ONE of Scotland’s most unlikely sporting heroes is to be the subject of a new stage play.
The late Jocky Wilson, the Fife-born darts star twice crowned world champion, who won the hearts of millions but fought a long battle against alcohol and ended up a virtual recluse, is to be saluted in Jocky Wilson Says.
Premiering at the Oran Mor arts centre in Glasgow’s west end on March 20, the play will be staged exactly five years after the death of Wilson, who retired from the sport in 1995.
The show, set before Wilson became a household name through TV coverage of darts, has been created by a brother and sister from Fife, writer Jane Livingstone and singer-songwriter Jonathan Cairney – though it does not feature any music.
It will recall an infamous incident when the then 29-year-old ex-miner was travelling around the US playing exhibition matches. He stayed up so late in Los Angeles that he was forced to hitch 400 miles through the desert to Las Vegas after missing his bus.
Born in Kirkcaldy in 1950, he served in the Army, worked in a fish processing plant and delivered coal.
Unemployed in 1979, he entered a darts competition at Butlin’s, in Ayr, won first prize of £500 and decided to turn professional.
Within months he was playing in the World Championships and three years later won the tournament, a triumph he reprised in 1989.
After retiring from the game in December 1995 he retreated from public life and virtually refused to speak about his time in the limelight. He died in 2012.
Jane Livingstone said: “There was a time when everybody in Scotland would have known Wilson’s name, but they possibly wouldn’t have been able to tell you much about him.”
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