The two Lukes headline new darts era that is both deeply trivial and deathly serious

There are plant burgers and arancini on sleek dark plates. There is a beer mat with the face of Brendan Dolan on it. In one corner of the room Michael van Gerwen is being interviewed by Troy Deeney live on TalkSport. In another an influencer called JaackMaate is filming a video for his YouTube channel.
Dave Allen, the press chief at the Professional Darts Corporation, remembers the first time they held a media launch before the world championship. It was 2008, Phil Taylor and Raymond van Barneveld and Sid Waddell dressed as Santa Claus, holding a huge novelty dartboard. A handful of people turned up, a few photos were taken, and then everyone packed up and went home.
Now, the Sid Waddell Trophy stands backlit on a plinth in a London gastro-bar, while a Netflix documentary crew skim the room. There are enough industrial-strength spotlights to conduct a police manhunt. There is a security detail patrolling the venue for threats. “This is a sterile environment,” he whispers into his radio, which is probably the first time in history a darts venue has been described in such terms.
Meanwhile, a man from German television is trying to get Luke Humphries to film a promo for his programme. “If you can look to the camera and say: ‘Hi, I’m Luke Humphries, and I’m playing on Sportschau.’”
Humphries’s brow furrows a little. “Sports Show?”
“Sport-schau,” the reporter replies, emphasising the final syllable.
“Sport-shoaggh.”
“Sportschau.”
“OK.”
The camera starts rolling. “Hi, I’m Luke Humphries,” says Humphries, “and I’m playing on Sports Show.”
But we will perhaps forgive Humphries his unfamiliarity with Teutonic diphthongs. After all, he has barely slept. He won the Players Championship Finals in Minehead late on Sunday night, and then hopped straight in a car for the long overnight drive to London for this. “We got here about 4am,” he says. “Probably got to sleep around half five. Then the fire alarm went off.”
There are serious people here, asking serious questions about form and averages. There are also plenty of unserious people asking extremely unserious questions. What was the most recent photo in your camera roll? Which darts player would you least want to take on in a fight? Blind-rank these Dutch sporting legends!
What matters here, and what does not? These are dedicated professionals, leveraging unimaginable talent, chasing a lifelong dream and genuinely transformational sums of money. And yet the spectacle itself runs – to a large extent – on the energy and cash and banter of guys dressed as traffic cones ordering four-pint pitchers. In a way darts is sport slathered in so many layers of irony that it is essentially indistinguishable from sincerity, a cultural phenomenon that exists at the crowded intersection of the deeply trivial and the deathly serious.
Nobody expresses this tension better than the newest and brightest star of the sport. Luke Littler has reached that level of fame where you must begin to sense your own presence, the way the energy of a room changes when you walk into it, the way the gaze is instinctively drawn towards you.
The Premier League and Grand Slam champion, new world number four and second favourite for BBC Sports Personality of the Year enters with a huge entourage, takes a seat in the secluded corner booth where he will fulfil his media duties, which has been specially stripped of sponsor livery. Yes, Littler cannot be filmed in front of gambling branding because he is still only 17.
All year people have been asking him how he copes with the attention and scrutiny, how he doesn’t go mad from it all. But then, what does he really have to compare it with? Littler is the first darts player in the history of the sport never to have been anything else: never to have had a proper job, or even much of a plan for life.
Of course he is flesh and blood, like anyone else. But on the stage, he does a better job than anyone else of hiding it. His blossoming rivalry with Humphries has all the makings of greatness: the two outstanding players in the world, still discovering their outer limits, still trying to stay ahead of a chasing pack more than capable of dethroning them.
The winner’s cheque for the first PDC world championship in 1994 was £64,000. At this tournament, each nine-dart leg will see a random spectator from the crowd handed a cheque for £60,000. For those following this journey even from a safe distance, let alone for those riding the train, the pace of change still feels a little surreal, verging on disorienting. Is this trivial or is this serious? Perhaps, when you have enough eyes on you, the distinction no longer matters. — Guardian