Centaur

by Declan Murphy

  That’s how we rode.

  Flying together through the wind, man and beast; of one mind, of one heart.

  Dancing, soaring, creating light.

  Claiming back my freedom.

  And with my freedom came another realization. That morning, on the gallops at Newmarket Heath, I learnt something about myself; something I had always known, but had never been able to explain. I learnt why I was never meant to be a jockey. One of the greatest deceptions we can fall victim to is the myth that relationships need to fit into pre-existing boxes. It simplifies things to believe this. And so we do. Horses and I had always had a strong emotional connection. We understood each other. Horses were my first friends; some of my best friends. And so it seemed – in the eyes of the world – that the obvious way to channel this relationship, to define it, was for me to become a jockey. But how wrong that was.

  My experience over the past months had shown that there was a greater purpose to this connection I had with horses. There was a purity to it, a magic that was at its best when left in its innate, primitive state. Interfering with this, the natural order of things, was only corrupting its beauty.

  I was born to ride, but I was born to ride free.

  When I dismounted that day, the first time after I rode a gallop on Staunch Friend, I walked alongside him, shoulder to shoulder, and he nuzzled against me.

  I looked at him, at his eyes. His beautiful, soulful eyes … a window into myself.

  And he looked back at me.

  Like he felt my sadness.

  Like he wanted to take it away.

  I was overcome then by an intense and inexplicable emotion. It was the moment that I finally accepted myself; the moment that I finally forgave myself. The moment that I accepted I had lost four years, six months and twenty-four days of my life; that I wasn’t going to fight it.

  Beside me, Staunch Friend was leading me forward gently. And, for the first time since my accident, the clamour inside my head quietened long enough so I could hear them – our two sounds mingled together as one, so much so that I couldn’t tell them apart.

  His hoofbeat.

  My heartbeat.

  Why Me?

  I fell off a horse and almost died.

  Why me?

  Nope. That is not the question.

  A long time ago, someone told me laughingly I was so lucky that if I fell off a building, I’d fall upwards, not downwards. I never fell off a building, but I did fall off a horse. That in itself makes me lucky. I may have been a good jockey, but I’m no match for gravity. If I’d fallen off a building, I would be dead.

  If you think I’m being facetious, I’m not. Things fell into place for me in miraculous ways. The stars aligned. What happened to me belonged squarely in the domain of chance, so the stars had to align. It was like a game of dominoes. If one fell, the whole thing would have come crashing down. It didn’t. There they were, the stars, all lined up in a neat row. Only for me. I believe I had an inordinate amount of luck.

  Let me count the ways:

  One: I belonged to a sport where two ambulances follow you around all the time. If I’d suffered the same injury doing almost anything else, I would be dead.

  Two: The paramedic on course knew exactly what to do with me. If he had rested his hand on the wrong side of my head, I would be dead.

  Three: The ambulance driver was having a good day – the traffic around Liverpool cooperated with him. If he had brought me in to Warrington Hospital four minutes later, I would be dead.

  Four: The Walton Centre lies within 26 miles of Haydock Park. Had I been on any other racecourse in the country, I would be dead.

  Five: There happened to be a professor of neurology at The Walton Centre called Professor John Miles. If he had been out of the country instead of out playing golf, perhaps I would be dead.

  Six: My father had a morbid fear of flying. If he hadn’t, I would be dead.

  Seven: I was a professional athlete, physically at the peak of health and fitness. If I had been of a weaker constitution, I would be dead.

  Eight: They said, even if I survived, I might never walk. That I would lose my sight, my hearing, my speech. I would exist, but I wouldn’t live. I would be dead.

  I look up at the night sky. And I stand in awe of my luck. The stars haven’t lost their twinkle.

  Never: Why me?

  But: Why me?

  That is the question.

  A Little Concept of Time

  ‘Clocks slay time … time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops, does time come to life.’

  William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury

  3 seconds: to end my career.

