Now that White is climbing back again, he describes his time away from competitive playing as happy but lost years -- he worked, snowmobiled, fished, and routinely got beat at the local pubs by even the most mediocre darts players. Then he got a change of scenery: In the summer of 1998, White moved here with his wife, Kelly, from Toronto, Canada. There, he had a job managing a plant that made office cubicles; here, he lacked a work visa. That left him with something a lot of players pray for -- more time to play, more time to get better.
San Francisco first saw that shortly after his arrival. Before he came, the best player in the city was a man named Peter Fiore. At a recent Friday-night shoot at the Eagles, Robert Adams, a laid-off dot-com worker who manages the San Francisco Dart Association's Web site, remembered the first time Fiore and White played each other.
Paolo Vescia
Local rising star Paul Soncuya.
Paolo Vescia
Top-ranked shooter Patricia Miller.
Related Content
More About
"It was late '98, maybe early '99, something like that," he recalled. "It was crazy. I remember looking at Peter after the game, and he was just shaking his head. It was like, "What am I going to do? I played my best game and got beat.' Chris just crushed Peter so badly."
The hell of it is that White doesn't spend that much time practicing. Parenthood cuts into playing time -- he's the father of twin daughters, now 2 years old, and "they're starting to learn not to walk in front of the board." But because his goal is to start winning national and international tournaments, he'll try to get in an hour or so a day, maybe more if a big tournament is coming up, and he takes the Eagles shoots more seriously. The plan is to build up enough world-ranking points to get him playing against the machinelike darts masters, Brits like Phil "The Power" Taylor and Wayne "Woody" Jones, or the best player in Canada, John "Darth Maple" Part. No more being complacent.
And if people around here start improving because he's around, so much the better. More competition. More meat. "I can only go by what people have said," White says. "You're getting your ass kicked by somebody, you're not gonna want that to happen week in, week out. You're gonna say, "I might never be as good as Chris, but maybe I should be able to give him a game here or there.' I think that might have happened."
There's no getting around the fact that darts is a drinking sport. According to a survey by the American Darts Organization (ADO), 86 percent of the American darts-playing population drinks alcohol, and 70 percent prefers beer (55 percent smokes). Reports from overseas seem to attest to beer's skill-improving powers. In last month's Embassy Darts Championship, Britain's leading darts tournament, Woody Jones credited the seven pints he consumed before a match for his wins in the early rounds. The strategy, alas, failed him in the quarterfinals. "I had a few beers but I wasn't as pumped up tonight," Jones lamented to the BBC after his loss.
Despite its reputation, darts at the level Chris White plays it is also a mental game, players say. White has run into enough cocky people in bars to laugh at those who try to intimidate him. "You'll see guys who are great basement players or great bar players," he says. "But take them out of their local bar and put them in a huge tournament, in the finals playing a top guy, and you'd think they'd never played before. I've told a lot of guys, "Win something, then talk to me.' You have to go through three different stages: from your house to the bar, and the bars to the tournaments."
Serious darts players talk a lot about discipline and mental toughness. "It's Zen," says Jennifer Daggy, a San Franciscan who's also a top-ranked ADO player. "When it's done well, you're subtracting all motion. You have to forget your mistakes and just refocus."
"When I'm playing, the only thing I see is the board," Jason Paine explained one evening at the Eagles while he sucked on a pint of cola. "Somebody could be getting mugged right by the board, and I just won't see it."
"If you're gonna play your best game, you've gotta hammer him from the beginning," says Chris White. "You can respect somebody, but you can't fear him. As soon as you fear somebody, you're done."
To that end, Brian Keenan suggests reverse psychology as the best method for beating White. "Don't piss Chris off, that's my advice," he says. "Don't get him going. If you want to beat him, respect him. Wish him good luck, tell him he's great. Maybe then he'll fall into a false sense of security."
Good darts players may be mentally disciplined, but apparently it also doesn't hurt to be a little obsessive.
"I chose darts over girlfriends at one point in my life," says Tim Shore, who in the early '90s was playing in the Bay Area seven nights a week. "In hindsight, it was a huge commitment. Ten years of playing six, seven nights a week was a tremendous amount of time I could've spent on other things. But what usually sparked an interest was if there was some new kid on the block -- I wanted to hone my game a little bit, to show him what I can do. It can be an addiction."
foam order.com
