‘Fat Beauty’ Kevin Leung thought darts was ‘stupid’ until he hit triple bullseye on his first go – now he wants to take the game out of pubs and bars

Seven years ago, Kevin Leung Kai-fan was a stockbroker with a passion for long-distance running. If you had asked him then about darts as a sport, he would have dismissed you out of hand. “I thought it was a stupid game,” said Leung. “It was something you play in pubs when you are drunk.”

Indeed, Leung’s first dalliance with the game was in a pub, with friends and, no doubt, with pints of beer close at hand.

Leung was not to know that those first few throws of soft darts – in which the arrows have plastic tips instead of metal – would change his life. He hit the bullseye three times and almost immediately, darts was no longer a “stupid” game.

He started to take it seriously, entered competitions and become one of Hong Kong’s top players. At the end of 2015, he quit his job to take up darts full-time. In January, the 36-year-old Leung fulfilled one of his dreams when he became the second Hong Kong player to qualify for the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) ProTour – the world’s premier darts circuit.

His next goal? To take darts – or at least the perception of darts – out of the alcohol-soaked pubs and bars of Hong Kong.

“The sport has come a long way over the years,” said Leung, who is able to enter 30 ProTour events over the season, each offering prize money. “The environment is no longer associated with pubs and bars. When it started in Hong Kong, it had a different culture.

“Now, we don’t play in bars, we play in ‘dojos’. We have academies in Hong Kong that promote darts. There is no alcohol allowed and even many schools in Hong Kong have accepted darts as part of their extra curricular activities.

“We have about 30-40 schools involved,” said Leung, who taught at a couple of the schools to earn income before gaining his ProTour spot. “Darts is an indoor sport, it is suited to Hong Kong because of the lack of space.”

Leung is keen for more Hongkongers to play darts, adapting the famous catch line from cooking show Yan Can Cook to his own “If Fat Beauty can play darts, so can you”. And he is happy to become the poster boy for Hong Kong darts, having embraced the Fat Beauty nickname first coined by a classmate when he was in form one.

“Most people call me ‘Fat Beauty’, they also call me ‘FB’ and some call me ‘Kevin’,” he said. “I use the nickname to get attention so I can help promote the sport. When I was in school, I wasn’t that fat but somehow the guys gave me this name.

“At a history lesson, my classmate behind me saw my butt when I raised my hand to answer a question. And he said, ‘wow, what a fei mei [Fat Beauty]’. It has stuck ever since and I’m known as this in the local darts community.”

That community has now already spread to the whole of the darts world, with Leung’s 4-3 victory over four-time women’s world champion Lisa Ashton in the Wigan qualifier in January earning him a place on the ProTour.

Leung, who lives in Jordan, Kowloon, with his wife, toddler son and parents, has racked up a number of triumphs on the local and international scene.

He is the reigning two-time Hong Kong Open WDF champion and was part of the Hong Kong team who won the WSDA Soft Darts World Cup in April last year.

He knows the ProTour is a big step up and his ability to look after his family is dependent on how much prize money he wins.

“I discussed it with my wife when I first wanted to quit my job,” he said. “So far so good, I am in the ProTour. I never thought I could go this far, every year is a new surprise for me.

“If I don’t make it [on the tour] it will be wasteful. I will make an effort and see what happens. You never know, maybe I will lose in the first round of every tournament.

“Whatever I have achieved in the past, I’m starting from the beginning again. My participation rates have to be very high. If I can go 20 or 30 per cent in each competition in the UK and in Europe, I could survive. It’s the first time I’m leaving my family for so long. There is a lot of pressure, but I’ve got to make an effort and give myself a chance.”

Leung’s ProTour life starts in February with three tournaments before taking part in the UK Championship in early March and then a trip to Tokyo for the soft tips tournament. His family will join him in Japan before they fly down to Hong Kong – one of his few trips back home this season.