Dan Dawson on darts
Dan Dawson: I can’t wait to see what happens next in darts
There are few people in the world who have their dream job. Aside from elite sportspeople who get paid to do what so many of us do for our love of the game, who else truly gets to say they get up every day and love what they do?
Well, Dan Dawson for one.
The commentator has gone from capitalising on a ‘right place, right time’ spot of good fortune to cementing a reputation as one of the most prolific and popular darts commentators around.
He is now a mainstay of Sky Sports’ coverage, as well as a regular on his beloved Euro Tour and other PDC events via the organisation’s streaming service, travelling the world all in the name of talking about darts.
“I’m just very, very fortunate that I’ve been in the right place at the time to have the opportunities that I’ve had, and that darts has grown and things like streaming have grown,” he told DartAsylum.
“It’s given me the chances to be involved in a sport which I think is absolutely sensational. “It’s normal people doing extraordinary things. And that, I think, is what makes it so appealing compared to something like football, where a lot of these guys are groomed from a young age and they’re millionaires before they even set foot on the pitch – then they are detached from the regular person.
“But I think darts is blessed to be a sport where the players are relatable. They’ve got all the same characteristics and flaws as the man on the street – but they are doing amazing things all over the world.
“I’ll watch darts for the rest of my life, and the longer I get to work in it, the better, because I’m in a hugely privileged position and I can’t wait to see what happens next.”
When it comes to the growth and future direction of darts, Dawson is reluctant to make predictions – mainly because the way in which the game has grown in the past two decades could not have been foreseen.
“I genuinely don’t know what the future holds for darts,” said Dawson. “I think if you went back 20 years, people wouldn’t have thought it would get as big as it is now. “Even now, there’ll be the old-school fans who think the PDC stuff isn’t for them – the crowds are too big, too disrespectful, ‘I prefer the Lakeside days when it was all quiet and you could hear a pin drop’, and fair enough: if that’s what you want, that’s fine. “But I don’t think you could argue that what’s happened in the last 20 years has made darts more viable as a sport for the actual players. There are more – and better – players, the standard has gone up, there’s more strength in depth, you’ve got youngsters coming through.
“We’re playing in new countries on a regular basis in front of enormous crowds – Germany has exploded in popularity. We could see that happen in other countries across Europe and indeed the world – and I think that makes it more attractive. “Making it more of a global game, we now need those other players to step up. We saw what happened when Raymond van Barneveld came on the scene – he really put darts on the map in the Netherlands. If we get a German star who becomes a major champion or even a world champion or world number one then that really does change the landscape. Could we get an Asian player to go and do that? It’s exciting times for darts.”
Importantly, Dawson feels that if a star was to emerge in a non-traditional darting territory, groundwork has already been done to allow the sport to capitalise on that. “I genuinely do not know what the ceiling for this game is,” he said. “The sky may be the limit and I hope so, because there is so much untapped potential, particularly over in Asia. “North America is a very difficult market to crack but pretty much every continent now has something going on. Devon Petersen is doing a lot of work in Africa, we’ve started making some tenuous strides into South America, and if the next superstar happens to come from Zambia or the Philippines or Brazil then there is now more of an opportunity to make the most out of it, because there’s more of an infrastructure there and pathways for players to progress. I think the future is bright.
Written by Steve Cotton