Fifty years old. That’s how old Martin Adams was when he finally became world champion.
Not fifty and hanging on, either. Fifty and top seed, fifty and captain of England, fifty and about to survive one of the strangest finals the Lakeside stage has ever hosted. Adams won the BDO World Darts Championship three times in five years — 2007, 2010 and 2011 — at an age when most sports would have long since ushered him towards the commentary booth. Darts kept him on the oche, and he repaid the favour by refusing, ever, to leave.
The Bank Clerk with the Beard
Adams was born in Sutton, south London, in June 1956, and came to the professional game the long way round. Until 1992 he worked for Lloyds Bank; when redundancy arrived, he decided the darts would do instead. He was thirty-six — an age at which plenty of playing careers are winding down, not starting.
The nickname is Wolfie, and with that beard it was never going to be anything else. Lakeside crowds took to him the way they take to anyone who looks like he’s wandered in from a folk tale, but behind the pantomime sat one of the most relentlessly consistent throwers the BDO ever produced. He won the WDF World Cup singles in 1995 and again in 2001, added four Dutch Open titles over the years, and turned up — this matters, as you’ll see — every single January without fail.
Captain of the Ones Who Stayed
In 1993, professional darts tore itself in half. The biggest names walked out to form what became the PDC, and the BDO was left with a proud history and a hole where its stars used to be. The full story is told in the account of the 1993 split; the short version is that somebody had to steady the England team afterwards, and that somebody was Adams.
He took the captaincy in 1993 and kept it until 2013 — twenty years, longer than anyone has held the job. It’s the detail that explains everything else about him. Adams didn’t merely decline to defect; he became the institutional memory of the side that stayed, the fixed point around which two decades of BDO darts arranged itself.
Six-Nil, Six-Six
By January 2007 the one gap in his record had grown enormous. Adams had already lost a world final, beaten 6–2 by Raymond van Barneveld in 2005, and at fifty the chances were not multiplying.
He did it the hard way. Past Tony O’Shea, Co Stompé and Ted Hankey, through a 6–5 semi-final against Mervyn King, and into a final at the Lakeside Country Club on 14 January 2007 against Phill Nixon — a 150-1 outsider, a first-time qualifier who had knocked out a seed in every round, and, like Adams, fifty years old. In a race to seven sets, Adams led 6–0. Finished, surely.
Nixon won the next six sets. Six-nil became six-six, a coronation turned into one of the most extraordinary finals the championship has ever produced, and the whole thing came down to a decider. Adams somehow held himself together and won it 7–6, collecting the title and £70,000 while looking like a man who had aged a further decade in ninety minutes. Nobody has led a world final 6–0 and enjoyed it less.
Two More, to Kill the Argument
One world title at fifty could be filed away as a lovely story. Adams made sure it couldn’t stay filed there. In 2010 he beat Dave Chisnall 7–5 in the final. In 2011 he retained the title, beating Dean Winstanley 7–5 at fifty-four. Three world championships put him among the most decorated names on the roll of BDO world champions, and around them he stacked three consecutive Winmau World Masters — 2008, 2009 and 2010 — for good measure.
There was very nearly a fourth. In 2015, at fifty-eight, he reached the final yet again and lost 7–6 to Scott Mitchell, one set short of what would have been the most improbable world title of the lot. Five world finals inside a decade, all of them contested in his late forties and fifties. There is no other career in the game shaped quite like it.
Twenty-Five Januaries
From 1994 to 2018, Adams appeared at twenty-five consecutive World Championships — a record — and only a failure to qualify for the 2019 edition ended the run. Along the way came a diagnosis of prostate cancer in April 2016 and the all-clear before the year was out, an episode he handled, publicly at least, with the same unbothered shrug he gave everything else.
The PDC would have taken him at almost any point. He went sparingly — the odd Matchplay and Grand Prix appearance around 2000 and 2001, a couple of Grand Slam outings in 2015 and 2016 — and otherwise stayed exactly where he was. Read that as stubbornness or as principle; the effect was the same. The second half of the whole Lakeside era had a spine, and its name was Wolfie.
When Frimley Green’s next dominant champion arrived, it was Glen Durrant — a man who won three titles and then left to prove a point somewhere else. Adams made the opposite choice, every year, for a quarter of a century. Both of them, in their own way, were right.
