Culture
Luke Littler: How the 17-year-old achieved sporting greatness and put himself on a path alongside Pele and Serena Williams
At the end of the second set of the final of the World Darts Championship, the biggest game in one of the biggest indoor sports in the world, Luke Littler calmly strolled off stage, gave his family a wry, knowing smile and rubbed his hands together like he had the prescient foresight of the beating he was about to dish out.
The man, no, the boy that 3,000 people had crammed inside London’s Alexandra Palace to see produce history, plus millions more watching at home and in pubs around the UK and the world, was doing it not just with dispassionate ease, or with flamboyant style, but with disdainful relish.
Darts finals have been won more handsomely — the sport’s all-time great Phil Taylor dished out three 7-0 whitewashes in his heyday — but not like this. Never like this.
Luke Littler is 17. He has facial hair that men many years his senior yearn to grow and in a sport that has its history rooted in pubs, Littler is not yet able to drink alcohol in one.
And yet he already carries the bravado and stage persona of someone ready to lead the sport down roads it has never visited before, which is exactly what he is already doing.
Like Pele and Serena Williams, Littler has won one of sport’s biggest prizes while still a teenager (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
Littler has already helped push darts further towards the mainstream in the UK, with viewing figures on Sky Sports, a subscription service, up almost 200 per cent for some tournaments in 2024, following record numbers of 4.8 million for last year’s final (the most watched non-football event in the broadcaster’s history), which a then-16-year-old Littler lost to Luke Humphries.
Now, by becoming world champion, he has earned the right to enter the pantheon of youthful sporting legends. Sure, Pele was good with a football at 17, but could he throw three treble-20s at a red, green and black board from almost two-and-a-half metres away?
Serena Williams won the US Open at 17, Ian Thorpe was the same age when he won Olympic gold in the pool, Sachin Tendulkar was 16 when he made his India debut and snooker magician Ronnie O’Sullivan was 17 when he won the UK Championship. What sets Littler apart in his particular field is that he has become the greatest current player in the world in the entire sport before he has become an adult.
GO DEEPER
How darts, a traditional ‘pub game’, became must-watch sport for Britons
Why is he so good? Is it natural talent? Well, he’s been playing darts since his dad bought him a magnetic dart board from the pound shop when he was 18 months old. He’s not old enough to vote, but he’s basically been practising for this moment almost his entire, short life.
And it’s not all youthful exuberance and freshness, either. Littler had mental scars from losing last year’s final despite being 4-2 up (he watched it back just hours before Friday’s match to recap what went wrong), but he was relentless and merciless in his pursuit of victory here in north London, bulldozing into a 4-0 lead against one of the greatest players to ever chuck an arrow, three-time champion Michael van Gerwen.
The youngster later said he felt nervous after taking that early lead, but his actions in obliterating one of the best players in the world suggested the exact opposite.
He unyieldingly hammered the treble bed like he was using a dart-sized jackhammer, ploughing perfect tiny holes in the helpless board as he sculpted his journey to greatness.
With the throwing hands of a sporting artist, Littler smiled and waved to the crowd, talking to them and himself throughout, in complete control of his own destiny.
Littler surpassed Van Gerwen’s record as the youngest darts world champion in history (James Fearn/Getty Images)
He didn’t just try to win, he tried to produce darts from the Gods while he was at it. He kept leaving himself on 170, darts’ biggest outshot to win a leg, which happened too frequently to not be deliberate. Darts players normally look pained when they miss a nine-darter (i.e. darting perfection of winning a leg with the smallest possible number of throws), but Littler just gave a nonchalant shrug when he missed the seventh dart like he knew he would get another chance.
A powerless Van Gerwen, the winner of 157 PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) titles, could only scowl and grimace like Dick Dastardly in a lime green shirt.
The Dutchman was once the youngest world champion, aged 24. The symbolism of a weighty dart-shaped baton being passed to the next generation here was irresistible.
Van Gerwen rallied, as champions do, clinging to Littler’s coattails as they swapped the next six sets, but it was never going to be enough in front of a deliriously partisan crowd, drunk on booze and throwing. He may give off the appearance of a combination of Bond villains, part Blofeld with his shiny bald head, part Jaws with a grille across his chops, but he could only play the bad guy for so long against a tidal wave of trebles and tons.
