The lessons Littler can take from Raducanu’s difficulties with fame

British tennis meteor’s difficulties in dealing with fame could provide teenage darts sensation with some useful insights

When was the last time a 16-year-old dominated pub chatter for a week? There are no obvious precedents. Even when a young Wayne Rooney found the top corner, one Saturday in October 2002, the world had moved on by the following Monday.
A better comparison might be Emma Raducanu, the tennis meteor who monopolised front pages on her way to a miraculous US Open title in September 2021. “Schoolgirl to superstar in just 73 days” screamed The Daily Telegraph headline on the morning of her final. But Raducanu was already 18, almost two years older than Luke Littler is now.
Only in sport – and to a lesser extent the dramatic arts – do we venerate young talent in this way. In civilian life, Littler’s contemporaries are mostly at school, or stacking paperclips in the back office, or serving tables at the cafe. This young man is taking selfies in front of three thousand fake nuns and Oompa Loompas.
How such celebrity affects a person is unpredictable. In Raducanu’s case, she recently admitted that all the attention had added “weight to her shoulders”. When the press pack caught up with her in Indian Wells, the first tournament she attended as US Open champion, she exuded relief at swapping the intense scrutiny of south London for the relative anonymity of the Californian desert.
The double-whammy of mass media and social networks makes everything far harder for modern “phenoms”. Speak to Raducanu’s most comparable antecedent – Christine Truman, who was 16 when she reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 1958 – and she will tell you about an entirely positive experience.
“I did not feel nervous at 16,” says Truman, still full of vim at 82, who has been doing the rounds of radio stations in her capacity as a former teenage champion. “If I lost to Althea Gibson in the semis, that’s because she was the best player in the world at that time. People assumed that being so young is too much, but it is invigorating to have no nerves. Plus, the crowd are always rooting for you.”
It’s an odd business, this celebration of youth. Neuroscientists claim that our brains don’t reach maturity until 25 or so. (Many wives reply that their husbands still haven’t.) Placing huge expectations on people too young to drive a car can feel rather intrusive and unfair.
And yet, it seems to be hardwired into us. Go all the way back to Classical times, and the Romans were already making heroes – and statues – out of the lissom young lads who wrestled or threw the discus. Littler is thus operating in a tradition that runs from Olympia all the way through Michelangelo’s David, even if the resemblance is not immediately obvious.
Littler’s very eminence owes much to his anomalous position as an overgrown kid in a working man’s sport based around betting and booze (two things he is still legally barred from enjoying).
Jessica Gadirova might have been 16 when she won her first European title, but then that’s hardly unusual in gymnastics – the sport made for pixies. As for skateboarder Sky Brown (Olympic bronze at 13) and snowboarder Mia Brooks (world champion at 16), most casual viewers have no real familiarity with their disciplines. As a result, we don’t know how amazed we ought to be.
We do, however, know what darts champions look like: grizzled chaps like Eric Bristow and Phil Taylor. The fact that Littler already blends in so well only adds to the charm of the whole story.
As a lad who enjoys his PlayStation, his kebabs and his vapes, Littler is likely to face fewer distractions than Raducanu. As an unlikely candidate for the Met Gala, his path could well run closer to that of Stephen Hendry, the monomaniac teenage snooker star who rarely raised his eyes from the green baize. At 18, Hendry even dumped his girlfriend (later wife) because his manager insisted that she was becoming a distraction.
But there is one thing that all these superkids have in common. As Truman correctly points out, they experience no fear, and are thus perfectly positioned to instil fear into their opponents (even if Luke Humphries held his nerve on Wednesday night). Nobody wants to face a prodigy on a roll. But everyone wants to watch them.