John Gwynne battled cancer in the late stages of his life. His family has yet to release a statement about his cause of death, which might be related to cancer. John was 77 years old at the time of his passing.
Who is John Gwynne?
Gwynne has been the color analyst for Sky Sports’ coverage of PDC darts tournaments. In Manchester, Gwynne’s first job was as a teacher. Gwynne was a toastmaster and an after-dinner speaker.
At the start of the 2019 season, he became the announcer for Lancashire County Cricket Club. He declared in February 2013 that he would retire in the summer. His final competition for Sky Sports was the 2016 World Championship.
He was admitted to the PDC Hall of Fame in 2014. Gwynne began providing commentary for the BDO darts competitions on Eurosport in 2014, including the BDO World Championship, Winmau World Masters, and Six Nations Cup.
He occasionally provided commentary on Sky Sports during the preliminary rounds of the PDC World Championship in the years that followed, but he didn’t do so at all in 2020. He did put a lot of effort into Talk Sport’s radio coverage of the match.
In the year 1980, he was employed by Piccadilly Radio in Manchester at the Belle Vue Speedway as a speedway reporter. He then switched to covering local North West football and darts on the Talking Sport podcast.
His first paid commentary position covered Lancashire County Cricket Club games for Cricket Call, a phone-based service. He did this between 1988 and 1991.
Gwynne helped set up a darts phone line service known as The Darts Line in 1989 and 1990, where Gwynne would give darts news and tournament updates to a paid phone number that people would call.
The Darts Line opened the doors to the world of darts, and soon Gwynne and Dave Lanning were commentating on darts competitions for local ITV television.
Lanning and Gwynne were the obvious choices for commentators when the WDC (later to become the PDC) tournaments began to be covered by Sky Sports following the 1993 darts split
. Sid Waddell worked for the BBC until the World Matchplay Championship in 1994.
