Leighton Rees(1940–2003)

Leighton Maldwyn Rees was born at Ynysybwl in the Cynon Valley of central Glamorgan on the seventeenth of January 1940, son of a Ynysybwl miner. He was raised in the village, was schooled at the Ynysybwl national school, and from fourteen worked at the Lady Windsor Colliery at Ynysybwl for the next decade. He took up darts in the village working-men's club at fifteen, played for the Lady Windsor pub team through the late 1950s and 1960s, was selected for the Wales national darts team in 1970 in his thirtieth year, and through the early 1970s emerged as the leading single player in the British Isles amateur and semi-professional darts circuits.

He left the colliery in 1972 to take a furniture-salesman job in Pontypridd that left him free for the weekend exhibition matches that were then the primary professional income of the leading darts players. He won the British Open in 1976, the News of the World Individual Championship in 1976, and the Winmau World Masters in 1976 and 1977, the three principal pre-television darts trophies of the period. He was the leading single player in the British Darts Organisation (BDO) ranking on the inauguration of the professional World Championship in 1978.

On the third to the seventh of February 1978, at the Heart of the Midlands nightclub in Nottingham, the BDO held the first World Professional Darts Championship over five days with sixteen players from six countries. Rees came through the first three rounds to meet the Welsh Wizard Alan Evans in the semi-final on the sixth of February, won 8 to 6, and met the American John Lowe in the final on the seventh. Rees won 11 sets to 7 to become the first BDO World Darts Champion. The final was broadcast live on BBC Two in the inaugural BBC darts coverage and was watched by an estimated four and a half million viewers, the largest single sports television audience for a darts event to that date. The tournament's success established the World Championship as the central single event of professional darts and the BBC darts coverage as a fixture of the British sporting winter for the next four decades.

He won the WDF World Cup individual title in October 1978 (the first edition of the World Darts Federation tournament), played as captain of the Wales team that took the WDF World Cup team title in 1978 and 1979, and continued as one of the leading single players in the BDO professional circuit through the early 1980s. He retired from professional play in 1989 and was elected to the BDO Hall of Fame in 1996. He died at Pontypridd on the eighth of June 2003 in his sixty-fourth year. The Welsh national darts team named the team trophy the Leighton Rees Trophy in his memory in 2004. The Rees name in modern Welsh sport carries the weight of the seventh of February 1978 at the Heart of the Midlands.