WRITING this column means I've reached the age of pontification, when it's easier to sit on a bar stool and muse about life than to stride purposefully to the oche and test your nerve in a tension-packed darts match.

Calling at my favourite pub on the way home from the office, I can sometimes be mildly irritated on darts nights by having to indulge in passive smoking.

Still, the pall of smoke which enshrouds any serious darts encounter should not cloud our judgement of a sport which apparently peaks in January, judging by the two separate world championships we have recently witnessed.

It has emerged during this extravaganza that darts players are finely-honed athletes.

In a television programme called Darts Wives, one woman observed that their men were "the most disciplined group of professional sportsmen I've met in my life."

It would be tempting to ask, of course, what other groups of professional sportsmen she had met, but let's not get too cynical.

Another wife asked her man how many miles he walked. "Well it's eight feet to the oche and you might walk 15 back," he replied, and on this dubious basis it was calculated he covered two miles in five hours of play.

The very thought of such exertion will have me calling for another pint from the comfort of my bar stool.

THE average darts player, I suspect, is not quite as fit as Tiger Woods, whose obsession with staying ahead of the golfing field drives him to work out for 90 minutes every day in a gym.

For the purpose of walking round 18 holes this seems rather excessive and we can only assume he wants to hit the ball even further, thereby rendering all courses obsolete.

I seriously believe the time has come to make golf balls which will fly no more than 250 yards, even when hit by the likes of Woods with the most modern of equipment.

Most of the world's great courses were designed with that sort of distance in mind and to have Woods and the other super strikers reaching par fives with a drive and a 9-iron makes a nonsense of the game.

All the power in the world won't help your putting, however, and Woods apparently blamed the greens when he came back from his month off to finish eighth in Hawaii this week. His worst round was still a level par 73 and it is now 59 rounds since he was last over par.

SUNDERLAND has certainly hit the headlines this week and I'm surprised Kevin Phillips hasn't been photgraphed buying a few pounds of bananas from Stephen Thoburn's market stall.

The snap could then be sent to the European Commission, telling them to stick their metrication in the same place as their ruling that footballers should be free to break their contracts at three months' notice.

Despite Phillips' Sven-nudging brace in the FA Cup replay at Crystal Palace, the goal which really deserved to send all Black Cats fans bananas was Niall Quinn's.

With his back to goal he controlled Michael Gray's long cross with his chest and swivelled to hit home the sweetest of volleys from 20 yards (sorry, metres).

Sunderland's glorious success is increasing the Phillips-for-England clamour. But at international level he might face some rather better defenders than Neil Ruddock.

I'M by no means averse to a bit of cleavage, but it's hard to believe that Venus Williams' strange display at the Australian Open this week had the desired effect.

The normal male reaction would be to say: "You don't get many of those to the pound" (sorry, kilogramme), but not on this occasion with the top part of the cleavage obscured by some superfluous flimsy attachment.

The whole purpose, of course, was to draw attention to the word emblazoned across her chest, advertising the company who are said d to be paying Venus around £20m over five years to endorse their products. Whatever make my next trainers are I doubt very much whether they'll be Reebok.

WE all make mistakes, but the written ones are most amusing when they occur in a particularly pretentious article.

Headlined "Out on the toon," a piece in the Sunday Telegraph travel section referred to fans at St James's Park in their black and white shirts being "swathed across the vast grandstands like a herd of zebra crossing the Serengeti."

No doubt the writer would have congratulated himself on this nice turn of phrase, so it's rather a pity that in the next paragraph he says: "I hummed along to The Bladen Races."

After the match he headed, very predictably, for the Quayside. What a pity he didn't gan along the Scotswood Road to Blaydon