Featured Image Credit: YouTube/The Darts Referee
Topics: Darts
Jack Kenmare
A content creator who runs one of the biggest darts channels on YouTube has accidentally stumbled across a way of overcoming his dartitis condition.
Former PDC darts referee Jack Langston, who is the face of The Darts Referee – a YouTube channel with over 85,000 subscribers – was only 11 years old when the symptoms of dartitis began.
If you're unaware, dartitis is a psychological condition where the brain stops a player from being able to release a dart at the right time.
The Oxford English Dictionary featured the word for the first time in 2007 and defined it as "a state of nervousness which prevents a player from releasing a dart at the right moment when throwing."
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Many tour professionals have suffered from the condition over the years, including Kevin Painter, Nathan Aspinall and the late Eric Bristow, whose career was drastically cut short by dartitis.
And in a recent video, Langston opened up on his experiences with dartitis and how he accidentally found a cure.
Speaking at length, Langston details how dartitis has become a recurring issue in his game over the past two decades. In fact, he didn't throw a dart for two years because of the strain it was having.
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As a result of the issues, he switched to playing left-handed.
"Since I've swapped to left-handed, I have enjoyed playing darts a heck of a lot more," he said. "My enjoyment for the game has gone through the roof. I don't fear playing on a Friday night and in a league match, or on a Saturday at a tournament.
"I don't fear that dartitis is going to kick in at some point because that was always the worry for me."
Langston is still playing with his left hand, but earlier this week, something unusual happened when he decided to film himself throwing right-handed to demonstrate dartitis for a video.
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Normally when throwing right-handed, Jack's fingers end up in the wrong position and his arm gets stuck mid-throw.
On this occasion, however, the majority of those dartitis symptoms were gone and his throw felt smoother. Why? He believes wearing a hoodie instead of a t-shirt helped overcome the issues.
"It is 90 per cent gone when I'm wearing a hoodie, which is really, really strange," he says in the video.
"I have a theory. I've been throwing for about 10 minutes, and I've had very minimal dartitis-y things happening while I'm playing right-handed with a hoodie on.
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"The only thing I can think of is the fact that, because dartitis is quite a visual thing, I think that not being able to see my arm, or my arm being covered, has solved the issue."
Towards the end of the video, Langston asks if there is anyone out there who can explain what is going on. "I'm not saying I've 100 per cent cured my own dartitis here, but 90% of it is gone," he added.
Last year, Nathan Aspinall opened up on his ongoing battle with dartitis, which started in a 2023 Premier League match against Peter Wright.
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"All of a sudden out of nowhere I couldn't throw my effing dart," Aspinall explained on Sky Sports' Game of Throws: Inside Darts documentary. "I just couldn't let it go. It ended up getting worse and worse and worse to the point where I was in tears.
"Because I knew what it was. The dreaded D-word that no darts player ever wants to hear or get. Something called dartitis. It's horrific, no one ever wants to get it. Not many people come back from it.
"It's basically the fear of missing. There's somewhere deep in the back of your head saying 'you're going to miss this' so you stop."