You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman

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      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 hold on there are ‘fixed odds’ slot machines offering roulette, blackjack, poker and other games to plug the gap. We were never short of things to bet on in a betting shop.

      Yet the rapacity of the high street chains knows no bounds. So it was that a few years ago, the screens began to feature these simulations – their results pre-determined by random-number generators in the three- or four-minute gaps between the real versions.

      What is particularly tragic about virtual races is that they are enlivened by in-house commentaries identically as involved, dramatic and hysterical as those that attend the Derby and Grand National. Somewhere in a London office, in other words, an employee of William Hill is sitting at a screen watching the virtual race unfold and becoming unhinged by simulated action involving animated animals at an imaginary racetrack.

      ‘Going behind Elysian Fields, going behind. Hare’s running at Elysian Fields,’ it begins. ‘And they’re away. Trap 2 Fellatio Flyer gets out best, ahead of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis in 4. There’s trouble behind, with 1 baulking 5, and off the first bend it’s 2 leading 4 and 6. Down the back straight, and 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece, takes it up just ahead of 4, 2 and 3. Round the second-last bend, and 5, Aortic Aneurysm, joins 6. Off the final bend, and there’s nothing to choose. It’s 5 and 6, 6 and 5 [screaming now], 5 and 6, and here’s 3 finishing like a train up the outside to join them. Coming to the line and it’s 6, 5 and 3 in a line, they’ve gone past together. Very close, Elysian Fields.’ A short, tension-heightening hiatus. ‘Result, Elysian Fields. Trap 5, Aortic Aneurysm, has beaten 6, John McCririck’s Codpiece.’

      For the committed gambler such as myself, telling fantasy from reality is hard enough. Virtual racing is an animated hoof or paw step too far. Every sensible dealer knows that when you have an addict in your power, you don’t actively encourage the overdose that will either kill him or persuade him to seek professional help.

      That, in a sensationally loose manner of speaking, is what virtual racing forced me to do. After that quarter of a century of dismal love, it proved СКАЧАТЬ