Nicholson on CM Punk inspiration: “He’s woken me up, he’s made me a better dart player”

Paul Nicholson was known throughout his darting career as being different in his persona as ‘The Asset’ as one of the last pantomime villains in the sport before Gerwyn Price emerged.

But many who will listen to Nicholson’s dulcet tones on commentary will know, his main sporting loves include professional wrestling or WWE.

This saw him begin his walk on with a homage to CM Punk and his It’s Clobbering Time shout like the Chicago native and recently he explained the reasoning.

“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,” Nicholson said, as per WrestleTalk

“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.”

As well as in a prior podcast, he went further into it including how he thought being intimidating would make him be a force to be reckoned with.

“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?’,” he said to The Darts Show podcast.

“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 going 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.”