The
wit and wisdom of Sid Waddell
Sid Waddell has been commentating on darts for 30 of his 67 years. That is an
awful lot of darts. It is also a lot of shouting in broad and frequently
overheated Geordie into a microphone, and few viewers were entirely
surprised, three years ago, during the semi-finals of the PDC World
Championship, when Waddell’s abused vocal cords went on strike in protest.
“I’m asthmatic anyway,” Waddell says. “I’d picked up a chest infection and,
for the first time, I couldn’t finish the match. They got me back for the
final and said, ‘Just try and get as far as you can.’ There was this plate
of Marco Pierre White’s pies in the commentary box, for some reason. So I
had one of those, managed half the final and crawled out.”
It was, as they say, a wake-up call. Shortly afterwards, Waddell appointed a
voice coach, who advised him “not to hold the microphone like a lollipop and
sit crouched over like a jockey”. Waddell, who has no plans to retire, now
does ten minutes of breathing exercises in the morning, plus an extended
weekly session in which he will lie on the floor and recite “American states
and doggerel poetry”. Exercises include “teeth counting”, “the tongue tango”
and “the sinus song”.
He demonstrates. “M-m-m-marmalade, p-p-p-plenipotentiary.” He taps his cheeks
and goes, “Eeee-ooowww.” It sounds like a cat being tortured with a stick.
He then proudly shows how he can exhale for 23 seconds. “That would have
taken four breaths three years ago,” he says.
We are sitting in a book-lined living-room in Waddell’s capacious house in a
comfortable suburb of Leeds – one of only a small number of British homes in
which the French windows were fixed by a world champion darts player. “Phil
Taylor came here when I was working with him on his book and he noticed that
the bloke who had done the window hadn’t put it in right,” Waddell says. “He
insisted I got him a screwdriver. We’re meant to be writing his biography
and he’s sitting there mending my windows. But that’s Taylor.”
“The Power”, of course, has come to bestride his sport. But so, too, in his
own way, has Waddell. Although the contributions to viewing pleasure of his
regular partners, Dave Lanning and John Gwynne, should never be dismissed,
Waddell is broadly regarded as “the voice of darts”. Some players are said
to resent the extent to which a “mere” commentator bulks large within the
mythology of the game. Most, though, according to Waddell, “regard me as
sort of family”.
He is working class, as they are, but he went to grammar school, read history
at Cambridge and does not mind telling you. His best flights of
adrenalin-driven commentary-box humour rely not so much on a clashing
together of high and low culture as on a proud refusal to recognise the
distinction. Hence his willingness to introduce Wittgenstein, Galileo and
Alexander of Macedonia, among others, into the darting context.
Yet the bedrock beneath the gags is Waddell’s extraordinary and evangelical
seriousness about darts. He may well be the sport’s only advanced-level
theorist. He speaks of “understacking”, “overstacking”, “air-shots along the
bed”. He developed the term “feed hand”, denoting the hand that holds the
darts and “feeds” them to the throwing hand.
In 2003, when Taylor lost his world title, Waddell was the first to posit the
theory that weight loss had affected The Power’s balance. He draws parallels
between darts and the intricacies of pitching in baseball.
Moreover, his knowledge of the players, their styles and their roots is
encyclopaedic. Leighton Rees, he will mention, was a storeman in a car-parts
factory, John Lowe a master carpenter, Bobby George a car salesman.
“Taylor’s dad used to shovel wet clay in the Potteries,” Waddell says.
“Taylor himself had three different apprenticeships before he went to play
darts full-time. He did air ducts, then metalwork drawing and then making
toilet-chain handles on a lathe that he could set up himself. Taylor would
come home from an eight-hour shift, have a cup of tea and then get under a
car to earn a fiver that way.
“He understands the value of money. I think he’s brought that mentality to the
darts. He’s the world’s best practiser, brutally dedicated. Very few have
that ability to turn the game into a job.”
Such professionalism looked far off in the 1970s when Waddell, a television
producer at the time, worked on The Indoor League, a compendium of
pub games, staged at the Leeds Irish Centre and screened on ITV to audiences
of up to eight million.
Fred Trueman, cricket’s former Yorkshire and England fast bowler, presented
and a shove-ha’penny champion from Huddersfield found himself hymned as “the
Spassky of the sliding small change”. One night a fight broke out at the
table football and Waddell had to usher to safety Terry Yorath, the former
Leeds United and Wales player, and his special guest, only to find another
fight coming up the stairs from a nearby wedding.
More significantly, the show exposed to television a subculture of darts and
darts players: Ron Church, “the leaning tower of Shoreditch”, in a
moth-eaten cardigan; Alan Evans – later, in Waddell’s opinion, “the Denis
Law of the sport, the cornerstone of the professional game” – in a bright
red shirt from Swansea market.
“There was this amazing darts going on, and all this free beer flying around,”
Waddell says. “These were sportsmen who drank a bit and had beer bellies and
tattoos. And they were ordinary. What one liked was their availability. They
didn’t have the remoteness that rugby players or cricketers had. They were
the bloke next door as a sports star. That’s what appealed to me,
particularly.” Obsessed him, more like.
Waddell soon switched from production to commentary and by 1977 was calling
tournaments with David Vine for the BBC’s Grandstand. (He made
the mistake of calling Vine “Dad”, short for “Daddio”. It didn’t go down
well.) It was a different game then – probably a harder drinking game.
“You rarely saw anybody drunk,” Waddell says. “But there again, some of the
quantities that people like Cliff Lazarenko could take were industrial.
Leighton Rees drank three or four pints of lager and a couple of brandies
before he played and several during. Same with Evans.
“Eric Bristow, though, has never been a boozer. He would drink pints of
session lager. He wouldn’t go for your six-percenters. He would have a
tickle and a swally, but he was careful.
“Taylor hardly drinks. He’s the best drinker I know in darts. If you’re having
Malibu and milk, he’ll have the same. If I’m drinking a pint of Newcastle
Brown Ale, he’ll have one. He drinks what the other bloke drinks, which is
extremely civilised.”
The World Championship transfers this year from the Circus Tavern in Purfleet,
Essex, to the altogether more genteel Alexandra Palace, marking a new,
surprisingly expansive phase in the sport’s history. “Going to the ‘Ally
Pally’ means a lot,” Waddell says. “It’s where things started, in a sense,
with the World Championship of 1972 that ITV showed.
“But I think I will miss the Tavern. It was a bit like a movie set. What I
really loved was getting Denis Smith’s sweat on me when I was sitting about
eight feet from the oche when Smith played Taylor three years ago. It was
like being at the fights – except you don’t tend to get snot and teeth at
the darts.”
His worst moment in those 30 years? Probably when he was sick with nerves and
ready to heave into a plastic bag before a live commentary from
Stoke-on-Trent in 1980, only for Bobby George, his co-commentator, to enter
the box with a large, dripping burger, push it under Waddell’s nose and say:
“Sidney, have a bit of that.”
His best moment? Possibly when Bristow came “back from the dead” to reach the semi-finals
of the World Championship in 1997, only to lose to Taylor, the player he had
sponsored and encouraged. “Brissie came out and was like a horse,” Waddell
says. “He was jumping up and down the oche. It was like a scene from Equus.
Even ten years after the dart-itis he could step out into the limelight. It
was like Mickey Rooney, aged 90.”
Even now, he says, “you’re not sure what you’re there for. You’re partly there
to inform, partly there to entertain. And sometimes you tell jokes and they
fit.”
–– Sky Sports is showing the PDC World Darts Championship exclusively live
from Monday
