History
In the 1980s professional darts in Britain lost much of its sponsorship and most of its television coverage. From 1989 the only televised event was the annual Embassy World Championship. Some of the players felt that not enough was being done by the governing body, the British Darts Organisation, to encourage new sponsors into the sport and arrange more television coverage than just one event a year.
As a result, 16 professional players, including every previous BDO world champion who was still active in the game, created their own darts organisation, the World Darts Council (WDC), in January 1992.
They wanted to appoint a PR consultant to improve the image of the game. The 1993 Embassy World Championship was the last time there was one unified world championship. The WDC players wore their new insignia on their sleeves during the tournament but were told to remove them by the BDO. The WDC players decided that if they were not going to be recognised by the BDO they would no longer play in the Embassy tournament.
The BDO took the step of banning the rebel players from playing in county darts and even threatened to ban any player who participated in exhibition events with WDC players.
Read more about this topic: Professional Darts Corporation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)