Suddenly, a whole new world had opened up for me. Within that year I became champion pony rider, going on to retain the title for three years. By the age of fourteen, I had ridden a couple of hundred winners. But as much as I enjoyed winning, one thing stayed constant throughout. I was riding because I enjoyed it, not because I wanted to make a life from it.
No, I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to live in New York. I wanted to see the world. Every Thursday morning, without fail, I used to read Jenny Bannister’s ‘American Diary’ in the Irish Independent – I had eyes for America long before I ever set foot there. I had always been considered well-spoken and articulate, choosing my words carefully and delivering them with impact. So it wasn’t an impossible dream that I saw myself in America: Declan Murphy, criminal lawyer, dressed in a tailor-made suit and shiny new shoes, defending my clients in courtrooms filled with people. I didn’t dream to live; I lived to dream. I lived my life, but I dreamt of something else, of something beyond the life I had.
My mother, Maura Murphy, dreamt my dream. While my father was always excited when I raced, and more so when I won, my mother never wanted me to ride horses, least of all as my profession. While part of this was driven by some larger ambition for me, another part – consciously or subconsciously – almost certainly had to do with the risk involved with being a jockey. I know she found no logic in placing one’s life at the mercy of half a tonne of pure muscle, for no reason other than to satisfy that aberrant thrill-seeking gene which some of us are apparently born with.
A simple girl from Portarlington, she had met my father when he was working up there as an engineer for Bord na Móna. They had fallen in love, and moved back to Hospital to make a life together. Most of the McCanns – her elder sister Noeline, her brother Michael, her brother Bobby – had all emigrated to America right after leaving school, and she believed I was destined to do something bigger with my life. ‘You will do something extraordinary,’ she would say to me from time to time, ‘I just know it.’
This was her dream. And, in my heart, mine.
Meanwhile, back in the real world …
My dexterity with ponies was beginning to attract attention and for the first time, people started making reference to ‘my hands’. With horses, the reference to hands is metaphorical – it is an all-encompassing term that connotes something much more intangible. When people said I had a good pair of hands, they were alluding to a rider’s ability to ‘feel’ his horse – horses need that feel, they need that confidence you emit and transmit to them. You bounce it off each other. I had this even from those early years – that ‘feel’ in ‘my hands’. Horses seemed to respond to it, to relax to it, to settle so naturally and beautifully because of it. And this, for me, was the reason I continued to ride and to race; on some level, it seemed that it was ingrained in me. You are either born with it or not, and I was learning slowly that, in some capacity or another, I was destined to ride. Where I chose to take it was another matter altogether.
And so, from around the age of ten to the age of fourteen, I continued pony racing with great gusto. I realized it wasn’t something that I had to try too hard to be good at; it came naturally to me and, as a teenage boy, that suited me brilliantly: the less I had to work at something, the more I tended to enjoy it!
Nineteen eighty was the last year I was champion pony rider. I was fourteen years old then and I could no longer do 8 stone; I had just grown too heavy for pony racing. I started to take a keen interest in hunting, a strong Irish tradition and a natural hobby for many riding enthusiasts.
Fortuitously for me, exactly around this time, 5 Bank Place welcomed Misty into its equine family. Misty was a 14.2hh pony that we bought from Dan Donovan, a friend of my father’s, who lived in the neighbouring village of Kilteely. Dan was leaving home to work with horses on the Curragh and so, much to our delight, Misty became ours.
There are jumpers and then there are jumpers, and Misty was an unbelievable jumper. She was mercurial by nature, but she never ceased to amaze with her ability, and we would watch wonderstruck as she jumped double ditches with the agility of a cat. For me, Misty couldn’t have arrived at a better time – she became the perfect companion to ride hunting.
At the time in Ireland, hunting was largely synonymous with the Ryan family; Thady Ryan was Master of the Scarteen Hounds, Ireland’s most famous pack of foxhounds. The Ryans had run the Scarteen Hunt – named after their house in Knocklong, on the Limerick–Tipperary border – since the late eighteenth century, and their distinctive Black and Tan Hounds had since become a celebrated feature of the Irish countryside.
