Sid Waddell, 1941-2012 – Spectator Blogs

Reader TT asks a good question: given your (self-appointed) role as the Spectator’s unofficial darts correspondent, why haven’t you written anything on the death of Sid Waddell? What can I say? Grief moves one in mysterious ways.

Few people can claim to have created a sport, yet that was Waddell’s achievement and only nit-pickers and other churls would mock the fact that the sport Waddell created was darts. Before Sid there was nothing and the darts universe is his creation. As he might almost have put it, “God took six days to create his world, Phil Taylor needed just three hours to build his. And Taylor never rests on the Sabbath.”

Though a Northumbrian by birth, Waddell was an example of the democratic intellect. Had he been Scottish he’d have been considered a “lad o’pairts”. Rising from humble beginnings he made it to Cambridge and then Durham universities. His love of books would, in time, provide the hinterland for his commentary.