I was having a quiet, heavily comped lunch at a steakhouse near the league office last week with a former world champion, and the conversation naturally turned to what is wrong with modern darts. The consensus was obvious. The sport has simply become too cheerful. We have walk-on girls replaced by light shows, we have fans dancing to pop music, and we have Luke Littler, a teenager who plays with a smile on his face and openly enjoys eating kebabs. It lacks the grim, working-class existential dread that built this franchise.
Then I took a train to a damp, poorly lit pub in Cardiff to meet Makinley Cooper-Johnson, and for the first time in years, I felt a spark of hope for the future of British athletics. Makinley is sixteen years old, possesses a remarkably fluid throwing action, and has absolutely no interest in the glitz and glamour of the Professional Darts Corporation. He is not playing to buy a sports car or a mansion in Dubai. He is hoping to beat Littler on the main stage solely to fund his training and equipment as a licensed undertaker.
When you sit across a sticky wooden table from a young man who is carefully calculating how much of his tournament winnings will need to be allocated for a high-volume hydraulic embalming pump, you realize you are in the presence of greatness. I asked him what he plans to do with the runner-up purse if he falls short in a final. He did not talk about reinvesting in his coaching staff or taking a holiday. He looked me dead in the eye and explained the current market rates for mahogany caskets versus standard pine, and how a deep run at the World Matchplay could essentially finance a small fleet of hearses.
You can't teach that. You can teach a teenager how to find double top under pressure, but you cannot manufacture the chilling, ambient awareness of our shared mortality that Makinley brings to the oche. When he steps up to throw, he is not seeing a dartboard. He is seeing the fleeting, temporary nature of human existence. It is the ultimate mental edge. While Littler is drawing energy from a rowdy crowd chanting his name, Makinley is drawing energy from the absolute certainty that every single person in the arena will one day require his services.
I have watched countless prospects crumble under the bright lights of television cameras because they want to be famous. Makinley does not want to be famous. He wants to safely and respectfully drain the fluids from his local community. That singular, bleak focus translates directly into his scoring power. When he needs a treble twenty, his heart rate actually drops, presumably because he is mentally measuring his opponent for a burial suit.
We have spent millions trying to manufacture the kind of icy, bloodless composure this boy naturally derives from reading trade magazines about embalming fluid.
This is exactly the kind of grounded, traditional perspective the league office has been desperately missing. For years, I have argued that athletes are too disconnected from the real world. We complain that they live in bubbles of wealth and privilege. Yet here is a young athlete who is actively planning to spend his prime earning years arranging floral tributes and comforting grieving widows. It is a level of maturity that puts the rest of the tour to shame.
I asked Makinley how he plans to handle the psychological warfare that takes place on the grandee stages, the subtle mind games veterans play to rattle a newcomer. He simply told me that intimidation does not work when you have spent your weekends shadowing a funeral director during a harsh Welsh winter. You cannot rattle a man who knows exactly how much paperwork is required to legally transport a corpse across county lines.
I even found myself discussing my own end-of-life plans with the boy over a pint of bitter. He noted that I was looking a bit flushed and suggested I might want to start looking into pre-paid burial plots before the seasonal rush. It was refreshing to speak to an athlete who actually cares about the long-term well-being of the media covering him, even if that well-being technically extends into the afterlife.
If the sport of darts wants to survive its current era of flashing lights and social media influencers, it needs to throw its full weight behind Makinley Cooper-Johnson. We need his walk-on music to be a slow, mournful organ dirge. We need his fans dressing up in Victorian mourning attire instead of neon traffic cones. We need a champion who reminds us all that the game is just a brief, meaningless distraction before the inevitable silence of the grave. I, for one, cannot wait to watch him bury the competition.