More than 30 years after making darts history, 70-year-old 'Singapore Slinger' Paul Lim continues to achieve new feats

SINGAPORE: The year was 1990. And in about a minute at Lakeside Country Club in Surrey, England, Paul Lim accomplished the extraordinary.

It is a feat which has lived in the record books of darting history – the first player to hit a perfect nine-dart finish at a world championship.

The accomplishment landed him £52,000 – about US$92,600 then – and while he was eliminated in the quarter-finals, Lim won the hearts of darts fans worldwide.

Fast forward 34 years, and Lim was back where it all started.

His features were no longer as youthful, his vision was no longer as sharp, and his polo t-shirt bore the flag of a different country. But it's the same man – the "Singapore Slinger".

On Dec 8, Lim lost in the final of the WDF World Darts Championship after a fairytale run. Ireland's Shane McGuirk, 29, beat the 70-year-old Singaporean 6-3 at Lakeside.

In the past decades, Lim has travelled the globe, but his story started in England.

After he completed his National Service in the 1970s, Lim packed his bags and headed to London.

"I went through different jobs just to survive," he told CNA. "Eventually I was able to hunt down a hotel because I wanted to be a chef."

With the help of the hotel's head chef, Lim enrolled himself in a cookery course.

"Every morning I would go to college ... After I finished college, I would go back to the hotel and work from afternoon to dinner service, which was about 10 to 11 at night," he recalled.

It was at a local pub where he was first introduced to darts by other chefs.

They competed every Friday night, with everybody chipping in with 50 pence. The winner's prize? A bottle of whisky.

Playing a number of sports as a youngster meant that Lim had good hand-eye coordination, and he was quickly drawn to the