Almost everything is different. For one thing the BBC graphic bills him as English, not Scottish. The throwing motion is not taut and measured but quick and impetuous. The hair is not spiked into a lurid Mohican but sensibly gelled and tousled, making him look less an elite sportsman and more the backing singer in an Irish pop group. The year is 1995 and, as a 24‑year‑old Peter Wright loses 3-1 against Ritchie Burnett in the first round at Lakeside, there is virtually nothing to suggest that we are watching a future world champion in the gestation.
The year is 2007. Wright and his wife Jo are watching the Grand Slam on television. He does not play darts any more. Soon after his one and only world championship appearance he gave it up because there wasn’t enough money in it. He spent nearly five years on the dole, worked a series of thankless deadend jobs, none of which he could ever seem to hold down. He fitted tyres and windows, hauled fence posts, worked all-night shifts in a supermarket warehouse, spent his days knee-deep in freezing water laying pipes. Yet through it all, the lure of the bright lights and the flying arrows never quite deserted him. As he and Jo watched the television that night, he casually observed that he had beaten most of the players they had seen.
“You miss this, don’t you?” Jo said. And Peter had to admit he did.
The year is 2020. The new decade has only just begun and Wright should be in bed getting some sleep before the world championship final the following evening. Instead he’s awake, remembering a promise he made to himself when he took his first tentative steps back into competitive darts more than a decade earlier. When he returned to the sport at Jo’s suggestion, he pledged that he would become world champion before the age of 50. He realises he will be turning 50 in March. This is his final chance.
In a sport whose age profile is increasingly skewing young, Wright has begun to develop a reputation as the sport’s eternal nearly-man. Ten major finals have come and gone. Even the one he won, the 2017 UK Open, carries an asterisk: the world’s best player Michael van Gerwen was absent through injury. On social media abuse peppers his feed on an almost weekly basis. Bottler. Choker. Joanne filters out the worst of it.
And so, however early it may have staked its claim, Wright’s 7-3 victory against Van Gerwen on Wednesday night deserves to take its place as one of the year’s great sporting yarns: a shaggy dog tale of sacrifice and heartache, of a life remade and a career reborn. For all the scorn he has attracted over the years, Wright is not a vengeful or vindictive man by nature. The only person he ever wanted to show was himself. “That was the main thing,” he said. “I’ve given away trophies in the past. [Now] I’ve proved to myself that I can do it.”
What comes next? Wright and Van Gerwen will get a chance to rekindle their rivalry in the Premier League, which starts next month in Aberdeen. Talk of displacing Van Gerwen as world No 1 is probably a touch premature and, given the course of the Dutchman’s career, to date it would be foolish not to expect a stinging reaction from him over the next few months. But if Wright really has shed the coyness that has so often impaired him in big finals, then this could prove a golden dawn for him.
And in a way Wright’s story is part of the irresistible romance of modern darts: a sport that can slingshot its participants to superstardom virtually overnight. Fallon Sherrock’s life will certainly never be the same again. Nor was Rob Cross’s after his shock triumph two years ago. Wright has spent a little longer hacking away at the coalface but there is an unfeasibly warming quality to his tale, too: a reminder of just how far you can go with a little hard work, a little stubbornness, a big old dream and three darts in your top pocket.