‘I can be cold but I’m not arrogant’
THERE had to be a way of managing my responsibilities to Willie Mullins at home and Pauil Nicholls in England. Jennifer got out the racing calendar and went through it to see what days there was racing in both Ireland and England. Maybe if we sent Paul a list of the days I might be available and included the Saturdays on it, then maybe we could find a compromise. Saturdays were crucial. Racing here was often fairly ordinary on Saturdays but it was the big day of the week over there.
From the beginning, I knew that it was going to take a fair bit of work. But I didn’t mind that at all. Getting up early has never bothered me so the difference between getting up at six o’clock to make a flight from Dublin or getting up after seven to go down to Willie’s to ride out wasn’t going to be a big problem to me.
But beyond that, it was going to take a lot of diplomacy. I was going to have to make a fair few political decisions to keep the peace. Not getting paid a retainer was my choice but I knew I wouldn’t get very far if I abused the privilege all over the place.
I would have to try and live up to my responsibilities to both Paul and Willie as best I could. I was going to have to start reading situations well. I couldn’t just be going where I thought the winner was.
Sometimes I would have to turn up to meetings where it mattered more that I was actually there even if there was going to be a better ride elsewhere. It occasionally happened that there’d be a meeting in, say, Clonmel on a Sunday, an ordinary enough meeting that wouldn’t match up with whatever was going on in England. I would have to nail my colours to the mast on those days and make good on my promise to Willie.
There has been plenty of times that I’ve flown to England and back for one ride and there’ll be plenty of times again. It’s no hardship at all. I’ll happily go for one horse if there’s a chance of it paying off down the line. My childhood dream was to ride the best horses in the biggest races and sometimes you have to play the long game to get those rides. The way I look at it, in order to have half a dozen very good chances going to Cheltenham, you might need to give yourself a couple of hundred chances at the start of the season. The more horses you can lay claim to, the more chances you’re going to have to find a superstar. But I was lucky too. There’s every chance it could have gone wrong without the help of Gillian, Jennifer, Paul and Willie. Maybe the luckiest break I got, though, came from someone who would become both a close friend and a fierce rival over the years.
HE GOES by plenty of names and a lot of people just use his surname when they’re talking about him, which is a sure sign of a legend. I call him A.P. In early December 2001, Henrietta Knight asked me to come to England to ride a few races and school some horses at her yard in Wantage, Oxfordshire. Jim Culloty had broken his arm in a fall at Taunton the week before the Hennessy and since I was going to be in England to ride Commanche Court in that race on the Saturday, I’d filled in on a horse of hers called Southern Star at Newbury on the Friday. It was the first time I’d ridden for her and she asked me over for a few days about a fortnight later. It was to be a straightforward enough job. Head over on the Wednesday, do some schooling in the mornings, go racing in Ludlow on the Thursday and Cheltenham on the Friday and then home again in time for Navan on the Saturday. My only problem was that I had nowhere to stay for the two nights. I didn’t know anybody in that part of England, or at least I didn’t think so. So I rang James Nash. He’d know if I did or not.
‘Who lives near Wantage that we know?’ I asked.
‘McCoy only lives up the road,’ he said. ‘Ring A.P., he’ll sort you out.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘I don’t really know him that well. Is there nobody else?’
‘Just ring him. It’ll be grand.’
I needn’t have worried. He couldn’t have been more sound about it. He gave me directions, said to come on round, that the spare room was mine if I wanted it. I stayed those two nights and before I went home on the Friday, he told me that any time I was over again just to give him a shout and there’d be a bed there waiting for me. So I did and there was and there has been ever since. I nearly have squatter’s rights by now.
I found him great company and made a good friend, which was something I wasn’t expecting at all. I’m not the friendliest guy in the world and most of my close friends are the lads I knew as a teenager. I can count the friends I’ve made as an adult. I can be cold when someone meets me for the first time. I’d always be polite but I wouldn’t always go out of my way to be the life and soul.
I have a terrible habit of giving the smart-arsed answer. If I think somebody’s asked me a stupid question or even if they’ve just got me at the wrong time when I’ve something on my mind, my first instinct a lot of the time is to come out with the sharp reply. So people come away thinking, ‘Jaysus, that Ruby Walsh is rude.’ And I’m the one who ends up kicking myself and thinking I’m an awful eejit.
