Four semi-finals, four defeats. Then one January when everything he had ever been short of arrived at once.
Andy Fordham was called The Viking, on account of the long hair and the considerable frame, and by the early 2000s he occupied a particular place in the darts public’s affections: the best-loved nearly-man in the game. Born in Erith on 2 February 1962, throwing darts since 1982, he was the sort of player crowds adopt — and no crowd adopts a favourite quite like the one at the Lakeside Country Club.
Nearly, four times
The scale of the wait is worth setting out properly. In 1995 he reached the world semi-final and lost 5–2 to Richie Burnett. In 1996 he was back, and Steve Beaton beat him 5–3. In 1999 it was Ronnie Baxter, 5–1. In 2001 it was Ted Hankey, 5–2, with Hankey going on to the final.
Four semi-finals across seven years, and not one of them especially close. That is usually how these stories end: the crowd favourite who keeps turning up, keeps falling one match short of the final, and eventually stops turning up. By 2004 Fordham was about to turn 42, and nobody would have blamed the bookmakers for filing him under sentiment rather than contenders.
The comeback
The 2004 semi-final paired him with Raymond van Barneveld — the defending champion, three times a winner, and comfortably the most accomplished player in the field. It went the way everyone feared. Van Barneveld led 3–0 in sets. A fifth semi-final defeat, and surely the most painless of the lot, was being pencilled in.
Then it turned into the match of the era. Fordham clawed back to 2–4, then level, then somehow in front, and won it 5–4. A man who had lost four semi-finals without frightening anyone had come from 3–0 down against the best player of the age to reach his first world final. It is still talked about as one of the most dramatic matches the BDO championship ever produced, and the noise in the room that afternoon has passed into legend.
The final, by comparison, was almost serene. Fordham beat Mervyn King 6–3, and nine years of semi-final heartbreak dissolved into the happiest coronation Lakeside had staged. He already owned a Winmau World Masters title, won in 1999, along with the British Matchplay from 1995 and a scattering of opens — but this was the one, and everybody in the building knew what it had cost him to get it.
The match that never finished
Ten months later came the strangest night of his career. On 21 November 2004, at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, Fordham met Phil Taylor in a set-piece showdown — best of thirteen sets, a meeting across the divide that the 1993 split had carved through the sport a decade earlier.
It never reached a proper ending. After the seventh set, with Taylor leading 5–2, Fordham became unwell and complained of shortness of breath. Medical staff advised him not to continue, and Taylor was declared the winner by default. As a contest it settled nothing. As a warning, it could hardly have been clearer.
The Viking’s body
The warmth around Fordham always coexisted with genuine alarm about how he lived. His weight peaked at 31 stone. His pre-match preparation famously ran to 24 bottles of lager. For years this was treated as part of the act — the gentle giant with the heroic thirst — right up until it stopped being funny.
By 2007 he was in hospital with severe breathing difficulties, and the full picture emerged: a liver operating at roughly a quarter of its capacity after years of damage. In 2008 he was put forward for a transplant. In the end he avoided it the hard way, losing 17 stone — a whole person’s worth of weight — and taking his fight public on television’s Celebrity Fit Club.
The long road back
He never stopped wanting to play. He made a PDC debut in March 2009, returned to the BDO fold in 2013, and in 2015 produced one last flourish, qualifying for the Grand Slam of Darts and beating Wayne Jones 5–3 — his first televised win in more than ten years. The standing ovations that followed him around that tournament told their own story about where he stood with the public.
Andy Fordham died on 15 July 2021, in Woolwich, of organ failure. He was 59.
One world title looks a modest return next to the multiple champions on the honours board, and Fordham never pretended otherwise. But titles are not really how he is remembered. He is remembered for a single afternoon in January 2004, three sets down to the best player in the world, when the most popular man ever to walk onto that stage finally refused to lose — and nobody who was in the room has done the arithmetic any other way since.