  4 minutes: to get to the hospital, alive.

  3 hours: to survive, for a 50 per cent chance to live.

  96 hours: to wake from coma.

  10 weeks: to walk 50 yards, with sticks.

  20 weeks: to get sensation back in my limbs.

  6 months: to walk unaided.

  7 months: to run like a madman around Newmarket Heath.

  9 months: to sit on a horse for the first time since the accident.

  12 months: to feel the rhythm of a horse in motion.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock …

  It’s a race against time. But I’m a race-rider.

  18 months: TO RIDE, TO RACE, TO WIN.

  Timeless: to find my soul.

  Centaur

  When I run, I choose the hilliest course I can. I do this with deliberate intent, and I do it not for pleasure but for pain.

  Hills are not my enemy; they are simply an obstacle, meant to be overcome. So when I approach a hill, I don’t wince, I focus. I shorten my stride, control my breathing, power my leg muscles and I drive forward, my body standing tall.

  And I fight those hills. We are capable of infinitely more than we think.

  I remember the precise moment in time that I decided I was going to make a comeback. I knew it with a certainty that was almost startling in its clarity.

  I was sitting on the sofa in my house in Newmarket one afternoon – about ten months after my accident – flicking through the TV channels. There seemed to be nothing of particular interest to watch, and so I switched the TV off. And right then, in the shiny blackness of the TV screen, I saw the reflection of a painting hanging on the wall behind me. It was by Neil Cawthorne, oil on canvas, and there was something profoundly telling in its simplicity.

  Art evokes emotion in me. It moves me from the inside. It always has. And so it was with this piece.

  Aptly titled The Long Way Home, the painting shows a jockey from the back, leading his horse away from the racetrack. In front of them is the looming majesty of the grandstand at Cheltenham. The horse has fallen three fences from home, and the rider has had to abandon the race and walk away. The air of despondency is apparent in the body language of the rider – his head hangs low, his shoulders weighed down by the weight of something indefinable.

  I know so much about all this because the rider in the painting is me.

  But now I looked at the piece with different eyes.

  I was known in riding circles for my seat in the saddle, for the way I had perfected the classic ‘Martini glass’ posture – a 45-degree angle between my shoulders and my knees, another 45 degrees between my knees and my hips, a straight line between my knees and ankles, perpendicular to the ground. When I was racing, they said you could balance a ball on my back and it wouldn’t fall off. When I wasn’t racing, I stood ramrod straight, shoulders back, head held high. It was the body language of a man in control, full of vitality and confidence. It stood in total and complete contrast to my posture in the painting. There was a dejection about me there. A restlessness. A yearning to be where I belonged – in the race. But there I was, walking away from the race, taking ‘the long way home’.

  And now it gnawed at me, this feeling.

  It had become deeply familiar, this sensation, in these last few mon
ths, so much so that my bones ached with the weight of it. ‘Maybe one day you will walk,’ the doctors had said. In less than a year, I had beaten the statistics well and clear. I could walk, I could run, I could ride, I had built up my energy, my muscle, my strength. It had not only been a steep slope, but a slippery one, dotted with dangerous ‘what ifs?’ that had often threatened to shake my resolve. But I had crawled my way up on my hands and knees, yard by yard. And yet, it didn’t seem enough. I was restless all the time, searching for something, I knew not what.

  What I did know was that this unknown, unspecified longing was growing bigger and bigger and bigger every day and that if left unchecked, it would soon breathe life. And then it would fight me. I had to stop it, before it stopped me.

  I stared at that painting for a long, long time, even as afternoon melted into evening and evening into night. The light changed, but the essence didn’t.

  Sleep evaded me that night, my breathing shallow and laboured as I lay tossing and turning in bed, troubled by the ghosts that hadn’t left my side for eighteen months. I longed to rid myself of them. So I could breathe. So I could sleep.

