In his latest column, PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf examines Steve Beaton's incredible longevity at the top level, after the 60-year-old brought down the curtain on his ProTour career last week.
As the world of professional darts contemplates the future without Steve Beaton, it's obvious that links to darts' storied past are being cut.
Beaton's impending retirement leaves Raymond van Barneveld as the only active PDC Tour Card holder to have qualified for a unified World Championship prior to the BDO's 1993 schism.
There are subsequently no players born before 1965 and no player with Beaton's unique style or romantic appeal.
The more than 10,000 legs played by Beaton since the advent of statistical tracking of player performance represent only a fraction of his total output of darts, but what we do know about Beaton's performances indicates that a remarkable figure has retired from darts.
Beaton's highest known averages in the PDC were recorded within one month of each other in 2022, well after his 58th birthday.
In August of that year, Beaton overcame two early ton-plus checkouts from Martin Lukeman to advance to a Players Championship board final, himself completing every finish he attempted less than 121, resulting in a 110.41 average.
However, it was Jonathan Worsley who experienced the full force of Beaton's power.
In a qualifying match for the 11th European Tour event of that year, Worsley could do little to overcome Beaton's powerful scoring and precise finishing.
Even a nine-dart finish attempt did not result in his winning the fifth leg as Beaton posted an 118.19 average and won the only known match of his career in which he won a majority of his legs in 12 darts or fewer.
Winning this match eventually qualified him for the 2022 German Open, but did not themselves contribute to surges of form which saw him winning titles or qualifying for major tournaments.
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The extent of his demolition of his two colleagues would have remained unknown were the scores not recorded on DartConnect, unlike many hundreds of the matches he played throughout four decades of darts.
The only people who experienced the full extent of Beaton's capabilities on the dartboard were his fellow professionals.
Beaton completed four nine-dart finishes in his career, his first and last bookending a 22-year period in which the PDC went from five total completed perfect legs to nearly 500.
No nine-dart finish had ever been seen live in a PDC event when Beaton first achieved perfection; when he last did so, earlier this year, his perfect leg was merely one of three struck by different players in the same event.
Only one was captured on video, in a nearly empty auditorium during a European Tour event in a first-round match against Kirk Shepherd.
Beaton is not known to have made any additional money from his nine-dart finishes, and in his only filmed nine-darter Beaton shows no reaction to this outstanding career achievement beyond a quick handshake with his opponent.
It's clear that for Beaton, a nine-darter is just another leg on the road to winning a match.
No opponent faced Steve Beaton in the Order of Merit era more often than Peter Wright, and the two-time World Champion only won 16 of their 30 meetings.
In total, having played 280 legs against one another, Wright managed only a +2 leg difference and lost both of the semi-final matches contested between the pair.
Beaton triumphed in their first six and last three meetings, indicating a consistency to his play that existed long before Peter Wright's rise to prominence in the PDC and could have endured long after Wright's blip in form 15 years later.
Having endured countless losses at the zenith of Phil Taylor's dominance of the PDC, his comeback from the brink of certain defeat at the 2010 Grand Slam marked Taylor's only televised defeat that year in an elimination match before the semi-finals.
And during his farewell 2024 season, Beaton achieved something which he had never done in his career to that point - back-to-back ranking victories over Michael van Gerwen, wins which have kept 'Mighty Mike" out of the top 16 seeds for the upcoming Players Championship Finals.
Beaton retires having won his only stage meeting with reigning World Champion Luke Humphries, a majority of his ranking TV matches with Rob Cross, but never a match with teenage sensation Luke Litter, leaving unsettled the question of who would win a match across the generations.
Beaton's greatest statistical legacy will endure because of his consistency throughout his career.
Beginning in 2009, when he was absent for an event held in Canada, Beaton entered 391 consecutive Players Championship events and won two; the streak of 179 consecutive eliminations in Players Championships between his titles in 2009 and 2017 is the longest in the history of that tour.
It's difficult to imagine that, with the deluge of talented players bursting onto the darts scene and then rapidly flaming out, that any player currently active would both remain devoted enough to the game and performing at an elite level to qualify for 33 consecutive World Championships.
As his rivals became more formidable over the years, Beaton remained among the top 32 players in the world; even in his final year he played well enough to retain his Tour Card, if he so desired, in 2025.
His status as a professional will not be taken away as he retires. 41 years into a professional career - he will resign his Tour Card voluntarily as a player entitled to yet another year on the circuit.
No player has mastered 'stayin' alive' like Steve Beaton.