Misty and I eagerly joined the hunt – and it wasn’t long before we developed quite the reputation. A typical hunting party follows a strict hierarchy: leading the front is the master huntsman, followed by the whipper-in. After that, where you sit is determined by relative authority, and kids like me were meant to follow at the very rear. But Misty was such a brilliant jumper that it was easy to get carried away. Often, I’d find myself at the front with all the adults, swept away by my own enthusiasm, inadvertently breaking rank.
Thady Ryan and his whipper-in, Tommy O’Dwyer, were amused no end by my antics – they viewed me as an audacious little kid with both the ability and the confidence to negotiate the rules. But I was often told off by the other huntspeople for my disobedience! I had always had a mischievous side, and a part of me enjoyed challenging authority. Even at fourteen, I was driven by a cool self-confidence – I knew that even though I was young, I could hold my own on horseback. And so in my own head, I wasn’t breaking any rules, only reinventing them!
It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much of an education hunting gave me in preparation for being a jump jockey. Riding over hurdles or fences is a tremendous skill, but you have the benefit of knowing where the obstacles lie – you see them, so you prepare for them. You calculate, you strategize, you plan. With hunting, you’re riding virtually blind. You don’t know the lay of the land, obstacles come up unexpectedly and you’ve got to have the confidence to jump them as you see them, without the benefit of foresight. I found that hunting lent finesse to my riding, it sharpened my instinct for confronting obstacles, it forced me to make split-second decisions under pressure and, most important of all, it unequivocally tested the limits of my courage.
It would be amiss at this time not to mention the indispensable part Misty played in honing my skill as a rider. Not only was she a star jumper, but her temperament was such that it pushed me to fine-tune my own prowess. She was so headstrong, so erratic when she was in the gallop or while jumping, that she consistently challenged my ability to ride her. Misty was a creature that, for some reason, wanted so much to be out of control. This forced me to raise my game just so that I could keep her in control.
All of these individual experiences – my early exposure to horses, the hunting, the jumping, the pony racing, Misty – formed the vital ingredients that had unsuspectingly been thrown together inside the cauldron of my mind. And now the potion was brewing within me, creating something weird and wonderful, something that would become apparent to others long before I became aware of it myself, in a form that would be widely regarded as artistry. And yet in its infancy – in that delicate embryonic stage – it was no more than a young boy trying to control the animal he was riding.
And so it followed.
Until one day …
I was out in the early hours of the morning, hunting on Misty. We were on a steep, downward-sloping dirt path in the woods when I turned her around to jump a five-bar gate. It was either bad luck or an error of judgement, or perhaps a bit of both, but Misty caught the top of the gate, threw me over, and then fell with her full weight squarely on one of my legs. What followed was a visit to the hospital, where I was told in no uncertain terms that my leg had been badly injured and needed complete rest. My mother – rarely one to lose her cool – lost her cool. That put an end to hunting for a short while.
It was aro
und this time that my father bought me Tarenaga, a 15.1hh horse, from Tommy Kinane. Albeit small, Tarenaga was a racehorse – a proper racehorse – who I got to ride at speed. This was when the addiction really started. I began to love the thrill of racing, of doing it right, of perfecting the ability to coordinate balance and pace and technique to achieve a race-rider’s one ideal: speed.
When I was sixteen, Eamon, by then an apprentice jockey on the Curragh, invited me up to join him for the summer, where he got me a job with Kevin Prendergast, one of Ireland’s consistently successful trainers. I was to ride his horses to exercise them, for the three months of my summer holidays. One morning, when I was riding a notoriously headstrong horse, Piccadilly Lord, I noticed Kevin Prendergast watching me handle him, a look of admiration in his eyes. The Curragh is filled with racehorses, filled with people involved with horses, but more than that, I went to a stable which, at that moment in time, probably had about ten seriously good aspiring young jockeys. To be able to shine through bright enough to make an impression in that particular environment in the yard, on the gallops, perhaps spoke to my ability, except I didn’t see it that way. I was just a kid playing around with horses in his school holidays.