Littler was just too good. Whenever Van Gerwen came up for air, the teenager pushed him back underwater with one hand and hit double 10 with the other.
“Wow… wow,” Littler said to himself as he welled up having just hit double 16 to win 7-3, confirm the title and become £500,000 ($621,056 at current conversion rates) richer. He muttered “I can’t believe it” three times in his immediate post-match interview.
“At 2-0 up, I started getting nervous, but I said to myself, ‘Just relax’.
“That first game against Ryan Meikle, it’s the game that really mattered.”
Littler cried on stage after that second-round victory over Meikle before Christmas. He broke down, couldn’t finish an interview, left the stage and went to give his mum a hug.
On the train journey down to London earlier that day, he couldn’t wait for the match to start, but when he threw his first dart he basically, paraphrasing his own words, bottled it.
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” he later said after composing himself. “It was a weird feeling… it’s the biggest stage out there. It was probably the toughest game I’ve played.”
To prove his otherworldly nature, he had somehow produced the greatest set of darts ever seen in the history of the world championships at the end of that “toughest” match, averaging more than 140, but yes, he had started it like a glorified pub player by his own incredibly high standards.
“I’m thinking to myself; ‘What are you doing? Just relax’,” Littler said.
Littler during his walk out for the final against Michael van Gerwen at Alexandra Palace (James Fearn/Getty Images)
It’s no wonder, what with the enormous pressure on his young shoulders at being the favourite to lift the title aged just 17, a normal kid from Runcorn, a small town near Liverpool in the north-west of England, who eats kebabs and likes football.
Thereafter, throughout almost the whole tournament, he was imperious, reflecting the form that saw him rise from 164th to fourth in the world rankings last year.
Despite the unimaginable increase in money, fame, popularity and exposure, the 1.5 million Instagram followers, the endless television appearances and mixing it with Max Verstappen or his heroes at Manchester United, he stayed focused, winning 10 PDC titles, the Premier League, Grand Slam and World Series finals, plus hitting four perfect nine-darters along the way and earning more than £1million ($1.2m) in prize money.
He was the most searched athlete of the year on Google and the runner-up in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
“Littler has captivated people because he’s relatable,” Sky Sports darts presenter Emma Paton told The Athletic earlier in the tournament. “He’s taken the sport to different places… Darts has never had this exposure before. It’s not even because of what he’s done in the sport, which has been ridiculous by the way, but it’s the impact he’s had on it.
“Compared to a lot of other sportspeople, darts players are refreshingly honest and are basically just being themselves and Luke is no different. He’s just a kid at the end of the day.
“People have asked me, ‘What’s it like speaking to Luke Littler? It doesn’t seem like he has loads to say’. I’m like, ‘He’s just very chilled out, he doesn’t really care that much, he’s just a 17-year-old kid’.”
Darts obsessive Littler plays exactly like that, like a kid having fun on the stage, ticking off his own personal bucket list of darting dreams.
He has an uncanny ability to detach himself completely from the enormity of the event, chat to the crowd, ignore his opponent and just play his own game, the old sporting cliche.
He relishes showing off the skills he’s honed over years of practice, expanding on the possibilities and limits that we thought the sport previously had. He tries irregular setup shots, he hits double-doubles or two bullseyes. He essentially takes the practice board to the world stage.
And then, when he needs to, a steely glint of determination emanates from his eyes and an unforgiving rhythm of 180s ensues. He can turn it on like few in the sport ever have before.
An emotional Littler reacts after winning the PDC World Championship (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
“I sometimes say, every 17 years a star gets born,” a humbled Van Gerwen said. “He’s one of them… Every chance he got, every moment he had to hurt me, he did it.”
World champion, famous, a millionaire. What on earth next, other than impending adulthood?
“I just want to add to it, maybe get a few more,” Littler said. “If I want the 16 (Taylor’s record of world titles), then I’m sure I could possibly achieve it.
“I’ve been doing this since 18 months old on a magnetic board wearing a nappy.
“When I’d say to my mates I’ve got a darts competition, they’d be like, ‘Darts?!’ ‘Yeah, darts, have you not seen it?’”
They’re all seeing it now, thanks to an unassuming 17-year-old lad who can throw arrows like few ever have before.
(Top photo: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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