Jocky Wilson , who has died aged 62, was the world darts champion in 1982 and 1989, and one of the game’s most engaging and popular characters.
He looked the part, being short, stout and pasty. Sweets had rotted away his teeth by the time he was 28 (“But I can manage just about anything with my gums”), and his championship wins, which took place before the authorities attempted to sanitise the game by banning the on-stage consumption of alcohol, were fuelled by buckets of lager, chased down by vodka-and-coke. This intake only served to emphasise his phenomenal skill and hand-eye co-ordination.
Above all he will be remembered for his rivalry with Eric “The Crafty Cockney” Bristow, against whom Wilson secured his second World Championship title in dramatic fashion. Having raced to a 5-0 lead (needing six sets to win), Wilson appeared in total control, only for his confidence visibly to falter as Bristow, with nothing to lose, mounted a comeback. On several occasions Wilson was within a dart or two of clinching victory, only to miss and allow Bristow to claw his way closer. Bristow was himself within a whisker of tying the match at 5-5 when Wilson finally hit the double 10 he needed, and sank to his knees in relief.
Wilson’s first championship victory, 5-3 against the number two seed, John “Stone Face” Lowe, had come seven years earlier, on January 16 1982. “I sunk double 16 to win, and I was champ. I was drained of effort and just about in tears,” Wilson recalled. He gave his winning darts to a friend and the bars of his homeland echoed to a new ditty: “He’s 16 stone of fat and pain, / When he steps up the oche. / When he throws the spears you can hear the cheers / For Fife’s wee hero Jocky”.
John Thomas Wilson, known to all as Jocky, was born at Kirkcaldy, Fife, on March 22 1950. Educated locally, he took what jobs he could while developing his darting skills, mainly at the Lister Bar in the Lang Toun. When not there he worked in a fish processing plant and as a miner at the Seafield Colliery.
He was jobless when, in 1979, he won his first substantial prize in darts, the Butlin’s Grand Masters, which earned him £500. The sum rendered him ineligible for unemployment benefit, and his course was set. By the end of that year he was ranked in the top eight in the world.
His World Championship title in 1982 (when he also won the British Open Championship) came at a time when darts was arguably at its most popular. Millions watched on television and Bristow was fast becoming the game’s first celebrity – largely because of his cocksure determination to wind up his opponents and their fans. Above all he liked to wind up the Scots, making for a friendly rivalry with Wilson that last throughout the 1980s.
Wilson was the first Scot to win the world title, and reached the semi-finals in the following two years, and again in 1987, and the quarter-finals in 1985. 1986 and 1988.
In March 1987, against the American Bud Trumbower, he polished off a 1001-point leg in a remarkable 24-darts. In doing so, he scored 600 points with his first 12 arrows and finished with 60-20-40 to average 41.7 points per dart. Only occasionally did the booze obviously effect his game. In 1984 he was well in control of his World Championship semi-final against Dave Whitcombe, only to lose narrowly after sinking a prodigious number of pints. As Whitcombe walked backed from the dartboard to shake his opponent’s hand, Wilson was nowhere to be seen. He had fallen off the stage.
It was not too long before such antics began to attract the wrong kind of publicity, with broadcasters objecting to the game’s beer-swilling, working men’s club image. Old-school darts, and particularly players like Wilson, looked out of touch. His response was to observe: “If darts come off TV for good than I’m off to Japan to take up Sumo Wrestling.” Instead he joined several other players in a breakaway from the ruling British Darts Organisation, to form the World Darts Council. But this only led to a painful schism in British darts, with legal action that rumbled through the 1990s. Many players suffered bans, including Wilson.
This effectively ended his career. Legal costs bankrupted him and the pressure doubtless contributed to the high blood pressure, diabetes and depression from which he suffered. He was teetotal from 1993, and though a new slimline Jocky Wilson briefly emerged, he was fast retreating into his shell. His last match came in 1995 at a Butlin’s holiday camp in Ayr.
Though many tried to tempt him back to the oche, at least for well-paid exhibition matches, if not competitions, he chose to stay in his one-bedroom Kirkcaldy council flat, living on £67.50 incapacity benefit, and hardly going out.
In 1996 Wilson was elected to the Darts Hall of Fame. But he was only tracked down and presented with his plaque two years later, when he was mentioned on a website that listed Kirkcaldy’s favourite sons. His name was associated with merchandise including sets of darts and computer games, but Wilson himself remained doggedly out of sight, though he claimed, when asked, to be contented. His absence was mourned not least by his old foe, Eric Bristow: “I miss him. He was good for the game”.
Jocky Wilson is survived by his wife, Malvina, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
Jocky Wilson, born March 22 1950, died March 24 2012
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