It is the one thing all darts players fear: ‘dartitis’, the condition that creeps out of nowhere to strip them of all their powers. It can strike at any time and although rare, when it happens, it is devastating for a player.
Dartitis is a mental condition where the brain stops a player from being able to release a dart.
One of the world title contenders over the next couple of weeks, Nathan Aspinall, opened up on his experience during the recent Sky Sports documentary Game of Throws.
“All of a sudden out of nowhere I couldn’t throw my effing dart,” Aspinall said. “I just couldn’t let it go. It ended up getting worse and worse and worse to the point where I was in tears.
“Because I knew what it was. The dreaded D-word that no darts player ever wants to hear or get. Something called dartitis. It’s basically the fear of missing. There’s somewhere deep in the back of your head saying ‘you’re going to miss this’, so you stop.”
The entire episode sent Aspinal into a fit of rage.
“I lost the game 6-5, I went upstairs after the game and I was in the toilet and I was absolutely smashing ten lumps of s*** out of the hand dryer. I lost my head.”
Kevin Painter is another player who experienced dartitis.
“You’re in shock, I stood there for ages,” he said, of the feeling hitting him for the first time aged 40. “I just couldn’t get my arm up to let go of the dart.”
No one is certain why it arrives at a particular moment. Dutchman Berry van Peer explained last year: “It’s a strange story. I was over alert so I would get scared from everything around me. If you just walked by me and said ‘hey’, I would be like ‘oh Jesus, where did you come from?’
“Once that started, it was hard to tell my brain it was nothing.”
But there is help at hand from sports psychologists, who advise positive thinking about past experiences at the oche, visualisation of your throw and concentrating on something else, like breathing patterns.
The condition is related to similar issues in other sports, referred to as the “yips” in golf, for example.
Van Peer explained: “Getting over dartitis was mostly just practising, keeping all the positives thoughts, like results from years ago, and removing the negatives thoughts. I found a way of visualising what I’m going to hit. So if I have a 76 checkout to go for, I’ll visualise that I’m going for treble 20, double 18. That helped me a lot.”
