Simon Kelner: A throwback to a time when sport had characters

Kelner's view

John Thomas Wilson, better known as Jocky, wins the 1989 Embassy World Darts Championship. Two-times world champion, Wilson, has passed away, March 25, 2012 at his home in Kirkcaldy, Fife. (Getty)

I wouldn't mind betting that he's the only middle-aged man with no teeth, a drink problem and a body that, according to Scottish legend, was "16 stain of fat and pain" to have appeared on Top of the Pops.

Jocky Wilson, the former world darts champion who died at the weekend at 62, was something of an unexpected presence for the gilded young people dancing away to Dexys Midnight Runners, one of the most popular bands of the 1980s. During their performance of "Jackie Wilson Says", viewers saw a video backdrop, not of Jackie Wilson, one of the most influential figures in R&B history, but of Jocky Wilson, the diminutive man from Kirkcaldy who, for a brief period, made the sport of darts big box office.

Ah, I hear you say, but can you consider darts a sport? It requires stamina, hand-eye co-ordination, skill, and a tremendous amount of nerve, so that counts as a sport in my book. Also, I think it's virtually the only sport in which luck plays no part whatsoever. It breeds great competitiveness and an astonishing amount of sportsmanship. It may seem an odd thing to say, but in the raucous atmosphere in which most professional darts takes place, you will find a significant level of grace under pressure.

Jocky, however, came from another time, before anyone had thought of marketing the sport. And, along with his three tungsten darts, he had other items in his armoury, notably a packet of cigarettes – he usually threw with a lit fag in his left hand – and a drink. He would have seven or eight vodkas before a match to settle his nerves and then move on to the pints. Once, he fell off the stage when an opponent offered him a handshake at the end of a contest. He had no teeth through eating sweets as a child and refusing to clean them because his grandmother had told him that the English had poisoned the water, and was particularly fond of coke, with which he braced his vodka.

Wilson's great battles with the Englishman Eric Bristow were watched by millions on television, but broadcasters soon found that negative publicity attracted by the hard-drinking, chain-smoking participants of this noble sport was too much for them to bear. "If darts comes off TV for good," Wilson said, "I'm off to Japan to take up sumo wrestling."

Darts did not come off television, but drinking and smoking on stage were banned, and instead of a new life in Japan, Wilson retreated to his one-bedroom council flat in Kirkcaldy, where he lived out the rest of his life as a virtual recluse before the lung disease which was clearly a result of his punishingly unhealthy lifestyle finally claimed him. He is, I know, a very unlikely sporting hero, and, of course, readers should not try to emulate his regimen at home. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that the passing of John Thomas Wilson tells us much about an age when sport, indeed the world, was a more colourful place.

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