Former Darts Champion Paul Nicholson Explains Why He Mimicked CM Punk & Discusses Wrestling Influences

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2010 PDC Players Champion Paul Nicholson has opened up about why he used to mimic CM Punk, and why he was influenced by wrestling in general.

Around 10 years ago, Nicholson was one of the top players in the world of darts, and also one of the most unique thanks to his bad-boy character largely influenced by pro-wrestling, and in particular, CM Punk.

Nicholson regularly shouted “It’s clobberin’ time!” during his walk-ons, sat down cross-legged on the stage, drew crosses on his hands and waved a Nexus scarf around, and even shouted out CM Punk in post-match interviews, including by Punk’s real name Phil Brooks.

In fact, here’s what Nicholson said after one of his matches in 2011:

“I’m a massive WWE fan, there’s a lot of WWE fans in the darting crowd, going to the tours that they do over here. I shout ‘It’s clobberin’ time’ because that’s exactly what CM Punk shouts. His voice, to me earlier this year, spoke to me. He’s woken me up, he’s made me a better dart player. If CM Punk is watching this, he probably isn’t but I hope he is, you’re watching a great dart player and I thank you Phil Brooks, I thank you.”

Paul Nicholson has been away from the PDC tour since 2018, but has remained around the sport as a commentator and pundit. He was the guest on the latest edition of the Darts Show podcast, during which he spoke about why he was influenced by wrestling and Punk, and the controversial reputation he created for himself thanks to his persona.

He said:

“Certain times I definitely took it too far. Now and again, you think to yourself, ‘Should I have done that, should I not have done that?’. In modern society, people take it too far because they want clicks, right. It was different for me because Twitter wasn’t really a big thing, Facebook was probably the biggest social media. All of the things I was doing was purely because I thought these were gonna make me the kind of player that would be hard to beat. Be intimidating, and go up there and just be a little bit different. That was what it’s all about. I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to be like everybody else, I wanted to be just a little different.

“And I did have my influences. The Matrix was a huge visual inspiration. Wrestling was a big inspiring thing for me. He (CM Punk) just got my blood pumping, and that was the kind of thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to bring that into darts, and what a lot of people don’t know is when I was doing that whole CM Punk mimicry thing, my Twitter following went through the roof. And I thought, ‘Well yeah that’s cool’, but at the same time, it was making me enjoy my game more than ever.

“I wanted to take the walk-ons maybe to another level, or maybe from a different angle. A lot of them were very samey in my opinion. They were going in a pretty good direction, but I thought maybe we could take them a bit further. A lot of the ideas that I had were poo-pooed by certain people at the top. Tommy Cox (PDC co-founder and tournament director) did not like me.

“He was not – in my opinion – at a progressive level the way that I was. He did things the way he wanted to, that’s fair enough, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for the sacrifice he made to get us where we were at that point, but I was thinking to myself, can I take this further? Can I get us into somebody else’s household? Can other people be interested in this? Different demographics, a younger audience, maybe audiences from the United States and things like that. That’s what I was trying to do – he didn’t get that.”

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Nicholson’s most recent TV walk-on in 2018 saw him use Ronda Rousey’s Bad Reputation entrance music, so the wrestling influence was still present even so many years later.

Paul Nicholson stated at the end of the interview that he’s promised himself he’ll attempt to qualify for a return to the PDC tour in 2023, but if he doesn’t succeed, he’ll end his playing career for good.

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