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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Jonathan Liew

‘Winning, losing, I wasn’t fussed’ – Adrian Lewis on quitting darts and hopes for a comeback

Darts player Adrian Lewis
Adrian Lewis won back-to-back world championships in 2011 and 2012 and also hit the first ever nine-dart finish in a world final. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

“The thing with darts,” explains Adrian Lewis, “is you have to be in a happy place. It was for me, anyway. When you’re up, everything’s free, everything’s flowing. You don’t feel like you’ve got a burden on yourself.”

And when Lewis was free, when the darts flowed from his hand like water, when the 180s piled up around his ears, the man they called “Jackpot” could make this unfathomably difficult sport look like the simplest thing in the world. “Don’t think, just throw,” was his mantra. “Just get up there, get into a rhythm, bash-bash-bash.”

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