The next morning, Kevin Prendergast came up and spoke to me. It was the first time anyone had seriously broached the subject of my career. He said, ‘I like the way you ride – you have natural talent. You should be a jockey.’
I said, ‘Thank you, but I’m going back to school, I have no interest in being a jockey.’
And so, I went back to school.
The following summer – it was 1983 and I was seventeen years old now – I went back to ride at Kevin Prendergast’s for the holidays. One day, he rode up next to me and said in all sincerity, ‘Would you like to be an amateur jockey?’
Matching sincerity for sincerity, I said, ‘No, not really.’
He said, ‘Why don’t you take out an amateur licence? It won’t cost you anything.’
I said, ‘But I don’t really want it. I’m going back to school in September and I won’t be able to ride.’
And so he let the matter drop …
But Kevin Prendergast was the leading trainer at the time in producing the next generation of apprentice jockeys, and ‘talent spotting’ came naturally to him. It seemed he wasn’t used to taking no for an answer.
A week later he rode up next to me again – I remember it was a Thursday morning – and he said, ‘I’ve got an interview for you tomorrow with the stewards at Navan Racecourse.’
I said, ‘An interview for what?’
He said, ‘For your amateur licence.’
I said, ‘I don’t want an amateur licence.’
He said, ‘It’s only a day out for you. Just go for the interview, it won’t cost you anything and you can have a ride on Monday.’
The ‘ride on Monday’ happened to be the Friends Handicap, the feature event at the Rose of Tralee Festival. So, on Kevin Prendergast’s insistence, I rocked up to ride my horse, Prom, 20/1 in this big amateur handicap, never having ridden in a proper race before.
I was riding against some leading figures at that time – Ted Walsh and Willie Mullins – but I was completely undaunted by their celebrity. In fact, I remember thinking to myself, What a lot of fun this is going to be!
But I was also there to win.
Winning is like a predator’s first taste of blood – it hooks you. Notwithstanding the fact that I viewed racing as my ‘recreational buzz’, I was realizing that I had become competitive. Some of us thrive under pressure, while others of us crumble beneath it. I found myself driven by the pressure to perform, by the hunger to win.
The race was every bit as thrilling as I had expected. There were thirteen runners and I deliberately rode a waiting race on the hard-pulling Prom, getting him to settle beautifully. Turning into the straight, I still had a lot of horses in front of me and I started to make my move up the outside when I caught sight of the furlong pole. As soon as I saw it, I squeezed up my mount and his response was immediate. I won the race by four lengths.
Suddenly, I was two out of two. My first-ever ride pony racing, I had won. My first-ever ride as an amateur jockey, I had won.
The statistics became significant to everyone around me, except myself.
Don’t get me wrong, I had a love of horses and a love of riding, a love of competition and a love of winning. Put it all together and you arrive at a single inevitable outcome. But I didn’t see it that way. Winning these races was the equivalent, for me, to teenagers joyriding in cars. It was fun. And it was still just that – a glorious hobby, a bit of fun.
Having fun defined my formative years. As a person, I was easy-going and happy-go-lucky – a typical teenage boy. I thrived on an insatiable curiosity; I enjoyed pushing the boundaries.
When I was fifteen or sixteen, my sister Kathleen and I would routinely thumb lifts to discos in Knocklong and at the Bruff Rugby Club. One night, after everyone was sound asleep – it was raining the way it only ever rains in Ireland: that distinctive soft, steady drizzle – I decided that driving ourselves to the disco would be more fun than thumbing a lift in the rain. So I told Kathleen to go inside the house and get the spare keys to the car. Keys safely in my possession, Kathleen, I and our friend Gerry Gallagher pushed the car out on to the road.
