Dart Championships on TV

I was intrigued over the weekend when I saw that there was this "thing" called the Dart World Championships playing on TV. 

Maybe it was the bad cold I was trying to get over blurring my thoughts to watch something I have no interest in, lol.  However, I really was genuinely interested in seeing the production and how it compared to pool.

Of course. 

I swear everything I read or see I can relate to pool somehow, lol.

And as I watched it, flipping back and forth from it to the Fifth Element (a fav movie of mine), let me just say I'm highly jealous for our sport.

Here, this photo kinda already proves why I was disappointed and jealous:

Can you see the depth of the crowd!  It was a HUGE venue and it was PACKED!  The amount of fans standing behind the two dart players was astounding.  Fans were cheering and yelling and it was quite the spectacle.  Even when pool was on TV we didn't have crowds as big as that.  The crowd was even larger than what I've seen at poker tournaments on TV.

It was a three-hour program and it had one of those famous announcers that extenuates the words, like for boxers.  And in this corner, the World Champion Briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeennnnnnnn Casperrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I have to admit I didn't see any payouts I didn't watch it all that long, but what I recognized was is darts is a highly followed sport that I probably had no idea about, but happened to see it on TV this day.

Even when I came to work this week, our secretary mentioned it to me and she was surprised how much the fans were into it and also had no idea there was a Championship or that it is something popular enough to be televised.

I bet people think the same thing about pool.  They see pool on TV and they think that we make great shots and that they wish they could play like us.  They are even surprised that there's a tournament that we're playing for money on TV.

This was held in London and doing research for this blog post, Wikipedia shows this is a mostly a sport with European players.  And there are qualifiers and brackets, etc etc.

I had heard that people play in dart tournaments, but hadn't thought past that to think they would have a World Championship like we do.  And didn't think it'd even be on TV.  Of course there's other sports like this that we don't think of but yet we see all the time in the pool room that are more popular than we realize:  Shuffleboard, darts and foosball are the ones that come to mind.

I'm sure the competitive dart players were very excited that this Championship was on TV, just like we get proud when pool is on TV.   I presume darts has the same struggles as we do trying to get  mainstream in a world that doesn't see pool as a mainstream sport yet.

I was pretty happy to see the darts on TV.  They are very similar in our wants of a low hanging fruit sport that should be more nationalized.  Hope for pool!