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Kenneth Roy
Among the larger personalities of the 1980s were the two Ws: the journalist Auberon Waugh and the darts player Jocky Wilson. Neither survived to old bones. Waugh was dead at 61, and already seems to have been gone a long time; Wilson died last weekend, two days after his 62nd birthday.
I remember both with affection. Waugh was one of the most bilious polemicists of our time – a terrific hater. When I finally met him, in the club he started in a cellar in Soho, beautifully furnished by his brother, I was not surprised to find him of a sweet temperament tinged with melancholy and presentiment. The real nasties in this world tend to be the ultra-warm public personalities, full of laughter and bonhomie.
Endearingly, Jocky Wilson always seemed a bit on the grumpy side. For a while, when I was a friend of the late Tom Frost, organiser of Scottish darts, Wilson was a familiar figure in my life. As his most bankable client, Tom talked of him often; and he was occasionally to be seen in the neighbourhood, drinking in the Albert at North Queensferry or visiting the Frost household. Even then he was coughing a lot, puffing loyally at a mild brand of his sponsor’s product.
I said to him once that there was something about darts that puzzled me. Since the game put such a high premium on accuracy, how come that drink enhanced a man’s play? The world champion (as he was at the time) responded patiently to this question. He replied that he appreciated I was not a darts player. But I should understand that drink was part of the game – it was in the blood. Four or five pints before an exhibition worked wonders for the adrenaline. Call it Dutch courage.
I still didn’t get it. I asked him if, considering the prodigious quantities of alcohol he consumed, his hand ever started to shake before a big point. He had a think about that. ‘Not my hand,’ he said. ‘Maybe my legs’. He gave a throaty laugh. He assured me that, before a tournament, he practised four or five hours a day; he would have agreed with Gary Player’s dictum that the harder you practised the luckier you got. He didn’t find all this practice boring – ‘You can still have a pint or two while you’re doing it, you know?’. There he and Gary Player would have parted company.
I wondered aloud what would happen to him when he was no longer able
to play darts for a living. He said he’d never given it a thought. That was Jocky’s problem: he never did.
He was not at all happy about the ban on drinking during televised matches, which had recently been imposed. He called it a bloody joke. In the old days he would have downed three pints of lager just before an important match, a couple more during it. Whether his abrupt decline as a competitor had anything to do with the nae-bevy rule I’m not qualified to judge.
I learned from him something of the hard life of the professional darts player. The tournaments themselves, of which there were only a few, accounted for a fraction of their annual earnings. The real money was made playing exhibition matches. At his peak Jocky Wilson spent four nights a week on the road with his manager Harry at the wheel, going from one club or pub to another, clocking up 2,000 miles in an average fortnight. But the appeal of the game, at least as a spectacle, dwindled and Jocky’s precarious fortunes with it.
I suggested to him that he was not exactly a picture of health. ‘Well, that’s me, innit, that’s my life, son,’ he replied cheerfully. I wondered aloud what would happen to him when he was no longer able to play darts for a living. He said he’d never given it a thought. That was Jocky’s problem: he never did. He told me he was cutting down on the booze and would try to reduce his intake of fags (‘Easier said than done’). But he didn’t do that either. He went bankrupt and lived as a recluse. The people’s champion who turned his back on the world with the words, ‘It’s all in the past’, scored 180 for irony. Towards the end he had difficulty breathing.
But it is something of a triumph that he lived a year longer than Waugh, who also smoked and drank if not with the same reckless dedication. Waugh, from the lofty heights of his Spectator column, mocked Jocky Wilson mercilessly. He confessed that he was repelled but intrigued by someone with no teeth who earned a fortune from the knack of chucking darts into a board a couple of yards away. ‘Jocky has everything needed to make him the model Britain,’ he wrote. ‘A new hero has emerged.’
I don’t suppose Jocky read the Spectator, but it is a pity they never met. They had at least one thing in common: an instinctive mistrust of authority. As for the absence of teeth, which fascinated Waugh so much, Jocky lost his dentures during a match early in his career. They had never fitted properly, and finally fell out in a moment of excitement, smashing on the floor. He insisted that the punters liked him better without them.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
