Early Life
As a child, Wilson's parents were deemed unfit to raise him and Wilson spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. Wilson served in the British Army from 1966 to 1968.
He had been a coal delivery man and also a miner at Kirkcaldy's Seafield Colliery. However, it was a spell of unemployment which was to prove the catalyst to Jocky achieving darting greatness. During this period of unemployment, Jocky entered a darts competition at Butlins, Ayrshire in 1979, which he went on to win, claiming the top prize of £500. His success at this tournament convinced him that he should turn professional as darts was beginning to become popular on television and the World Championship was in its infancy.
Read more about this topic: Jocky Wilson
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The arbitrary division of one’s life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.”
—Alice Caldwell Rice (1870–1942)