Taylor · 2011
Phil Taylor takes his sixteenth World Darts title
On the evening of Sunday the ninth of January 2011 at the Alexandra Palace in north London, in the final of the eighteenth Professional Darts Corporation World Darts Championship, the fifty-year-old Stoke-on-Trent-born professional darts player Phil The Power Taylor, the universally-recognised central single figure of the modern professional darts era, defeated the Dutch challenger Adrian Lewis 7 sets to 5 in the final to take his sixteenth World Darts Championship across the joint BDO and PDC sanctioning circuits (the British Darts Organisation championship 1990, 1992; the Professional Darts Corporation championship continuously 1995 to 2002 and intermittently to 2013). The sixteen-World-Championship-title record has been held by no other player in the history of professional darts; the nearest competitor on the all-time men's-darts-major-championship-list is Eric Bristow (the five-time BDO World Champion of the 1980s) and Michael van Gerwen (the three-time PDC World Champion of the modern era). Taylor's career across 1985 to 2018 included the sixteen World Championships, sixteen World Matchplay titles, two World Cup of Darts titles, the six-time BDC PDC Player of the Year, the 1990-2018 average-tournament-prize-money-record, and the central single transformative figure of the modernisation-and-mass-popularisation of professional darts as a major British televised-sport across the 1990-to-2010 period.
A sport is rarely dominated by a single figure across a continuous twenty-five-year competitive period. Professional darts before Phil Taylor was a semi-amateur pub-and-club regional-sport with a small late-1980s televised-sport circuit on the BDO sanctioning body. Phil Taylor transformed the professional-darts-circuit across his twenty-five-year career into the second-largest single televised-sport in the United Kingdom after football, on the strength of the sixteen-World-Championship-title competitive record and the Power Phil-Taylor public-persona that became the central single popular brand of the modern professional darts era.
THE BURSLEM POTTER
Philip Douglas Taylor was born at the Hartshill General Hospital outside Stoke-on-Trent on the thirteenth of August 1960, only son of Douglas Taylor, a Burslem potter who had worked across the Burslem-Stoke pottery-and-ceramic industry for the 1950s-and-1960s North-Staffordshire pottery employment, and Liz Reece. He was raised in the Burslem working-class-pottery-employee-terraces of central Stoke-on-Trent, was schooled at the Hanley Grammar School to the fifteen-year-old 1975 school-leaving-age, and on the 1975 school-leaving took the apprentice-ceramic-handle-and-spout-maker position at the Wedgwood ceramic factory at Barlaston outside Stoke.
He worked across the next decade at the Wedgwood factory on the handle-and-spout assembly-line position (the semi-skilled-production-line role at the Wedgwood industrial-ceramics production circuit), took up amateur darts at sixteen at the local Burslem Cricketers Arms pub on the weekend-evening-darts-team rotation, and across the 1976-to-1985 amateur period worked his way through the North-Staffordshire local-darts-leagues to the semi-professional amateur-club-championship recognition by the early 1980s.
He was identified as a junior-amateur-darts prospect by the senior BDO World Champion Eric Bristow at the 1985 North-Staffordshire amateur-darts-tournament at the Burslem Cricketers Arms, was taken on by Bristow as a personal-protégé on the 1986 Bristow-Eric-Bristow-Sponsorship arrangement (the 9,000-pound-per-year sponsorship-arrangement Bristow paid Taylor across 1986-1989 to support Taylor's transition to the senior-professional-darts-circuit on the British Darts Organisation sanctioning), and entered the senior BDO sanctioning circuit on the 1988 BDO World-Championship qualifying round.
THE FIRST WORLD TITLE
He won his first BDO World Darts Championship on the 1990 Lakeside Country Club Frimley Green final on the evening of Saturday the thirteenth of January 1990 in his twenty-ninth year, defeating his personal-sponsor-and-mentor Eric Bristow in the 6 sets to 1 final. The 1990 victory was the protégé over the mentor (Bristow had been the five-time BDO World Champion of the 1980s; Taylor's victory was the generational-handover moment that the 1990 BDC commentary universally recognised). Taylor took the 1990 BDO Player of the Year recognition on the strength of the World Championship.
He took the second BDO World Championship at the same Lakeside Country Club on the 1992 final on the evening of Saturday the eleventh of January 1992, defeating Mike Gregory 6 sets to 5, and entered the 1993 split-of-the-BDO-and-PDC sanctioning bodies on the professional-side of the Phil-Taylor-and-Bristow-and-the-fifteen-other-1993-PDC-foundation-players breakaway from the BDO that founded the Professional Darts Corporation in 1993.
THE PDC ERA
Taylor took the inaugural PDC World Darts Championship on the 1994 Lakeside Country Club final on the 1994 PDC sanctioning, took the 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002 PDC World Championships consecutively (the eight-year unbroken winning-streak that became the PDC-darts unrivalled-record), and took the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2011 PDC World Championships intermittently across the 2003-to-2011 PDC sanctioning period. The 2011 final at the Alexandra Palace on the evening of Sunday the ninth of January 2011 against Adrian Lewis was the sixteenth World Championship of his career, the universal-record across the combined BDO-and-PDC sanctioning history.
THE STANDING MODERN-DARTS TRANSFORMATION
The professional-darts-circuit across the 1990-to-2018 Taylor-era was transformed from the 1980s-semi-amateur-pub-and-club regional sport into the second-largest single televised sport in the United Kingdom after football. The PDC prize-money-pool grew from the 1994 PDC inaugural £64,000 across-all-PDC-events to the 2018 PDC annual £15 million across-all-PDC-events on the strength of the 1990s-and-2000s televised-darts mass-popularity (the Sky Sports PDC contract from 1994, the BBC darts coverage across the 2000s, the ITV4 darts coverage from 2012). Taylor was the central single brand-figure of the modern-darts mass-popularisation: the Power persona (the wrestling-style walk-on-with-the-arms-raised entry, the professional-wrestling-style ring-name, the crowd-call-and-response 1-8-0-call-after-the-180-throw) became the template for the PDC professional-darts-popular-presentation across the 2000s-and-2010s.
He took the 2007 BBC Sports Personality of the Year second-place finish (the second-place runner-up to Joe Calzaghe) on the strength of his public-popular-recognition; he was awarded the MBE in the 2001 New Year Honours List on the strength of the professional-darts-recognition. He retired from professional darts in 2018 at fifty-seven on the 2018 Alexandra Palace 2018 PDC World Championship final (lost to Rob Cross in the 7-sets-to-2 final), and continued in the exhibition-circuit through 2024. The Taylor name in modern English-sport carries the weight of the sixteen World Darts Championships across the 1990-to-2013 competitive period.