Darts legend Phil 'The Power' Taylor wanted to hit arch-rival Peter Manley with a shovel and strangle Paul Nicholson – but he thinks it's time for Gerwyn Price to calm down a notch.
The 16-times world champion, and the greatest purveyor of arrows since Robin Hood, revealed how opponents used to get under his skin. Taylor, who will be 62 in August, never forgot – nor forgave – the night 'One Dart' Manley beat him 23 yearso ago in his Blackpool kingdom, where the Power won an astonishing 16 World Matchplay titles, in a dramatic semi-final.
Next month, the Professional Darts Corporation bandwagon returns to the Golden Mile, where players at the World Matchplay now compete for the Phil Taylor Trophy. And the greatest tungsten marksman in history revisits some of his former glory in the latest Darts Show podcast, saying: I could wind people up dead easy.
“Peter Manley was good, I enjoyed the banter with Peter. Now we get on really well and he makes me laugh. But at the time I didn’t like him at all. As soon as he walked into a room I wanted to hit him with a shovel. It was horrible.
“He made me practise. He beat me at Blackpool and took the board down to sign for somebody - after that I won about near- enough everything. I won £1.5 million, and I always called it Manley’s millions. I went, 'Thank you very much for that'. The other players were having a go at Peter about it.”
Manley's dislike for Taylor ran so deep that he refused to shake hands after his 7-0 whitewash in the 2002 World Championship final, one of three heavy beatings the Power administered to him on the Circus Tavern stage in the final. But Taylor admitted Nicholson, the fair dinkum Geordie who competed for Australia at international level through marriage, made the sap rise even faster.
Nicholson was accused of giving Taylor a sarcastic wave-off after knocking him out of the UK Open in 2011. He later claimed he was only waving goodbye to the bad times, but Taylor said: “The one who got really under my skin was Paul Nicholson. I felt like strangling him. He was winding people up, especially me. They were coming over from the BDO and I was always the target, I was the main man.
“I thought that (wave-off) was funny. I thought, ‘You’re an idiot’ because the crowd are going to go mental at you now and he wasn’t the person to take it. How brash he was, he’s actually very sensitive and he’d break his heart about it. I said to him, ‘Paul don’t do it because you’ll only make a rod for your own back’. You’ll get booed - like Gerwyn (Price) now.”
Taylor remains a fan of the Iceman's extravagant celebrations on stage, but he says the former world champion needs to be more selective about the bicep-bulging, vein-popping, clenched-fist outbursts.
He said: “Calm it down a little bit. Do it at the right times. Gerwyn did a lovely 170 at the weekend. The young German lad was sitting on double top. Then, yes, let it go. But not if you just hit a ton.”
