Luke Littler of England celebrates after winning the final against Michael van Gerwen of the Netherlands, right, at the World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace in London, on Jan. 3.Zac Goodwin/The Associated Press
As coronations go, it wasn’t the most dignified.
On Friday, England’s Luke Littler became the world darts champion. He’d beaten a plainly displeased Dutchman, Michael van Gerwen, in order to do so.
As they announced the winner’s name, van Gerwen reached over and began petting Littler roughly on the head. More like a dog than a respected colleague.
Littler, who is only 17, didn’t have the presence of mind to slap van Gerwen. Next time.
Watching it, one felt a weird sensation when it comes to modern professional athletes – protectiveness.
There are transformative figures in sport, and then there’s Littler. In the space of one year – since he was a shock finalist at the same event – he has made darts cool. Or, more correctly, cool in its uncoolness.
Darts is to England what krautrock is to Germany – a weird local niche that everyone digs, but no one can copy correctly. The costumes, the drinking excess, the tubby heroes, the chanting. Darts is orgy culture for people who don’t like to be seen naked.
It’s always been popular in England, but since Littler arrived, it is stratospheric. Last year’s championship match was the most-watched non-football sporting event in Sky Sports history. This year’s will have been much bigger.
In between, Littler won consistently. Not yet legal to drink and unable to drive the Ford Focus he’s said he likes, he is already dug into the English imagination. They call him Luke the Nuke. Once you’ve heard from him, you are hard-pressed to come up with anyone less suited to his nickname. That’s the attraction. Littler represents a change in the great sporting tradition of the prodigy.
Typically, it’s “Li’l Jimmy was beating adults when he was in diapers, and practised 27 hours a day in between working shifts at the hospital.” The beats never change. They’re a reworking of the myth of Hercules, with little tweaks around the stables and the bull.
They’d be more fun if they weren’t so many of them these days. One per sport per year at least, and usually a few others on the way up behind them. All of them “generational talents,” though a generation is only 12 months for fruit flies.
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Most are busts, leading into the second-most-told sports story – the one who should have been a contender. It leaves no room to be surprised by anyone any more.
Littler is the exception, and you can literally see why. He doesn’t look, sound or carry himself anything like the child genius we’ve been trained to expect. He’s not slick and there’s nothing of the ingenue about him. He’s just average.
Though a teenager, he has no vibrancy of youth. He looks like a 30-year-old who makes his living doing something that involves a lot of sitting. Littler is the top pro who, upon first seeing him, makes you think, “Hey, maybe I’m not doing so bad after all.”
In interviews, he is unprepared for the most obvious questions. The morning after he’d won the title, he was on BBC’s flagship breakfast show.
First question: “It didn’t really feel like there was any danger you weren’t ever going to win last night. You seemed so confident.”
Littler: “Thank you. I just felt very confident going into last night.”
This isn’t done in a flustered or silly way. It’s done in the way of someone who has already been tossed every dumb question and has decided that in order to maintain his sanity, he will stop hearing them.
As much as the winning, this is what Littler’s admirers are reacting to. He is just a guy. Not an especially beautiful, charming or fascinating guy, but a median 21st-century person. The sort they don’t make movies about any more.
Media is brimming with beauty and charm, none of which has the slightest hint of authenticity. Somehow, osmotically, everyone now knows how best to light themselves on camera and which is their bad side.
If everyone is peppy and quippy and looks like they live in a gym, something unexpected will eventually happen. Puffy, listless and not-always-your-best-self is going to become fashionable.
Littler is the bleeding edge of this change. He could be the Coco Chanel of the disaffected working class. But first – the battle for Luke Littler’s soul.
You know what the media world wants him to do – get really into the Tao of Tom Brady and worry more about inflammatory vegetables; start his own production company so that he can tell the stories that he’d never thought of until they showed him the cheque, but are very close to his heart; get a hair transplant. If Littler owns a phone, this pressure will be crushing.
This is the danger of prodigiousness – distractions amplify exponentially. It is especially perilous for athletes in individual sports. Look at another Briton, Emma Raducanu. The former U.S. Open champion was the more typical prodigy and, at 22, her career has already been undone by excess.
It would take a very special person to put to one side the attention that Littler has attracted. You or I couldn’t manage it now, and certainly not when we were 17. I don’t expect Littler to do it either.
At next year’s world championship, I anticipate a buffer, glowed-up Littler. One keen to talk more articulately about all the personal growth he’s experienced and all the wonderful products that allowed him to do so. By that point, darts will be the least of it.
But if he can find a way to balance his averageness with his exceptionalism, there is no limit to the impact Littler can have. This is the man most likely to crack the America of today. He could be the Beatles, minus the cute suits and the need to be liked.