My problem half the time is that I find it hard to just let things slide and do like everybody else does. For example, every jockey who ever rode a horse in a race gets stopped and asked for tips.
I got advice when I was about 17 that all I ever have to do when that happens is give the name of a horse. Pick a horse, any horse. All the punter wants is a name. All they want is to go back to their friends and say, ‘I ran into yer man Ruby Walsh, he fancies Such-And-Such in the novice hurdle.’ Give them a name and if it wins, it makes their day and they’ll raise a glass to you afterwards. If it doesn’t, sure that’s racing and we go again. But I still struggle to just blurt one out, even all these years later. I know what I should do but I still find myself going, ‘Well, I don’t really fancy anything today,’ and I don’t like tipping losers. And it’d always be because I’d genuinely have doubts. But that’s missing the point.
The point is, it’s only good manners to give them a horse. By saying nothing, I’m only bringing needless bad feeling on myself. At best, the punter watches me walk away thinking that I know well what’s going to win and just won’t tell him. At worst, two of my horses go and win and the punter thinks I put him off a nice double. I guess it’s because of the nature of the sport.
I don’t think I’m cocky or arrogant but I have no doubt that I can come across like that sometimes. The thing is, it’s hard to maintain an even composure sometimes. You’d be amazed at some of the people you meet who want to tell you how to ride a horse. You’ll be sitting beside some fella on a flight back from Birmingham, Bristol or Heathrow and he’ll be asking me did I not think of maybe making a bit more use of this horse or that horse. Or over the years when we’d be out in Dublin after the Hennessy meeting in Leopardstown and some big lump would be telling me I went too soon on one that got beaten. And I’ll be sitting there thinking, ‘Are you for real? You never sat on a horse in your life.’ I won’t say it but my demeanour will give me away. That sort of chap will very likely go away thinking that Ruby Walsh is a terrible cocky fella who thinks he’s better than everyone. It’s not true. Not true at all. But it’s very hard to smile and nod.
Sometimes I can’t resist a comeback. It’s just in my nature.
BY the time the summer came around, I was happy enough with how the new arrangement had worked out. But that summer was a desperately sad time for all of us in Irish racing. We lost two jockeys within a couple of months, the first racecourse deaths since Jim Lombard died after a fall in a banks race at Punchestown in the mid 1980s. Kieran Kelly and Sean Cleary were the same generation as me, doing the same job, taking the same risks and both of them died in random racecourse accidents that year. It was heartbreaking.
I didn’t know Sean all that well. He was a flat jockey working in Jim Bolger’s yard and we’d seldom have crossed paths. Any time there’s a mixed card, they tend to keep the flat jockeys at one end of the weighing room and the jump jockeys at the other just for space reasons so we’d have known each other by sight but that was it. He died in a freak accident in Galway that November, when a horse he was riding clipped the heels of the one in front of him and he fell. He was on life support for almost a week before he died. I was in Melbourne with Davy Condon who was a good friend of Sean’s. While we were all upset, Davy was heartbroken.
I knew Kieran Kelly very well though. We had started out at more or less the same time and had ridden against each other all the way up along from back as far as 1995. He’d started off in Mickey Flynn’s yard then moved to work for Dessie Hughes where he’d been getting on great, winning good races on the likes of Colonel Braxton, Timbera and Mutineer.
But his biggest days had come on Hardy Eustace. He’d won the Royal Bond at Fairyhouse and a good novice hurdle at Leopardstown over Christmas that season, before the biggest win of his career in the Royal and Sun Alliance Hurdle at Cheltenham.
We got on well together. His spot in the weighing room in Kilbeggan was right beside mine and he was a great guy to have next to you, full of banter and good humour. I wasn’t riding in the race he fell in that evening but I was in the one that came after it. You could tell straight away there was something seriously wrong because the fence was still dolled off for the next race and as we went down to the start, you could see why. Some of the medical equipment had been left on the track in the rush to get Kieran away to the hospital.
