How it unfolded
Phil Taylor was a 29-year-old earning a few dozen pounds a week at a Stoke-on-Trent ceramics factory. The man who made him a professional was his final opponent, Eric Bristow. Bristow spotted the talent, lent him £10,000 to quit his job and focus on practice, and Taylor entered this tournament at 125-1 with that money. Bristow was already the sport's biggest star with five world titles, but he was suffering from dartitis, which was starting to jam his release, and was no longer the player he had been in the mid-1980s. The match was one-sided. Taylor won 6-1 to take his first world title, and the relationship between mentor and protégé, backer and backed, was reversed on the spot. Bristow reached two more finals in 1990 and 1991 but never won another world title, while Taylor went on to stack up sixteen world titles between that day and 2013.
Why it still matters
This is the start of a run of dominance with almost no precedent in any professional sport. From this day on Taylor reached 21 world finals and won 16, ran an eight-title winning streak from 1995 to 2002, and pushed the standard for televised three-dart averages from the 90s into the 100s. At the same time, this match also marked the generation that built the 1980s boom stepping aside.