Tonight the Palace; tomorrow the planet. Whatever Luke Littler goes on to achieve in the fields of darts, celebrity or world peace, nothing will ever quite match the crystalline beauty of this moment.
Champion of the world for the first time, the culmination and fulfilment of a dream that has not – if you think about it – really been in gestation for that long. An ascent this violent and spectacular simply deserved a triumph to match, and in thrashing Michael van Gerwen by seven sets to three, Littler may well have demolished not just one of the greatest players in history, but an entire era. Darts, a game conceived in the pub, may well have been perfected in a teenage bedroom.
Littler is still 17 for a couple of weeks. What makes him so good? A solid base, an economical and repeatable action, the sort of unerring accuracy on the double 10 that would probably qualify him for a medical licence. The ability to slide darts over or under their predecessors, so a bed is never truly blocked. This is the stuff you can see.
But then there’s the stuff you can only really intuit: the aura, the swagger, a flair and flamboyance that simply demands you drop everything and watch. The nerve required to hit 25 doubles out of 45 in a world final. And perhaps the fact that he clearly knows so little of the world beyond darts also works in his favour, giving him a clarity of thought and a singularity of purpose that his older rivals often require a certain degree of lubrication to replicate.
The world be will rattling his windows soon enough: digging for gossip, making demands of his time, mining his name for clicks. This is simply the price you pay for primetime genius. Phil Taylor and Van Gerwen, his predecessors at the top of the sport, commanded a grudging respect. Littler, by contrast, inspires a kind of instinctive fascination: part animal magnetism, part museum curiosity.
Comparisons with other teenage prodigies are obviously inevitable. But this isn’t Emma Raducanu, because Littler is actually really good. This isn’t Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods, because everyone could see them growing into gianthood from an early age. This isn’t some freak Olympic gymnast or swimmer benefiting from an industrial coaching system and very possibly a state-run doping regime.
In darting terms, Littler is basically your worst nightmare: like Taylor, if Taylor were 30 years younger, less weird and spent pretty much his entire childhood watching WWE and YouTube. A kid with the ability to find 180s out of absolutely nowhere, and at the maximally inconvenient time. The ability to expand the board for himself and shrink it for his opponent, forcing them to hit 12-dart legs simply to tread water.
And here Van Gerwen was simply sucked into the current. He lost by 25 legs to 14, a function not of scoring – which was pretty even – but of finishing, where he checked out just 37% of his doubles. By the end, the triple world champion was barely even bothering to celebrate his legs, no longer fist-pumping his own 180s, stepping forward to retrieve his darts as if it were simply an administrative obligation, like collecting the receipt after a credit card transaction.
And for those of you who weren’t following this sport back then, a few years ago this guy was basically unbeatable. He scored heaviest, finished the deadliest, celebrated the loudest.
In 2016-17 he won nine of the 10 major titles and reached the final in the other. And the hubris is still there. But for all his fine displays at this tournament, the high performance is not.
We got a taste of this less than a minute into the match, when Van Gerwen flamboyantly threw a 180 to leave himself 25. It was a calculated trade-off, rejecting the percentage setup (treble 19 to leave double 14) in favour of the dopamine hit of the maximum. But if you are going to preen, best not to bust your 25 next visit. And then miss two more for the leg. Littler broke, served out the set and despite starting pretty poorly by his standards, he was away.
By the fourth set, Littler had lodged himself firmly and rent-free in between the Dutchman’s ears. Van Gerwen was going for the sort of weird numbers – treble 20 on 74, refusing the 18 on 128 – that betrayed an utter befuddlement, an attempt to shift the vibes out of a sheer inability to shift anything else. Littler, meanwhile, was still averaging under 100. He had hit fewer 180s. He was also 4-0 up.
Overcoming greatness is hard enough in its own right: it’s harder when you give greatness a four-set head start. There were some fleeting glimpses of defiance: a 132 finish by Van Gerwen to pinch the fifth set, snuffed out immediately in the following set by Littler, who began all three of his winning legs with 180s. Van Gerwen closed the gap to 5-2, and then 6-3, but with all the conviction of a man who has lost everything in a storm reassuringly tapping the coins in his pocket.
The end was soon in coming. And so were the tears: for all his laser-guided brilliance at the board, this is still a kid, with kid feelings, for whom this is his entire world.
And the Palace rose to him, and the noise built and built, and the tears flowed, and all of a sudden the walls were collapsing into each other, one world into the next. The end of all that, and the start of everything else.
