Cupid’s Arrows
“GETTING the drinks is all part of and parcel of being a DWAG and I enjoy helping out and being there for him.”
The unmistakable voice of Gill O’Shea, lager wallah and wife to Tony ‘Silverback’ O’Shea, dartist.
The Lakeside World Professional Darts Championship has thrown off, or thrown up – what is it? – at Frimley Green, Surrey. The British Darts Organisation’s blue flagship event welcomes some of the great nicknames in British arts. And their wives.
Gill O’Shea is in conversation with the Sun. “I work part time as a lollipop lady,” she tells us. “I’m nothing like a footballer’s wife.”
No kidding.
Reading Gill’s words takes us back to the time when football was but a golden spark in Rupert Murdoch’s eye. (Is any modern Premiership footballer’s wife called Gill?)
Anorak recalls the end of Hunter Davies’s The Glory Game. The writer spends a year with the Spurs team of the 1971-72 season and ends the book by telling us what each player’s parent does for a living.
Darts deserves the same treatment. Charles ‘Chip’ McGrath, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, said: the smaller the ball, the better the writer. There are no balls in darts. Imagine the book.
Listen as Marie George, wife to ‘King of Bling’ Bobby George tells us how she met her man at a function at a brewery where they worked.
Sharon Adams, wife of England captain Martin ‘Woolfie’ Adams, works full-time as a swimming teacher “as you never know when Martin’s big pay cheque will be”.
Jenny Fordham, wife to Andy ‘The Viking’ Fordham says: “Being a darts player’s wife means he gets to travel a lot and I get to iron a lot of shirt.” Fordham, the tournament’s winner in 2004, once weighed over 30 stone. Big shirts. Lots of ironing.
Andy is also the man whose response to the question “What colour underpants are you wearing today?” was: “Erm, I dunno, they’re just grey.”
So not so down to earth after all. As any fashion conscious Wag knows, grey is this season’s colour…
Posted: 6th, January 2007 | In: Back pages Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
