LITMIR.BIZ

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old you imagine him curling up under the bedclothes with his torch and a copy of Wisden), a searing pain in the bum he undeniably was. His morbid terror of making mistakes led to him routinely rejecting LBW shouts which Hawkeye today would show travelling like guided missiles towards the middle of middle stump. The surest method of avoiding mistakes, of course, was to avoid the playing of any cricket, which may explain why reports of a small shadow at deep fine leg at Sabina Park or the ’Gabba would have him taking them off at Edgbaston.

      In retirement, alas, the endearing fussbucket nerviness of old mutated into something less lovable. Dickie Bird the umpire became Dickie Bird the National Character, and this dubious role he embraced without a shred of the neurosis he had lavished on unconfirmed reports of cloud movement in Chad. The success of his autobiography, imaginitively entitled My Autobiography, went to his head. The sweetness was replaced by a mild strain of egomania that persuaded him to keep raiding the same tiny storeroom of tales for the joy of a listening public that had perhaps been sated by hearing them the first time.

      The Peter Ustinov of the bails appeared to have precisely three hilarious stories from his decades behind the stumps, which he recycled with identical stresses, timing and breathless delight in their drollness. There was the one, from his late career, when Alan Lamb (‘Lamby’) handed him a mobile phone to look after while he stood at square leg, and he was then side-splittingly rung mid-over by Ian Botham (‘Beefy’). There was the one about turning up at the Palace to collect his MBE fourteen hours before the ceremony. And there was the one about being invited for lunch at Geoffrey Boycott’s house, no one answering when he rang the bell by the gate, having to climb a wall to gain admittance, and then being palmed off with cheese on toast.

      Perhaps there were others the mind has blanked out, much as it supposedly does the pain of childbirth. But it is Dickie Bird’s most remarkable achievement that in his anecdotage he came to make you wistful for the days when he used his mouth for no other purpose than to mutter ‘Not out’ as a ball that pitched on middle stayed on middle, and to engage his fellow umpire in urgent consultations about the threat posed to the continuation of play by a sandstorm in the northern Sahara.

      82

      Mervyn King

      If Mr King is the raging Caliban of darts, perhaps he has sound cause for his fury. The prospect of a footnote appearance in darting history as only the second-best arrowsman to come out of Ipswich can’t be easy for so resentful and paranoid a man to bear.

      In truth, that Suffolk town’s finest chucker is no easy act to follow. No leisure pursuitist has had as powerful an impact on national life, cultural and political, as Keith Deller. His surge in 1983 from unknown qualifier to world champion not only inspired Martin Amis to write London Fields, the lairy yet engaging anti-hero of which, Keith Talent, was modelled directly on Mr Deller, but also shaped British politics. According to the Channel 4 docu-drama When Boris Met Dave, watching Deller beat Bristow by taking out a legendary 138 inspired the undergraduate David Cameron. Apparently this shock victory taught him never to give up in the face of daunting odds – a lesson from which he profited twenty-two years later when coming from nowhere to steal the Tory leadership from the prohibitive favourite David Davis. Who is to deny that but for Deller there would be no coalition today, and that a right-wing Tory Party led by Mr Davis would be languishing on the opposition benches? Here, as the likes of Vernon Bogdanor and Anthony Howard would agree, is one of the great what-ifs of post-war British history.

      Set against all that, Mr King’s claims to immortality rest precariously on three achievements. He has the worst nickname even in darts, in which the myopic former Kwik-Fit fitter James Wade flirted with ‘Specstacular’ before settling on ‘The Machine’. If, like Mr King, you share your name with the man in charge of the Bank of England, on what conceivable grounds would you not choose for your sobriquet ‘The Governor’? Or even, going that extra mile down the Kray-esque path trampled half to death by Bobby George, ‘The Guv’nor’? By way of a dramatic lurch into lateral thinking, Mervyn King prefers Mervyn ‘The King’ King, a nickname as stultifyingly obvious as it is, with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor showing no ambition to abdicate this side of Doomsday, impertinently preumptious.

      Secondly, this bristling ball of East Anglian resentment has forged such a close bond with darts crowds that he now wears earplugs on the oche to cocoon himself from their appreciation. They loathe him, and without the panto-villain tone to the barracking that attended ‘One Dart’ Peter Manley before he flipped his reputation by cunningly adopting ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’ as his walk-on tune. When Mr King strides to the stage to Motörhead’s metallic dirge ‘Bow Down to the King’, his attempts to feign unconcern serve only to highlight his discomfort.

      And thirdly, he has a stylistic affectation even more irksome than Eric Bristow’s raising of the little finger (see no. 64). Mr King’s trademark is a pre-throw twiddle of the dart between thumb and index finger seemingly designed to suggest D’Artagnan nonchalantly caressing his sword before leaping to the defence of Porthos and Aramis.

      To his credit, it cannot be denied that Mr King is a man of principle. Livid at suggestions in January 2007 that he was poised to forsake one of darts’ two sanctioning bodies for the other (see Tony Green, no. 94, for a brief account of the split), he threatened to quit the BDO world championships in their midst if the rumours persisted. It speaks to his integrity that he waited a full month before duly announcing his defection to the PDC.

      Long after that is forgotten, perhaps, the thing for which this nightclub bouncer manqué will be remembered is an excuse plucked elegantly from the Spassky–Fischer era of insane chess paranoia. After losing a 2003 world semi-final to Raymond van Barneveld, Mr King showed customary grace in defeat by insisting that the air conditioning unit had blown his darts off-course.

      Every sport, game or leisure pursuit requires its hate figures. Darts is regally blessed to have Mervyn ‘the King’ King.

      81

      Virtual Racing

      Few entries in this book pain me more than this one, because for twenty-five years the high street bookie was a second home. At times, not least when supposedly revising (more correctly vising) for law exams failed by record margins, it was in fact my first, and in daylight hours only, home.

      I adored everything about these shabby, seedy, grubby, putrid rooms: the sullen, speechless camaraderie with fellow losers, the fug of fag smoke mingled with clothes that long ago yielded their Lenor freshness, the proximity to other lives being lived in quiet despair, the thrill of occasional victory (no money tastes half as good as that unearned), and the addictive anguish of near-perpetual defeat.

      Real gamblers, as Dostoevsky knew, gamble not to win but to lose. It’s a whipless form of sadomasochism, with its cathartic cocktail of pain and self-disgust, and the bookie’s in the old days was as skilled a dominatrix as you could desire.

      Elegance was always in short supply. Until very recently, a local William Hill in west London retained an ancient blue sign asking customers to avoid urinating in the street on the way out. The bookmaking firms treated us as scum, denying us access to toilets until not long ago, the staff seldom bothering to disguise their contempt; and as scum is precisely how we wanted to be treated.

      It started going wrong some twenty years ago, with the introduction of banks of TV screens churning out live satellite feeds (so much less atmospheric and tension-inducing than garbled commentaries over the blower, when a half-length win required a nerve-shredding five-minute study of the photo-finish print to confirm). Then they started cleaning the places, a gross breach of etiquette, and installing such ponceries as vending machines and even, God help us, loos. The public smoking ban was another blow, although not their fault. Gradually, these shops became sanitised, and their peculiar charm vanished.

      Nothing was as brutal a turn-off, however, as the advent of virtual racing – appallingly unconvincing computerised horse and dog races presumably created by the dunce-cap wearer at the back of the remedial class at Pixar College. It was hardly as if Ladbrokes, Hills and the rest needed something with which to fill the vast temporal chasm between actual races. The real ones come along every few minutes, and for those who can’t

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