  I sat up in bed, my eyes adjusting to the darkness and thought – one last time – about the painting in my living room. And in that instant – that still point in time – I knew I was not going to let destiny decide my future. I was going to create my own destiny.

  I was not ready to walk away.

  Not yet.

  I was going to race again.

  And finally, I found sleep.

  In October 1995, eighteen months after Haydock Park, twelve months to the day I could walk again, I made my comeback. It was a decision made in flagrant disregard of the orders of my doctors and the concern of my friends and family. Perhaps they were right to be worried. Perhaps anyone who had escaped the jaws of death the way I had, had no right to tempt fate. Another fall involving any kind of trauma to my head would kill me. It was that simple. So they warned and cautioned, coaxed and cajoled, reasoned and rationalized, pleaded and prayed.

  But they didn’t understand.

  This was no show of bravado. I wasn’t anybody’s hero. I was just a man searching for his soul. My decision to ride was driven by one desire and one desire alone – not to be seen as someone dead.

  I decided to ride in the Flat V Jump Jockeys Challenge at Chepstow. The announcement of my comeback caused a stir in the racing world; the interest in me, in the race I was going to be riding, in the horse I would choose to ride, was intense. The media went absolutely berserk – everywhere I went, there was press following me around. My phone rang off the hook. There were cameras outside my house. It was pure madness. When I was a ten-year-old kid, pretending to be Eamon in my first-ever pony race, nothing would have seemed more thrilling than the idea of paparazzi. Now, it all seemed misplaced. I couldn’t understand it. Why was everyone so interested in me? It was no different now to what it had been then. I was a child then, I was a man now, but I was still the same person – an Irish boy with an overwhelming desire to ride a horse.

  As the day approached, the racing world rallied around me. Jockeys called to wish me well; trainers rang, offering their horses. This was a race determined by draw; trainers entered their horses and the clerk of the course picked names to pair horses with jockeys. I was drawn to ride Geoff Lewis’s Jibereen, a beautiful bay colt with a proud carriage and a bright-eyed, exuberant demeanour.

  A few days before the race, I wanted to have a sit on the horse to get a feel for him, so I went up to Geoff Lewis’s yard and rode him in a workout. I realized, coming out of it, that riding Jibereen to win would require a certain judgement of pace – he had a high cruising speed, but it was going to prove essential to sustain it; travelling even one gear higher could prevent him from delivering his best at the winning post. He didn’t quite finish the workout the way I would have liked. On the day of the race, this would prove a priceless education.

  Once I was booked to ride and word got out that I was going to ride Jibereen, the late Pat Eddery – eleven-time flat-racing champion jockey – called to give me his advice: ‘If you ride this horse, you need to break sharp from the gates, and get across to the rail as soon as you can. Then, just get into a rhythm and try and sustain it for as long as you can, so you can get the pick-up you want when you need it.’

  It reinforced exactly what I had felt instinctively from my workout on the horse a few days earlier. Now it was down to being able to execute the strategy at a time and a place when it mattered.

  Could I?

  Was I unsure?

  I was unsure. I was completely unsure.

  It’s so easy to lose trust in yourself.

  But I was riding on the belief that you create your own destiny. So if I was unsure, I couldn’t show it. Not to the world, not to myself. I remained unfazed. Such was my determination to do everything I had ever done; to be everything I had ever been. It was clear in my mind: if I was a race-rider before, I was going to be a race-rider again.

  I couldn’t remember any of it but I was going to go out and pretend that I could.

  It was the summer of 1989. We were sitting on the bend at Hollywood Park racetrack, Bill Shoemaker and I. He was tiny next to me, barely 1.5 metres tall, but with 8,833 wins from 40,350 rides, he was a force to be reckoned with, a true legend – cream of the crop, best of the best.

  On many a day over the course of my time in California, I would sit alone on that bend and watch Bill ride. Just watch him. And wonder how this diminutive figure used to cause a traffic jam and then just kick off the bend at the precise moment – and not a fraction before – he felt his horse could run all the way to the line.

