Darts

1. Basketball has Michael Jordan, boxing has Muhammad Ali, football has Pele and darts has Phil "the Power" Taylor, lauded as the greatest ever in his discipline and a Briton to boot.

2. Granted, darts originated in Britain, but then so did cricket, so we need to hail our heroes where we can. However, last night in the PDC Ladbrokes.com World Championship final, the Canadian John Part defeated 10-times world champion Taylor to take the title, the £50,000 prize money and inspire a raft of "Power failure" headlines.

3. People who spend long enough in pubs to get bored with drinking and talking rubbish sometimes invent games.

4. Pubgoers of yore delighted in shove ha'penny and dominoes. Early forms of darts emerged in the 19th century including Puff and Dart, in which a blowpipe was used to fire a dart. According to legend there was a fatality when someone sucked.

5. Darts really took off in the 20th century, when the board with numbered coloured circles emerged. Leagues started in 1925, organised by breweries, and in 1937 the King and Queen touring a social club in Berkshire threw some darts and boosted its popularity.

6. Now darts is trying to move away from its pint-and-pie image. However, there are potential dangers in disturbing the games cosmos. Taylor's loss of three stone has been mooted as a reason for his dip in form. At least sartorially, the players' shirts still have a glamour all of their own.

7. The game has various forms but the rules of the classic contest are simple. Each player starts with the same score (often 501) and the first to reduce their score to zero wins. Spearing the pub landlord's dog results in a hasty eviction. A bullseye gives you 60 points, so with your three throws, a treble of bullseyes would allow you to let rip the immortal cry "one hundred and eighty!".

8. Super, smashing, great. Which brings us on to Jim Bowen, host of the late, lamented darts gameshow Bullseye.

9. Darts has its own literary legend, Keith Talent, a character in Martin Amis' novel London Fields. Talent is a petty criminal hoping to make it as a TV darts player.

10. Darts commentator Sid Waddell once said of a player: "Under that heart of stone beat muscles of pure flint." On another occasion, he said: "Here he is, stepping up to the oche, the Bronzed Adonis, Steve Beaton, most handsome man in darts ..." And finally, who could forget Eric Bristow?.