The Throw
Nine January 1990. Second round of the BDO World Darts Championship. Paul Lim steps up against Jack McKenna, a solid Irish journeyman who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen in front of him.
The sequence was as clean as it gets. Treble 20, treble 20, treble 20. A hundred and eighty. Then the same again — another 180, three more darts that barely disturbed the air. Six darts gone. 141 left. Lim stepped to the oche and threw treble 20, treble 19, double 12. Finished. Sixty-seven seconds, start to finish.
The crowd at Frimley Green reacted the way you’d expect — disbelief, then noise, then a stunned shuffling as people looked at each other to confirm what they’d just witnessed. Nine-dart finishes didn’t happen at World Championships. They happened in pubs, once on television in 1984 when John Lowe did it against Keith Deller. Not here, in the second round, on a Tuesday afternoon in January.
I was at Lakeside that week, though not in the room for that session — and that still bothers me. Word spread through the club afterwards, and there was a particular atmosphere in the building for the rest of the day. Quieter. More attentive. People were replaying it in their heads before anyone had seen a recording.
The finish — T20, T20, T20, T20, T20, T20, T20, T19, D12 — is about as orthodox as a nine-darter gets. Nothing theatrical about the checkout. Lim took double 12 and was done. Practical. Controlled.
Paul Lim: The Man Who Did It
Paul Lim Leong Hwa was born in Singapore in January 1954. He moved to England in the 1970s to train as a chef, ended up working in Knightsbridge, and picked up the game in west London pubs. By 1985 he’d relocated to San Bernardino, California, playing the American darts circuit whilst working weekends as a chef. Singapore gained WDF status and Lim began representing his home country, earning the nickname “the Singapore Slinger.”
He wasn’t a household name in Britain. World Championship debut in 1982, lost in the first round to Dave Whitcombe, and spent the next seven years failing to get past the second round. Not a bad player — clearly not — but not someone who caused alarm in the draw.
That’s part of what makes 9 January 1990 so strange. The nine-darter didn’t come from Phil Taylor or Eric Bristow. It came from a Singaporean player based in California who trained as a chef and had never previously made a meaningful dent in the tournament. Darts doesn’t do narrative tidily. It just does what it does.
The Prize Money Controversy
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The BDO had arranged a £52,000 bonus for a nine-dart finish at the 1990 championships. Phil Taylor won the entire tournament that year and collected £24,000. Lim, by completing nine perfect darts in a second-round match he still lost — McKenna won the overall match — walked away with more than double the champion’s prize.
Was the bonus structure sensible? Should a player who exits in the second round earn significantly more than the man who lifted the trophy? These are fair questions, and they’re not entirely comfortable ones.
Lim received the money — no dispute about that. He later said it helped him set up his own business. He also said, and this rings true for anyone who’s watched the footage, that the money never crossed his mind during the throw. “I knew I was going to the nine-darter but the money was never in my head.”
What the prize structure exposed was an awkward truth about incentivised perfection. A nine-dart finish generates more attention than almost anything else in darts — more replays, more column inches — so the commercial logic is sound. But when the payout dwarfs the winner’s cheque, it creates a tension the BDO was never quite comfortable addressing. The bonus is a footnote, not the story. It just refuses to stay quiet.
Why It Still Matters
The BDO World Darts Championship ran from 1978 to 2020. Forty-three years. Hundreds of thousands of legs of darts thrown at Frimley Green by the best players the BDO could muster. One nine-dart finish. One.
The format — best-of-sets, cumulative pressure, Lakeside crowds at quarter-past two in the afternoon — is precisely the environment where perfection becomes hardest. Players who average 100+ in exhibitions go to pieces on that oche. The stage is small and the walls press in. Lim did it anyway. In 67 seconds. In the second round. Representing Singapore.
The PDC has seen nine-darters at its World Championship. They still cause commotion. But the BDO record stands alone, untouched, from January 1990 — and now it stays that way forever. The BDO World Championship ended in 2020 and won’t be coming back. Lim didn’t just complete a perfect leg. He scored the only perfect leg in the entire history of the event. The last chance to match it disappeared when the BDO collapsed.
Once, across forty-two years of competition at Frimley Green, someone threw a perfect leg. It was Paul Lim. It will always be Paul Lim.
