Olly Croft
Darts supremo who helped to launch the sport on television but presided over a period of acrimony
OLLY CROFT, who has died aged 90, was a kitchen tile magnate from Muswell Hill who created the British Darts Organisation in 1973 and changed the face of the sport, leading it out of the pub and into the world of live television coverage and sponsorship deals.
A sad-eyed man with Dickensian mutton-chop sideburns, Croft devoted nearly 50 years of his life to the game. In the early 1980s, with both the BBC and ITV screening tournaments, it was suggested that darts was even rivalling football as Britain’s favourite television sport. Men like Eric Bristow, John Lowe, Bobby George and Jocky Wilson became household names.
Towards the end of the 1980s, however, public interest began to wane, and in 1992 professional darts split in two when 16 of the game’s top players revolted against Croft’s somewhat authoritarian ways and set up a rival organisation, the World Darts Council (WDC), now the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC).
Croft became embroiled in a series of acrimonious battles with the rival organisation which ended up in court, at great financial cost in lawyers’ fees, a story recounted in a documentary Blood on the Carpet: Poisoned Arrows, broadcast on BBC Two in 2001.
Oliver Albert Croft was born on November 17 1929, the son of a north London tiler. After National Service as an RAF electrician he founded a kitchen tile company that grew to achieve a turnover of £2 million a year.
Croft began playing darts in 1961 for the Harringay Arms in Crouch Hill, at a time when the game was controlled by the National Darts Association of Great Britain (NDA), under whose aegis darts remained very much a low-profile pub game with very little media coverage.
Croft was determined to do better, and in January 1973 he founded the BDO, with 12 others, including his formidable wife Lorna (widely regarded as the power behind her husband’s throne), in his living room in Muswell Hill. The meeting agreed to start an inter-county league – and, instead of working within the NDA, decided to go it alone.
Over the next few years the BDO created a commercial arm, got television involved, formed an England side for international competitions and set up a Super League for 64 countries. In 1974 it became a founder member of the World Darts Federation, which set up the World Cup and Europe Cup.
From the mid-1970s darts became popular on television – BBC and ITV both asked Croft to help run their darts coverage – leading to many players turning professional.
By the mid-1980s, however, the game’s popularity began to decline, linked to the perception that it was nothing but an oafish pastime for people with large beer bellies. The coup de grâce, by some accounts, was delivered by a famous sketch on Not the Nine O’clock News, featuring Mel Smith as Guy “Fat Belly” Gutbucket versus Griff Rhys Jones as Tommy “Even Fatter Belly” Belcher, the two comedians getting paralytic as they down pint after pint: “So, it’s Fat Belly to go first. A single pint. Another double vodka. A triple scotch. Oh, would you believe it! It went in but it’s come out again!”
The game’s growing image problem led to a significant reduction in both television coverage and sponsorship, a fact that many of the professional players began to resent. When some of them urged Croft and the BDO to give the game a makeover, however, they were brusquely turned down. “It’s like your children,” Croft maintained; “They say: ‘can I have an ice cream?’ and you say: ‘no’. We don’t owe anyone a living.”
In 1992, 16 of the world’s best players, including the crowd favourites Eric Bristow, Dennis Priestley, Jocky Wilson and the leading American professional Larry Butler, formed the WDC and began organising competitions that were exclusively for professionals, a radical break from the BDO’S open tournament format.
Croft responded by banning the rebels from playing in any Bdo-linked tournaments and even tried to forbid BDO members from drinking in the same pubs as the renegades. The rebels shot back by suing the BDO for restraint of trade, though they managed to land several lucrative television contracts, notably with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports, which rejigged the style of coverage with more pizzazz, loud music, big walkons and walk-offs and lots of hype. “Those other people don’t run competitions, they run darts shows,” Croft complained. “It’s all dolly girls and glitz, but it’s not sport, I can tell you that.”
Croft’s response was to try, unsuccessfully, to ban the group worldwide. “We tried to co-operate with the BDO,” said Dick Allix, WDC tournament director. “But Olly Croft set out instead to destroy us. He’s used to being a total dictator.”
After a long-running and expensive legal battle, in 1997 the High Court obliged Croft and the BDO to recognise the WDC (subsequently renamed the PDC) and the right of players to choose which organisation they played for. Both sides agreed that players could participate in all competitions, whoever ran them, and take part in exhibition matches and promote and endorse darts products.
The antagonism continued, however, with the rivals staging their own versions of the world championship – the BBC covering the BDO’S event at the Lakeside, Frimley Green, and Sky televising the PDC’S glitzier showpiece at Alexandra Palace – and continuing to exchange insults from time to time.
When darts was officially recognised by all sports councils as a bona fide sport in 2005, Croft claimed the credit for the BDO, “because we have the systems in place to provide darts from grass roots right through to national, international and world levels”. The PDC chairman, sports promoter Barry Hearn, he maintained, “thinks only of profit and has little or no time for proper, constituted governing bodies.”
It did not help relations that many of the players who made their way up through the Bdo-sponsored county system went on to join the PDC, whose tournaments offered higher prize money and more chance of making a living from the game.
In 2009 Hearn wrote an open letter to the BDO proposing a £1 million buy-out, in which he argued, pointedly: “If the BDO really care about the sport of darts … then you should accept offers and let us inject not just finance, but professional management, to run darts in a modern and effective manner.”
The letter, Croft claimed, was “nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt and has nothing to do with unifying the sport but everything to do with [Hearn’s] inflated ego and perceived self-importance.”
But by this time pressure for change was also increasing within the BDO, and in 2011 Croft was voted off the board after 38 years.
Croft’s wife, Lorna, died in 2003. He is survived by two sons and two daughters. Another son predeceased him.