Ten thousand people watch live as two men throw small darts at a round target in a hall in London. Millions of people all over the world watch them on TV, and the winner is celebrated in the sports news as if he had just won Wimbledon.
There’s a huge buzz about the Darts World Cup in the Ally Pally, where some people throw and others pay 33 euros for two liters of beer. Darts, I always thought, was for bars full of beer fumes. Calling dart throwing a sport and showing it on TV seemed absurd to me. Until now I read a novel about playing billiards. I immersed myself in a world that I thought, like darts, only took place in dreary back rooms.
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