‘Doctors say feeling won’t come back’ – Darts star Cameron Menzies lifts lid on horror hand injury after punching table

Cameron Menzies has delivered a brutally honest and deeply candid account of the full extent of the damage he inflicted on his throwing hand when he punched a drinks table in anger at the World Darts Championship — revealing surgery, six weeks without picking up a dart, ongoing nerve damage, and a period in which he came worryingly close to walking away from professional darts altogether.

The incident shocked the darting world in December. Menzies furiously smashed the water table with his fist after suffering a dramatic 3-2 defeat to Charlie Manby at the World Darts Championship. Referee Kirk Bevans asked him to calm down, and Menzies was subsequently taken to hospital. He held his bloodied hand up toward the Alexandra Palace crowd as if to apologise for his actions.

Three months on, the Scotsman has finally spoken in full detail about what happened to his hand — and the picture he has painted is far grimmer than many realised at the time.

The Damage

“They said when they operated on me that I was lucky that I hadn’t severed any nerves or tendons, I’d just battered and bruised them,” Menzies told Oche 180. That distinction — lucky, but only just — captures the severity of what Menzies put his hand through. Three blows to the underside of a solid surface, fuelled by raw frustration, came within a fraction of ending his professional darts career entirely.

The consequences have been severe and lasting. “At the moment I have no feeling in one side of my finger and the other, but I hold the dart the other side so I am kind of lucky,” he said — acknowledging, with a grim kind of fortune, that the specific location of the nerve damage does not directly affect his grip on the dart. But the relief in that admission is tempered by the reality of what he has been living with.

Menzies admitted: “No words could explain how I felt at that time. Waking up with the breathing tube and stuff. For a game of darts, I was stupid and I have to deal with it.”

The inability to feel his fingers for the duration of his recovery had a direct and devastating impact on his performance. “I’ve hardly averaged over 75 this year. I’ve been struggling. I was nervous but good up there. But going for a double it was always hope rather than I’m hitting this,” he admitted after his return to the oche at the Poland Darts Open, his first competitive match since the incident.

The Apology and the Context

In the immediate aftermath, Menzies issued a public apology, referencing a deeply personal source of grief that had been building in the lead-up to the incident. “I am sorry that I reacted in the manner that I did. It’s not an excuse, but I have had a lot of things on my mind and I suppose it all just became too much at the end. It’s not been an easy time for me with my uncle Gary passing away recently. I saw him four days before he died and he gave me a look which told me how much he thought of me. Had I won the game, my second match would have been on the day of Gary’s funeral and that hasn’t been lost on me,” he said in a statement.

The context does not excuse the outburst — Menzies himself has been insistent on that point — but it does explain the emotional state of a man who arrived at Alexandra Palace already carrying profound personal grief. “Let me say again, that’s no excuse for what I did. It was the wrong thing to do and I don’t want it to take anything away from Charlie. He played well,” Menzies said at the time.

On commentary, Wayne Mardle did not hold back. “The concentration boiled over, the anger, the anguish of losing, but you have got to control that — that is what conducting yourself the right way is all about, and he didn’t, he let himself down. I’m sure he will be punished accordingly by the Darts Regulation Authority, but hopefully the Professional Darts Players Association are there for him, because he has clearly got issues. You cannot do that anywhere, let alone on the biggest stage of them all.”

Close to Quitting

What makes Menzies’ account particularly striking is the raw honesty about how close the whole experience brought him to the exit door of professional darts. “I’ll be honest with you, a few times I’ve felt like wrapping it. I’m just not in a good place that way. Obviously what happened at the Worlds, I’ve done a lot of damage to myself. Basically I’ve no feeling in my fingers anymore because of the damage I’ve done.”

Even his return at the Poland Darts Open in February — the first time he had competed since December — nearly did not happen. “I was so close to pulling out this weekend. I’m not enjoying it at the moment. That today has given me a bit of love back.”

The relief in that last sentence speaks volumes. A 6-4 win over Ritchie Edhouse in Krakow, in difficult physical and psychological circumstances, with a hand that still doesn’t feel right and a mind carrying the weight of everything that followed Alexandra Palace, was the spark that stopped Menzies from walking away entirely. “That today has given me a bit of love back again,” he said. It was a small but significant step back from the brink.

A Reputation to Carry

There is no escaping the reputational dimension of what happened, and Menzies has not tried to. “I’ve made a massive mistake in my life. You can see the scar. They said the feeling will come back, but I have to live with the reputation of being a table puncher. It’s not a proud moment of my life. We all make mistakes.”

That reputation, and the self-deprecating awareness of it, was on full display at the UK Open, where Menzies had the crowd in stitches with a brilliant bit of self-deprecating comedy during his clash with Peter Wright, jokingly warming up as if he was about to strike the table again. The crowd absolutely loved it, bursting into laughter at his willingness to laugh at himself. It was a moment of real lightness amid what has been an extraordinarily difficult period — a sign that, as painful as the journey has been, Menzies can still find the humanity in his own worst moment.

“I’m not proud of it, but I’m lucky I can still play,” he said. That luck, and the gradual return of form and feeling that the doctors predict, is all he has to build on now. For Menzies, who is competing at this weekend’s Belgian Darts Open in Wieze, the task is to keep going — one dart, one tournament, one step back toward the player he knows he can be.