This week’s World Darts final brought back memories of a day 30 years ago. When I rolled the purple Polo into the car park at the front of the brewery in Dundalk, there was an odd reluctance to open the door and get out. Unsure why that feeling was there at the time, now it seems all too clear.
The arranged interview was with a sporting world champion, an iconic figure. But the conversation was not going to be about sport, or his world darts wins of 1982 and 1989. It was going to be about a car crash career and why a few years after winning the World Championship for the second time, life had violently spun away from him.
Prurient interest also seemed part of the contract. The deal was that he understood that too. He did. It was a playbook interview of brewery pays darts champion Jocky Wilson to talk about his life and promote product. His stories were the currency.
The unsettling scruples evaporated. Sitting on a comfortable chair inside the brewery, Jocky arrived. He didn’t disappoint. Known for his prodigious drinking and smoking when he was competing, his well upholstered figure padded across the room.
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Short, ungainly, an overweight wee man with a low fringe of dark hair, Jocky held a pint glass of orange in one hand. It was lunch time. He seemed drunk, although, he pointed to the glass, rolled out a few words from deep inside his chest and forced them through his throat. They emerged from a toothless mouth in a Kirkcaldy accent.
“Just orange juice, ya know,” said Jocky.
Wrongly prejudging him to be rough and cantankerous, he was placid and good-natured. In his 40s, the teeth had gone long ago. A constant sweet-eater and reluctant tooth washer, the reason was pinned to his profile.
“My Gran told me the English poison the water.”
Then, Jocky was on 50 cigarettes a day, on top of the coal dust he had breathed from Kirkcaldy’s Seafield Colliery.
It was the early 1990s. His career at the oche was tumbling and I would later learn after a life of workmen’s clubs, walk-on parts on Top of The Pops and music video appearances, the mental health of one of the biggest names in world darts had begun to deteriorate.
If there was a rat pack to be picked in those grainy, black and white days, Jocky, Alex Higgins and George Best would have been the first three names on the membership list. Jocky, Alex and Georgie. Jeez.
As a child, Jocky’s parents were deemed unfit to raise him and he spent much of his childhood years in an orphanage. At 16 he joined the British Army and left after two years, also working as a coal delivery man, fish processor and miner.
Filling his days of unemployment initially pushed him towards darts in his local Lister Bar before he progressed to skinning the field in Butlins Holiday Camp for a £500 first prize. The dole office read about it. They stopped his payments.
Less than a decade later he would be thumping his arrow into a double 10 at the Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke-on-Trent to beat John Lowe in the World Championship final. For that, his image was hung over Kirkcaldy’s Mercat centre.
That same year Jocky was temporarily banned from competing after he threw a punch at an official during a championship.
The reason given, suggesting reflection and sensitivity on his part, was the pressure of Britain’s war with Argentina in the Falklands (Malvinas) and the vitriol directed at his wife. The former soldier was married to an Argentine woman, whose name was Malvina.
Between that and his second world title seven years later, with darts in its terrestrial television heyday, Jocky would fall off the oche drunk as lager and cigarettes were the enablers for his best game. Celebrating a win, the false teeth he occasionally wore flew out of his mouth.
He developed diabetes. After the diagnosis, he couldn’t drink without being sick. Although he battled on for months drinking water at events, his throwing action needed alcohol. On water, Jocky, sinfully to the all male crowds, became an average player.
For that he became a figure of ridicule, an overweight, 5ft4in heavy drinker with no edge. Feeling it, he was embarrassed enough to walk away.
By 1996, aged 45, Jocky had withdrawn to Kirkcaldy into a council flat, depression and arthritis adding to the diabetes. He spent his days shuffling between the bedroom and sofa, shunning the world and refusing interviews.
His prize money had vanished. He was declared bankrupt. A recluse, he lived on disability benefits.
That day in Dundalk, a few years before his total withdrawal, he retold the embarrassing stories with endearing simplicity and truthfulness. In the telling he blamed nobody but himself.
But his candour revealed something more. He was less a figure of fun than tragically helpless. No tools. Vulnerable, his income had come to depend on a loop of retelling his life’s catastrophes.
The man who played darts on television, to audiences of eight million, became in 2011 the subject of Kirkcaldy Man, a documentary by young German filmmaker Julian Schwanitz. His idea was a film about someone who didn’t want to be found.
Jocky didn’t. He gave up living the following year at the age of 62.