I then drove us to the disco at the Bruff Rugby Club and we all had a grand night out. The following morning, straight-faced and as sincere as sunlight, I told our mother that it was Kathleen who had taken the car and that I had only gone along – with great reluctance – to make sure nothing happened to her or the car! Kathleen never got into trouble, so it’s more than likely that our mother didn’t quite buy my solemn impression of a concerned big brother, but she never said a word!
I had the same carefree approach with riding – I never took it too seriously. The day my sister Geraldine got married, I had been asked to ride a horse called The Yank Brown for Edwina Finn and Mickie Lee. I was doing my Leaving Certificate at school at the same time. So I did an exam in the morning, attended the wedding in the afternoon, and just when we got to the reception, which was in the Glen of Aherlow, I dashed off to Tipperary Racecourse, where I proceeded to ride the race, win the race, and come back to the reception before they had all even sat down!
And in this way I would have continued, riding only to fuel what I thought was a passing interest during a temporary phase in my life, had fate not intervened.
When I had just turned eighteen years old, I was out riding my pony on the road one day when I was approached by John Power, solicitor to Barney Curley. He stopped me and said, ‘Barney Curley would like to meet you.’
I said, ‘Who’s Barney Curley?’
And then I remembered that he was the guy from The Late Late Show.
‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet him.’
When I told Kevin Prendergast later that Barney Curley wanted to meet me, he said, ‘Don’t go near him. Go near him – find out what he wants – but don’t do anything else. He will destroy your life.’
Words have power; tremendous power.
Especially words of warning.
Especially when spoken by someone you respect.
Especially when you are eighteen.
Words have the power to stop you.
They didn’t stop me.
In the summer of 1984, my brother Eamon and his friend Mull took me to meet Barney Curley at his mansion in Mullingar – the very one he had been talking about on the TV show – and we sat, facing each other, on two chairs in the archway of this now infamous mansion.
Serendipity. I think of that word, its substance, and I take pause.
From my point of view, I was there because Barney Curley wanted to meet me. The idea of riding horses or becoming a jockey couldn’t have been further from my mind. No, I was there to meet him because he wanted to meet me. And yes, of course, ever since I’d seen him on The Late Late Show, I had wanted to meet him too. He was even
more impressive in real life than he was on TV – arrogant, detached, supremely confident. I guess there was an element of mystique about him, about this shaven-headed, cigarette-smoking rebel with the icy nonchalance and the perfect pencil moustache. I was completely drawn in. I struggled to get my head around how somebody so calm and undemonstrative in nature could go about doing things the way he did. This was a man who was doing everything himself in his own way of thinking, the sort of person you meet once in a lifetime. And even though I was only eighteen years old, I was inspired by this independence of mind, by someone who didn’t need to seek counsel on decisions he chose to make.
I had expected our meeting to last ten or fifteen minutes but three hours later, my life was in a different place. You see, the thing about Barney Curley is that there is no one who holds his cards closer to his chest. There’s no way of knowing what he’s thinking, he never gives anything away. He could have just won or lost two million pounds and you would never know. Because Barney Curley doesn’t even make an expression. And yet, somehow, I had managed to impress this man who couldn’t ever be impressed.
This man, with his meticulous planning and uncommonly astute judgement, seemed as interested in me as I was in him. I told you I have always been bold and spirited, a precocious boy. And perhaps it was this innate tenacity that gave me the confidence to go and sit with someone like Barney Curley and hold my own. Later, in an interview, he would say about me, ‘He was so calm and unintimidated and he spoke so well, I knew he was the one. I didn’t even have to see him ride.’
Meanwhile, close to three hours into our meeting, I still had no idea why this man had wanted to meet me. And then, just as curiously as he entered my life, so he changed it. He said, ‘I’m looking for a jockey to ride my horses in Newmarket. Do you think you’ll be good enough?’
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