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Iconic darts ref Russ Bray admits there is one thing that bugs him more than anything ahead of his Paddy Power World Championship swansong.
Bray will call at the Alexandra Palace for the final time after announcing his retirement from refereeing after almost 30 years as a top official. Dealing with rowdy crowds – and occasionally rowdy players – has been part and parcel of his beloved job over the years.
The party atmosphere at the Worlds and in the Premier League is something he dearly loves about the sport. But there is one particular crowd issue that irks the 66-year-old – known by many as the ‘Voice of Darts’ – more than anything else.
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“You get a general noise, but there is one person that will whistle over and above everything else,” he tells Daily Star Sport. “That is my biggest gripe, I hate it with a passion because it goes right through you.
“What these guys [who whistle] don’t realise is that these lads are playing for an awful lot of money, they’re playing for their dinners, their mortgages, things like that. People just don’t realise that. If you’ve got a bricklayer and you’re going up to him whistling in his ear and stopping him from working, it’s no different.
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“The rest of it, the singing, that’s all part and parcel of it. It’s just the whistling that really annoys me. You try and shut them up as best you can, but the worst thing you can say as a ref is ‘don’t whistle’ because then you’ll have 4,000 people start whistling. You have word it carefully and say things like ‘thank you’ and ‘best of order’.”
Bray put one whistling fan firmly in their place at a tournament earlier this year. As Josh Rock took on Stephen Bunting at the German Darts Championship, one fan decided they wanted to be the centre of attention by annoyingly whistling while both players threw.
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Bray wasn’t having any of it though. Just after a Rock visit in the third leg, with Bunting 2-0 up, Bray, in his distinctive gravelly voice, said: “Yeah, thanks mate, we all know you can whistle, just leave it.”
The retort triggered laughter in the commentary box while fans lauded Bray’s response while bemoaning the behaviour of the fan.
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