From bullied to bullseyes: The incredible rise of Michael van Gerwen

“I am a very confident guy, massively confident in what I do,” he says with trademark Dutch directness.

Night after night, van Gerwen strides to the stage, bald head shining, lime green shirt blaring as loudly as his intro song, Seven Nation Army.

The noise from crowds full of courage juice becomes distant as he aims his little metal missiles to a place that has taken him far beyond a prospective career tiling roofs in the small Dutch town he was raised in.

Van Gerwen’s dart invariably goes where he aims them.

Treble twenty is the most valuable tiny strip on a board. For some, when the heat is on, that strip may as well be in the next postcode. For van Gerwen, it’s part of his comfort zone, and he delivers with relentless, rhythmic accuracy.

Van Gerwen is well aware his ability breaks opponents down, much the same way Tiger Woods could win a golf tournament with a glare.

“They need to beat me if they want to win the tournament. Simple as that,” van Gerwen says, like Tiger used to think.

“Auto-pilot goes on, and it’s ‘Just try to catch me, boy’,” van Gerwen says.

*****

The confidence, or arrogance as it’s read by some, hasn’t always been apparent in van Gerwen.

As a child, it was dormant.

Long before van Gerwen earned the first of his $14.6 million in career prizemoney, and long before he’d won the first of 27 ‘major’ events he’s captured so far, self-esteem was hard to come by.

“I was a little fat kid, you get treated at school, people make jokes about you, never that strong,” van Gerwen tells CODE Sports.

He picked up darts at a local club in his small hometown of Boxtel when he realised his other sporting passion wasn’t going to work out.

“I was crap at football, so I had to do something!” he laughs.

“So I picked darts. Not a bad choice to be fair.”

Especially for his self-esteem. The bullying stopped when van Gerwen started hitting treble twenty like he was born for it.

“The only way I could find a way around having no confidence was playing darts,” he says.

“I was better than the others. As a kid, when you’re good at something you get confident, then it gets better. Gives you an identity, proud of yourself.”

“Then you think, I’m quite good at this game, take it with two hands and don’t let it go.”

Van Gerwen won his first junior tournament aged 10.

By 14, he thought he could become great and won junior tournaments with monotonous regularity.

By 17, he threw a televised nine-darter (in darts scoring, a ‘nine-darter’ is the quickest way of going from 501 to zero) against Dutch legend Raymond van Barneveld.

Junior titles morphed into beating the men, but just before he hit the big-time, van Gerwen supplanted his then-meagre income by working as a tiler, which would have been his career, he says glumly, if darts didn’t pan out.

Happily, his workmates knew van Gerwen wouldn’t be around them on job sites for long.

“The tiles were heavy, had to be careful with my fingers,” he recalls.

“Some would tell me to pick them up properly, but my mates would tell them to shut up, he has to play darts!’”

They were correct to protect him.

*****

Phil “The Power” Taylor is rightly regarded as the greatest darts player of all-time.

When the PDC organisation (the main darts tour) first brought its World Series concept to Australia, Luna Park in Sydney sold out in minutes. They all wanted to see ‘The Power’.

Then toward the end of his storied career, Taylor met a young upstart by the name of Michael van Gerwen in the final in Sydney. Taylor thrashed him.

Far from perturbed, van Gerwen, who by that stage had a couple of wins over Taylor, knew he was on the right track.

“Of course, Phil’s been the greatest of all-time, but if you have to believe in your own chances, believe in yourself,” van Gerwen says.

“I don’t care who I play. If you’re scared or have too much respect for someone, it goes into your head. I’ve never had that.”

Since that night in Sydney, van Gerwen has won titles at the rate Taylor did in his pomp. The two careers barely crossed over, with Taylor retiring in 2018.

Nearing the mid-way point of his career, the Dutchman is nearly halfway to Taylor’s 59 major event wins, but rather than focus on a single target, van Gerwen has just got his foot down to win as much as he can.

Van Gerwen’s form wavered during the pandemic period, in which top-level darts miraculously barely stopped.

A recent problem with Carpal Tunnel syndrome, a nerve issue which blocks feeling in the hand – the darts equivalent of a footy player breaking a leg – was causing issues.

“It was tricky, a few sleepless nights,” van Gerwen says with a rare lack of overflowing confidence.

“You never know if something goes wrong, it’s the end of your career.”

If the last few months is any evidence, the injury is a mere blip. Van Gerwen recently won the Premier League and World Matchplay, and more importantly found time for a good friend with terminal cancer.

“We play cards once a week, and they told him they can’t do anything for him, so a few of us went to Vegas for a few days,” van Gerwen says.

“You have to enjoy life, that’s how I always take it.”

Last weekend, van Gerwen won some more, taking out the Queensland Masters in Townsville.

It’s part of the PDC World Series’ annual swing through Australia and New Zealand, with two more events to come this weekend in Wollongong and next week in Hamilton.

The injury and the boy‘s trip to Vegas made van Gerwen think his current journey would be a success if he could win one of the three events.

Winning in Townsville has stoked a familiar trait inside him.

“I feel good again. The confidence is back. Now I wanna win all three,” van Gerwen says directly.

There’s little reason to doubt him.