
Ally Pally provided the PDC with the capacity and flexibility to expand their World Championship and as any attendee will recount it is now an experience in itself. This redoutable and unique venue, restored after bombing and fire, can claim to pre-date any other current darts venue and to have outlasted them all.
The Trophy
IT’S not the Original – The maker of ‘Big Sid’, Mike Shorer, spoke exclusively to Darts World on his creation:
“My favourite piece in darts was definitely Big Sid. It’s such an enormous over the top thing. When Barry commissioned me to do it he said he wanted Sid’s signature on it, he wanted it big and he wanted it noticed.
“It took a lot of making. The globe on the top is eight inches in diameter, solid silver and I had to hand engrave all the countries of the world on it.
“I’m usually working on about 10 jobs at once but the Sid Waddell Trophy start to finish took three weeks. To get all the angles right and the texturing, engraving is very detailed and time-consuming.
“The one you see now isn’t the original. The first one I wanted to include some of the colours of the dartboard. “Barry had asked for some granite on the plinth, which is black. I thought it would be nice to have some red marble, the middle part was the same marble Michelangelo used in the Sistine Chapel, such a beautiful red.
“I presented it to Barry and he picked it up and said it’s too heavy. It was 23 kilos. It was decided that it looked fantastic, but logistically it was too heavy for players to pick up. So we had to re-make it! Full Feature: Shorer’s Baby at dartsworldld50.com
The Prize
TOTAL prize fund for the inaugural PDC World Championship in 1994? £64,000.
This year’s event will offer £2,500,000. The winner’s cheque will be a cool half a million pounds.
Winner £500,000
Runner-Up £200,000
Semi-Finalists £100,000
Quarter-Finalists £50,000
Fourth-Round Losers £35,000
Third-Round Losers £25,000
Second-Round Losers £15,000
First-Round Losers £7,500
Total £2,500,000
1994’s winner, Dennis “The Menace” Priestley, trousered the princely sum of £16,000. Leighton Rees’s £3000 reward, for the first-ever darts World Championship (1978), looks almost sad by comparison.
Commercial contract earning power is boosted massively, by having a World Championship on your CV, and qualification for every event, for the next two years, is assured. Most players will value the place in the history books and the holding of the Sid Waddell trophy as equally important, but their families may well benefit more from the financial rewards.
To say the title is now worth more than a million pounds is no exaggeration. Winning the PDC World Darts Championship is a life-changing matter.
—–ENDS—–
Images: Main – Lawrence Lustig/ PDC, Dennis Priestley – Winmau and Gerwyn Price – PDC
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