when you are down, the only way is up.

​The other day I was in our local supermarket and I was stopped short by the amount of booze on sell on the shop-floor, plus what there must be in the store-room, which, multiplied by the amount of booze sold in the entire town, multiplied again by the amount in the county, in the country … (Well, you get my drift.) suggested that a vast amount of the world’s resources must be given over to the production of a commodity with the potential to harm and to kill. It was a sobering thought, and I am teetotal. It makes the brouhaha and controversy about sweeties at the till seem rather petty, as if obesity has little to with greed and that liver failure had no connection to the over-consumption of alcohol.
You may think I have gone off topic. Well, it’s here I haul the prose back on track.
Alcohol has been the downfall of too many jockeys. Think Bobby Beasley, a jockey many considered as good a rider ever to come from Ireland. Booze beat the crap out of him and it was one of the comebacks of all comebacks when he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Captain Christy. Jockeys also succumb to drink when retired and here I’ll reference Pat Eddery.
Now, I’ll admit I’m rather addicted to Assam tea and if forced by circumstance to give-up the golden nectar I dare say I would experience the same withdrawal symptoms as someone signing the pledge and foregoing whatever delights are to be had from an excess of alcohol. But when you are a gifted and successful sportsman why would you try to make sense of the stresses involved in your labour by resorting to getting blind drunk and suffering the hangovers that just prolong the agony? Why.
I have just finished reading ‘Riding The Storm’, the autobiography of Timmy Murphy, a book that was far better read than I imagined it would be. It is an honest assessment of the pitfalls of being Timmy Murphy. A man, who by his own admission, spurned opportunity after opportunity mainly due to going out on weekends looking for the ‘craic’. A jockey who fails to take advantage of becoming first jockey to Kim Bailey, when he was top of his profession, and to Paul Nicholls as he rose to the top, really is his own worst enemy.
Yet that was not the height of his follies. He actually ended up in prison after making an ass of himself on a flight back from Japan, adding to his own humiliation by sexually assaulting a stewardess. It was a mild sexual assault, though he was wrongly put on the sex offenders register, as if a six-month prison sentence was enough of a punishment for being under the influence of alcohol.
At the time, only knowing of his fall from grace through the media, I thought that was the end of his career, another brilliant Irish horseman undone by his inability to address his addiction to alcohol. Just another name to add to the long list of jockeys who failed to take full advantage of their skill in the saddle.
But Murphy got lucky, though he perhaps earned his good fortune by having the balls to start from scratch, to make his way back from the bottom of the heap to, well this book was published way to early in his career, something close to respectability, his reputation almost restored. With A.P. taking up a retainer to ride for J.P., David Johnson wanted his own jockey and Murphy was the best unattached jockey around. David Johnson saved his bacon. And how.
And that’s the mad and sad thing about ‘Riding The Storm’ as two-years after publication Timmy Murphy won the Grand National for David Johnson on Comply or Die. (Incidentally if you watch the 2008 Grand National keep an eye on the ride Paul Carberry gave King John’s Castle, a horse who rarely gave more than he had to and who never won beyond 2-mile 4. As good a ride as you’ll ever see at Aintree) Has a jockey who has won the Grand National written an autobiography that omits his greatest triumph? The rock bottom of a prison cell to the heights of winning the Grand National. That should have been the story of Murphy’s autobiography but then he was not to know what life had in store for him, did he?
And of course, post Aintree his career took a different turn when he chose to ride solely on the flat and as someone who has not heard the reason for him making such a radical career move, I felt short-changed at the end of the book.
No doubt due to the assistance of Donn McClean, and due in no small way to Murphy’s black and white honesty, ‘Riding The Storm’ is a very good read. I was always a fan of Murphy as a jockey, which was why he plummeted in my esteem so much after his arrest and trial (I despise anyone who brings the sport into disrepute) and accounts of his early life, plus the mistakes and misdemeanours of his early career, gave me the impression that it would long odds on him changing my opinion of him through the writing of this book. But at the end I was truly pleased he had hauled himself off the floor and achieved the heights he would go on to achieve.