Showdown at Trafalgar

After a hard day on the battlements, medieval warriors used to unwind with a spirited round or two. The Pilgrim fathers had at it on the Mayflower. And even good King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth were known to have had a fling. Over the centuries, the venerable game of darts became such a craze, in fact, that in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the British House of Commons engaged in a heated debate over the banning of darts in Scottish pubs. Darting not only fostered "ne'er-do-wellism," a Scottish magistrate had ruled, but it was "a dangerous game, likely to attract some people who are not too steady in hand." Bloody nonsense, said Home Secretary Samuel Hoare, and the Commons supported him. If nothing else, he said, the game was socially commendable as "a distraction from the mere business of drinking." Sir Samuel's decree: Darts away!

Today, more than 5,000,000 British enthusiasts are pitching at the pug (bull's-eye), and darting claims more participants than any other game in the sports-mad land. Thus when some upstart Yanks recently challenged the vaunted British there was open scorn in London pubs. "It's like snooker," sniffed one expert. "You figure that the best in Britain are the best in the world." Mrs. Jacqueline Eagan, 44, one of three American team members who survived an elimination tournament among 5,000 of the U.S.'s top tossers, figured differently: "We expect to beat the British at their own game."

The showdown was staged a fortnight ago in the chandeliered Nelson Room of the Trafalgar Tavern hard by the Thames in Greenwich. The Americans had barely unpacked their darts when the wily British indulged in a bit of ye olde "putting off" (psyching your opponent). The white toe-line, they announced, would be set 7 ft. 6 in. from the board and not 8 ft. as in the U.S. U.S. Darter Jack Carr, 39, a pub owner from Hermosa Beach, Calif., responded with some putting off of his own. "We'll continue to shoot from 8 ft.," he said gallantly, "because we are down to such a fine touch that any change would throw us off."

The rest of the ground rules were standard: each player would begin with a given number of points, shoot at a fiber board marked off in 20 pie-shaped sections with a score value of from 1 to 20, then subtract the points he scored in each three-dart round; each game had to be won on a double (zinging a dart into the tiny outer double ring) worth the exact number of points remaining. First to reach zero would win.

In the first best-of-three-game doubles match, Carr and Teammate Robert Thiede, 29, vice president of a New Jersey metalworking firm, stunned the crowd by winning the first game. Perspiring heavily under the arc lights, British Champion Tommy O'Regan, 33, a London milkman, allowed that he would take off his jacket but "I have a hole in my shirt." Then, zeroing in, the rosy-cheeked Irishman and his partner, Alan Cooper, a 34-year-old bricklayer, won the next two games and repaired to the bar for a victory gin and lemon.

Post One. British Women's Champion Mrs. Jean Smith, 43, a woodcutter garbed in a matronly blue dress, promptly dispatched the U.S.'s Mrs. Eagan (clad in a crimson pantsuit) in two straight games, tossed her red beret into the air and kissed her husband Denis. Carr and Thiede came back to post one victory, but at evening's end the score was 5-1 and Britannia still ruled supreme. Afterward, the consensus at the bar was that the Americans took their darting too seriously, that they needed to loosen up with an ale or three or even a burst of song--like O'Regan, for instance. Midway in the tournament, he had taken the microphone and caroled a sprightly air ("There's one fair county in Ireland..."). Good show, that.

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