  He took to me for some reason; he’d speak to me with an abrasive kindness typical of the most effective mentor–protégé relationships. I suppose he believed in me, in the fact that I could ride.

  One day we were sitting together in silence, watching the horses. It was a balmy California afternoon, sun in the sky, breeze in my hair, when suddenly he peered at me and said, ‘You god-damned son of a bitch, you probably don’t want to be a jockey but if you change your mind, remember this – you’ve got to ride the race to suit your horse and not your horse to suit the race.’

  And I looked at him, eyes wide in wonder, and I marvelled at his brilliance.

  I had heard that Bill Shoemaker was born weighing 2.5 pounds, so small that he was not expected to survive the night. He made it, spending his first hours in the world inside a shoebox, which in turn was placed inside the oven to raise his body temperature. But even at his heaviest, he weighed no more than 100 pounds. The miracle of Shoemaker was that even though he was smaller than everybody else, he rode more winners than anybody else and I realized at that point, that in this game we had both chosen to play, the mind and the brain assume a far greater role than any physical trait a man might have.

  This was about instinct and intelligence. That’s all.

  It was a moment of epiphany.

  At Chepstow, on the day of the race, the pressure to perform was immense. But I knew that no matter how scarred my body was, no matter how scarred I thought my mind was, I would need to rely more than ever on these twin traits – instinct and intelligence – to see me through. And I knew that I would need them to stay true to Shoemaker’s art of race-riding, to be in harmony with my horse, to ‘feel’ my horse, to mould my body to its rhythm, to be at one with it, to morph into it, to become – for these next crucial minutes of my life – a centaur.

  So, when I got on the horse that afternoon, I felt confident and ready. The horse was heavily gambled on, backed down from 7/1 to 3/1 favourite. I was overwhelmed by the good wishes from my colleagues, my friends and family – if they disapproved, they didn’t show it; everybody stood around me, supporting me. It was a remarkable show of solidarity and I was glad for it.

  And secretly? I needed it.

  Because during the countdown to the start – that final countdown – I felt an emotion I had nev
er felt when riding before. It was alien to me and the unnatural nature of it unsettled me. My brother Pat would later tell me that when I got on that horse I had a look on my face that he had never seen before. ‘It was determination,’ he said confidently.

  He was wrong.

  It was doubt.

  It was a moment – just only a moment. But it was there. That big black cloud of doubt moving silently across the sun, threatening to engulf it.

  Because what nobody knew was that I had no peripheral vision on my right side. I was riding partially blind.

  Nobody knew this. But I did. And sometimes, that’s enough.

  You can fool the world, but how long can you fool yourself? How long can you keep it intact, when it’s not? I think it’s right until the point when you realize the solemn truth that the joke is actually on you. And that’s all it takes, that one second of fear, to shatter everything you have built up.

  Ah, the fragility of confidence.

  And with that, out they came. The questions. From inside my head.

  Like a bucket of sand tipped on its side, the questions – tiny golden granules of doubt – came tumbling out: Could I still ride the way I’d ridden before? Did I remember the fractions? Could I judge the pace? Was it too soon? What the hell was I doing here?

  The phantoms – the ones that appeared before me during those black nights at the hospital – came back, with their white distended faces, the sockets with no eyes, the lipless mouths. I felt like I was twelve years old, thrust once again into a situation too grown up for me to handle, and I thought to myself, Are you sure you are ready to be here?

  And then, a voice inside my head. It wasn’t one of their voices; the phantoms, they didn’t have voices. It was my own and it was screaming: ‘My God, you are going to get exposed.’

  But the mind is fickle.

  That day, I used this to my advantage. It passed, that moment of doubt, as fleetingly as it had arrived.

  I drove out the demons. I had to. I was an elite athlete. There were no limits – they didn’t exist.