Scott Mitchell, a British darts player, is the sport’s current world champion. Photograph by Charlie Crowhurst / Getty

Scott “Scotty Dog” Mitchell, the current reigning world darts champion, has doubled down on his ill-fitting nickname. As he emerged from a veil of theatrical dry ice to take a boxer’s strut toward the ring at the 2016 Lakeside British Darts Organization World Darts Championship, last Thursday, he cradled in his thick arms a small, stuffed toy in the shape of a black Scottish terrier. The silhouetted outline of the same animal was emblazoned on the back of his XXL pink-and-black polo shirt. Mitchell’s stentorian entrance music? The Baha Men’s 2000 hit, “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

There is not a great deal of diversity when it comes to the men’s darts game in England. Nicknames help bring texture to a mostly identikit lineup of middle-aged, beer-paunched men. They add a bit of humor too, though usually of a straightforward kind: Thomas “Shorty” Seyler is a short man, Andy “Pie Man” Smith appears to enjoy pastry, Steve “Bronzed Adonis” Beaton trains in Tenerife. (One wonders if an intervention is in order for Mike “Wino” Day.)

This dash of color helps. Darts is an utterly simple game, consisting entirely of physical accuracy and mental arithmetic. Two players start out with five hundred and one points, and each tries to be the first to reduce his score to zero. They take turns throwing a quiver of three tiny javelins from a marker line, known as the oche (pronounced like “hockey” with a dropped “h”), which lies exactly seven feet and nine and a quarter inches from the board. The other details are probably familiar. The segment in which each dart lodges specifies the number of points to be subtracted from your current score; strike the narrow outer ring and you earn double the indicated points, the inner ring treble. The bright red bull’s-eye at the center has an inner circle and an outer rim, worth fifty points and twenty-five points, respectively. The final dart, which zeroes your score for the win, must land either in the double zone or the bull’s-eye, otherwise it is declared void.

While the typical darts player does not embody the standard athletic abstractions—power, grace—most players insist this is a legitimate sport. “I challenge anyone who says otherwise to get a set of darts, throw them for an hour, and see how they feel the next day,” Mitchell told me, on Thursday, after nosing a win against the Irishman Mark “Gladiator” McGeeney, and thereby reaching the quarter-finals in defense of his world championship. (The final takes place on Sunday). “I once put a pedometer on during a Dutch open. I walked about seven kilometres that day, just going backwards and forwards to the oche.”

There are certainly sportsmanlike theatrics involved. Before lining up a difficult shot, Mitchell has a habit of first throwing a look over his left shoulder, and blowing out through puffed cheeks, before returning his gaze to the board, as if resetting the alignment of his missile-guidance system. Mitchell grins under his buzz cut each time he manages to send all three darts into the treble-twenty, the most valuable real estate on the board, a feat announced by the tuxedoed caller with the quivering shout, “One hundred and ehhhhhh-tiiiieeeee.”

Mitchell is forty-five and currently works two day jobs, as a farmer and a landscape gardener. He started playing darts early on. “At home in the nineteen-seventies my mum and dad used to play,” he recalled. “There wasn’t a lot of money about, so at the weekend my parents would go to a friend’s house and pop a dart board on the back of a lounge door for their evening out. I’d stand on a chair and throw as a seven or eight-year-old.” Mitchell didn’t start playing seriously until he was much older, when a friend’s darts team, the Young Farmers, was short a player, and he was invited to plug the gap. “I went through three darts and managed to hit the board with all of them,” he recalled. “After that night I stood on the sidelines for about three weeks, taught myself to score, and Bob’s-your-uncle, it got me like a drug.”

Mitchell’s progress was slow at first. He suffered from tremendous anxiety in his early tournament matches. In 2011, during his début appearance at the B.D.O. championship—founded in 1978, and held at the Lakeside Country Club every year since 1986, the competition is England’s longest-running darts championship—he lost in the first round. Then he started talking to a hypnotherapist. “I’d speak on the phone about my anxieties, what made me nervous and so on,” he explained. “For darts players, that’s a very difficult thing to do. With darts, you hide everything at the oche. You can’t do that with a therapist. You have to open up to deal with the demons.” In the eighteen months since Mitchell began therapy, he has become world champion and has won thirteen world-ranking titles. “It’s had a huge effect,” he said. In 2015, Mitchell used a significant portion of his £100,000 winnings to buy a new tractor for his father. (Unfortunately, he neglected to take the sales tax into account, and had to offer the dealer a few choice items from the farm to make up the difference.)

There’s something huntsman-like, even neolithic, about darts, the tiny spears hurled to hit their mark. It is part of the evolutionary trajectory that, with time, turns all hunting into sport. And like other British games—rugby, polo, dogfighting—darts is saddled with the baggage of class: these are games defined by the people who play them and the environments in which they’re played. Mitchell appreciates the democratic aspect of darts. “It’s the only sport where money doesn’t count,” he said. “You can step to that oche with ten grand in your back pocket while the other person only has ten pence. But once you step to that oche it’s just about you and your bottle. It’s not like Formula One where it’s who has the fastest engine.”

By “bottle” Mitchell meant guts, or nerve, but the word provides a fitting double entendre: the home of darts is the English pub. Its natural surface is not the well-trimmed lawns of soccer or the noble clay of tennis, but the yielding sponge of the beery carpet. Indeed, in England, the association between darts and drink is strong. Last year, after his B.D.O. win, Mitchell said that he’d read the biography of a former world champion in which the author, Andy Fordham, described becoming so inebriated during the 2004 final that he couldn’t remember anything about what happened. With that in mind, Mitchell “didn’t drink too much” before the final.

But Mitchell doesn’t avoid alcohol entirely—in fact, he regards it as a performance enhancer. “If we’re going to get real technical here, alcohol slows the brain down so that by the time it goes to tell your hand ‘I can’t hit this,’ the dart has already left your fingers,” he explained. “That’s where the drink helps. If you can get used to not having to delay that reaction by not drinking, well . . . that’s probably the better way to go.”