Scott Mitchell

Sat across from me in Q Sports Bar, is Scott Mitchell, A World Champion, a father, and a full-time farmer.

 Not only is he throwing 180s, he is also herding cattle, shearing sheep and caring for his 40+ chickens.

 Aside from the professional farming, Scott is a professional athlete.

 The journey from farmers son to World Champ hasn’t been plain sailing.

 “I think the reason I picked up a dart in the 70s is that we were under a Labor government and there wasn't a lot of money around, so mum and dad, instead of going out or whatever to the pub or whatever, they'd buy a few tinnies and we'd go round somebody's house, they put up a dartboard on the back of the kitchen door and my parents would have a few beers and we would all have a nice night.”

Scott would progress through the darts ranks, starting by entering his Young Farmers team into the local darts leagues, and then in 2007 darts looked to be a viable career for Scott.

“I qualified for UK Open. And I won a couple of games to the UK and then made it live on Sky to play Jelle Klassen in my first game on Friday night in Bolton. It wasn't me that realised I was good. It was when I came back to the football club and went to the AGM a week later after I'd been on the TV and the lad said, ‘When you told us you played darts, we thought you just messed around at the pub. We didn't realise you could actually play darts’.”

Scott then went onto win the BDO Lakeside World Championships at the iconic Lakeside venue.

“I looked at the trophy after I won it and you look at the trophy and go look at all these superstar names on there and then there was mine. And I don't ever I've never seen myself as a superstar.”

 But professional sport isn’t always about the glory, sometimes it leaves you at rock bottom.

 In darts, your tour card is determined by how much prize money you have acquired in the previous year. To achieve a PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) tour card, that grants players automatic entries to all PDC events, including the qualifiers for the world championships at Alexandra Palace, players must earn a certain amount of prize money, depending on the year. Scott lost out by a thumbnail, at the end of 2022.

 "I lost my tour card by 1,200 quid... I needed about £55,000 to stay on the tour and I had £53,800. One win somewhere would have kept me my card."

A world champion, out of the professional circuit, for a sum less than a used farm trailer on Facebook marketplace.

But, Scott hasn’t given up yet, although he admits he is in the latter parts of his illustrious career, that includes a BDO World Championship win, as well as captaining his country in the Home Internationals, he believes he can still perform at the top level.

“I'm in the twilight years of my career now, I believe if I'd have kept my card, I'd have gone on and I'd still be there now. It seems to be the way of the world.” I believe if I can beat anybody in a game, if we can start going right for me and I get my mojo going again, you know, there's anything that could happen. But I know that as I get older, it's not going to happen as often as it used to.”

Scott believes the people may view him differently for his World championship title, but he insists it never changed him as a player or a person.

“It's coming to the point where, what do you expect as a player? What do you expect as a person? For me, I'd probably still play till I 80. I'm that sort of person. I absolutely love the game. People say, you know, your reputation could be dropping from being a former world champion. I'm not worried about reputation. I was never worried about being a world champion, I was always a big enough person without being a World Champion in my heart. So I didn't need it to make me anybody.”

Scott isn’t just fighting valiantly against age; he is battling his physiology. A freak food poisoning incident, sent his qualifying year into a tailspin.

“I got food poisoning right at the end of 2024. That sent my heart into a different stratosphere, overbeating and the like .I have to have three heart operations to try and stop that. I'm on medication to try and stop it. But they're slowing my heart rate down and everything else, so I can't get up for a game. Somebody comes and starts hitting a 140 against me. I go, oh, well done, mate. You're brilliant, when before I had a bit of ‘I’m going to rip your nuts off’, which is what you need!”

Scott ‘Scotty Dog’ Mitchell, is no stranger to the players at the top of the PDC rankings right now. As a world champ, he has been brushing shoulder with the best.

It's like a school. You get James Wade and Vincent van der Voort and MVG sit together. And then there's another table, where you get Gezzy (Gerwyn Price) sitting with Peter Wright and so on.

But, it can get tough at the top for The Dog. Who admits that the atmosphere can be less than savoury.

“You go sit on that table and then you go, I don't think they want me here. They don't even need to talk to you. In the PDC, there is no mind games whatsoever. It's just pure business. Nobody talks. Pure business. You get to the PDC, nobody's going to help you, because you're a direct rival to them.”

Scott still has plans for the future, and assured us to not count him out yet.

“I just want to keep playing. I want to help other players, particularly from this area, go into the top end of the game and we'll see where it goes. I love the game. There isn't a day that I don't want to throw.”

It seems as though, there is life in the old dog yet.