James Wade has bared his soul on the night he was branded a racist and a bully at Alexandra Palace – and how “everyone jumped on the bandwagon.”
The 'Machine' has learned to live with bipolar illness, and the occasional manic episodes which upset his equilibrium. But the 11-times major winner is still scarred by the memory of a narrow 3-2 win against Seigo Asada at the World Championship five years ago, when his on-stage celebrations invaded the Japanese outsider's personal space.
In a bizarre post-match interview, Wade claimed: “I did it for my country. I kept giving it to him, I wanted to hurt him to his face.”
But on William Hill podcast Up Front with Simon Jordan, the Aldershot southpaw has explained his infamous outburst, which landed him a £5,000 fine from the Darts Regulation Authority.
And he revealed his pain from the social media backlash, explaining his behaviour was a side-effect of his chronic mental health problems.
He said: “After the incident, everyone jumped on the bandwagon and I was called a racist, a bully, a thug, all these things. On that night I jumped around, shouted unintentionally in his face, and it was just unfortunate that he was standing where he was - I was unlucky there.
“I just came out with something that didn’t even make sense and was out of character for me, but people had been asked by trained professionals not to put a camera in front of my face right after the game because I needed time to calm down.
“It wasn’t helpful for me when they put a camera straight in my face. I was being judged as a guy that had just gone up there and been nasty, but that’s not what it was. I wasn’t very well and you do go through stages where you aren’t quite right, and no one took that into account.
“I wasn’t helped, I wasn’t backed, and I was just made to stand in front of a board and be told I was this and that and made to face the full consequence - even though everyone had been given professional opinions from trained people that it was what’s called a 'manic phase' - it was unfair.”
Wade, who has slipped down to No.16 in the world rankings, also addressed the pressure of throwing darts for big money to a soundtrack of volatile crowds. He gets a more sympathetic hearing from live audiences these days, but he admitted: “There are certain players that simply perform better and produce under pressure.
'How are you meant to perform when you’ve got 15,000 people behind you booing, saying things you don’t like, and you’re playing for £100, £200, or even £500,000? How do you produce the right dart at that time? For me, that’s part of a player’s natural ability to be able to control that.”
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