Phil Taylor (darts player)

Philip Douglas Taylor (born 13 August 1960) is an English former professional darts player. Nicknamed "the Power", he dominated darts across three decades and is considered the greatest darts player of all time, having won 214 professional tournaments, including a record 87 major titles and a record 16 World Championships. In 2015, the BBC rated Taylor among the ten greatest British sportsmen of the last 35 years.

Taylor took up darts seriously in his mid-twenties and was sponsored and mentored in his early professional career by five-time world champion Eric Bristow. An unseeded 125/1 outsider at the 1990 BDO World Darts Championship, he defeated Bristow 6–1 in the final to win his first world title at age 29. In 1992, he won his second world title in dramatic fashion, defeating Mike Gregory 6–5 in a tiebreak leg after Gregory had missed six championship darts.

In 1993, Taylor was among 16 top players who broke away from the British Darts Organisation (BDO) to form the World Darts Council, later renamed the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC). He won the PDC World Darts Championship eight consecutive times from 1995 to 2002, reached 14 consecutive finals from 1994 to 2007 and reached 21 world finals overall, all of which are records. He held the world number one ranking for thirteen years in total, including eight in a row from 2006 to 2013. He won 70 PDC Pro Tour events, which was a record until Michael van Gerwen surpassed it in February 2019. Taylor hit a record 11 televised nine-dart finishes (and 22 overall). He was also the first person to hit two nine-dart finishes in the same match.

Taylor won the PDC Player of the Year award six times (2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012) and was twice nominated for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, in 2006 and 2010; in the latter year, he finished as runner-up, making him the first darts player to finish in the top two. He was inducted into the PDC Hall of Fame in 2011. He retired from professional darts after the 2018 World Championship, where he finished as runner-up. He competed in the first three World Seniors Darts Championships from 2022 to 2024 but no longer plays darts competitively.