That evening, everybody was ringing around to see if there was any news. The Dublin Horse Show was on that week so after racing Gillian and I and a few friends went up to it. Paul Carberry was there as well. I got a phone call from Dad at one stage to say that the word wasn’t good. In the back of our heads we were going, ‘Ah, he’ll pull through, at least it’s not the worst news.’ But it was only delaying the worst news. Kilbeggan was on a Friday night; he died the following Tuesday.
We were racing in Gowran Park that evening when the news came through. It knocked the stuffing out of every one of us. You have to understand what a weighing room is like for us. A weighing room is more than a changing room. It’s more like a community. It’s a friendly place where we all find our little spot and settle into our little routines. From the first day you get a ride at a racecourse until the day you retire, the weighing room is where you make good friends and have great fun. It’s where you celebrate your wins and lick your wounds after a defeat.
How many sports can you think of where the competitors get changed side by side, go out and try as hard as possible to beat each other and then come back to the same room and change back in the same spot? Golf and tennis maybe, but that’s about it. We live each other’s lives, organise lifts among ourselves, book hotel rooms together, turn up at each other’s birthdays and stag parties and weddings. And that all starts in the weighing room. Being in that room makes us all very protective of each other.
JOCKEYS WILL back jockeys 99 times out of 100.We argue amongst ourselves, of course we do. We’re athletes filled with adrenaline in a sport that can get fairly hairy at times. But I can count the punch-ups I’ve seen on one hand. And they’re never actual punch-ups anyway. Not proper ones. If two fellas start, there’s half a dozen pulling them apart within seconds.
But we don’t let things fester. There’s too much slagging to let things fester. Carry a grudge and you’ll get it slagged out of you.
That day in Gowran, there was just silence. Some of Kieran Kelly’s best friends were in that room.We were all just numb. This had never happened before while any of us were in the weighing room but we all know the chance we take when we get on a horse. It’s part of the life you choose.
When the news came through in Gowran, I took off my colours and said I was going home. There were two races left on the card but I didn’t care about them just at that moment.
I’ll never forget the stewards in Gowran that evening and I still can’t believe the stance they took. They could have had a bit of human decency and made life a lot easier for us, but we nearly had to beg them to call off the last two races. Norman and I went into them and said, ‘Look, don’t know if you’ve heard but Kieran Kelly has passed away in the last hour or so. Now, we’re not refusing to ride in the last two races but there are a lot of lads in the weighing room who don’t want to ride and we’d prefer it if you called the last two races off as a mark of respect.’
I expected them to just say, ‘Yeah, Jesus, of course we will. Sure it’s only right.’ But instead, the chairman of the stewards said, ‘Let’s get this straight – ye’re not refusing to ride. So if we decide to race, ye’ll ride?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah but we’re asking as a mark of respect that ye don’t do that.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘But if we decide to keep racing, ye’ll ride.’ I was getting annoyed now, thinking to myself that this wasn’t right. So we left the stewards’ room while they deliberated. When we were called back, they asked for a representative of the amateur jockeys to join us so Denis Cullen came. They wanted to know whether if we didn’t ride, would the amateurs take the rides in the professional race. But Denis said no, that if the professionals weren’t going to ride as a mark of respect, neither were the amateurs.
In the end they called the two races off but they weren’t happy. They were worried about what they’d tell the public. I told them to show me where the microphone was and I’d make the announcement myself. So I did. I told them that Kieran Kelly had passed away. That he was a proper jockey and even more so, a proper man. And that as a mark of respect, his friends and colleagues in the weighing room have asked that the last two races on the card be cancelled. The public are decent people and not one of them said a bad word to us as we left.
That was the worst day I ever had in racing. Probably the worst day any of us ever had. Any time I think I’ve had a bad day, I remember Kieran and snap myself out of it. Losing a race or breaking a bone doesn’t compare to that feeling when the news came through. It took a while for everyone to move on.
But Kieran Kelly will never be forgotten.
(c) Ruby Walsh, 2010. Extracted from Ruby: The Autobiography by Ruby Walsh published by Orion.
Ruby Walsh will do a special In Conversation with..’ discussion with Malachy Clerkin on Wednesday, October 27 at 7.30pm in the Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin 1. Tickets are €10 are can be purchased from the box office on 01 4487777.
