Pressure points
Robin Oakley
Cricketer and racing fan Keith Miller, whodied recently, had flown Mosquitoes over Germany during the war and it gave him a perspective. 'When athletes these days talk of pressure,' he declared, they only reveal what they don't know of life. They've never had a Messerschmitt up their arse. That's pressure.'
It is not on that scale, but one man in racing who does know what pressure is about is jockey Timmy Murphy. A shy man to whom social exchange does not come easily, he used to fuel himself off course with booze. The alcoholism to which he finally admitted reached its most disastrous point when he got drunk on a flight back from Japan early in 2002. Amid other offensive behaviour, he molested a female flight attendant, which earned him several months in Wormwood Scrubs and left hiin wondering if he had a future.
Racing, it seems, had other ideas about a man with a sublime talent. Fellow jockey Andrew Thornton, for example, never let anyone else hang their clothes on Murphy's weighing-room peg while he was away. When he returned, riding jobs picked up steadily for the by then reformed alcoholic, and when Tony McCoy made his surprise decision to leave Martin Pipe's winner factory and join Jonjo O'Neill, Pipe's biggest owner David Johnson signed up Murphy on a personal retainer.
That was a pressure appointment. It was hard enough to be succeeding the great McCoy, with everybody watching to see if you could keep up the winning percentages; even worse when it was made clear that this was Johnson's appointment, not Pipe's. The pressure was the more extreme because there could not be a greater contrast between the two riders' styles. Though both can ride many sorts of races, McCoy revelled in Pipe's favoured frontrunning tactics on his supremely fit horses. Murphy is a rider who likes to send his mounts to sleep at the back, steadily coaxing a little more out of them as the race unwinds and coming to steal the race at the end with the finesse which clearly eluded the big black armed robber who was his protector in prison.
You choose between robust, high-class prose and something akin to poetry. Pipe — and McCoy — are about drive and domination, Murphy is about tenderness and patience. Horses run for McCoy because they don't want to find out what will happen if they don't. They run for Murphy because he cajoles and nurses them. He reckons horses like passing others on the way to victory.
Looking at Murphy's pale face and dark eyes as he came out into the parade ring to be swung up into the saddle by Martin Pipe, you wondered in the early days just how much turmoil was behind that highdomed forehead. The pressure notched up a few screws after Murphy rode a waiting race on Pipe's Well Chief and got beaten, with racecourse rumours of a lack of harmony between trainer and jockey. But when Murphy brought home Celestial Gold at Newbury last Saturday to win the Hennessy Gold Cup, it must surely have banished the last of his demons to the bottom of the pit from which he has so successfully emerged.
Only a fortnight before, Murphy had ridden a fabulous four-timer for Pipe and Johnson at Cheltenham, including victory in the Paddy Power Gold Cup on the same horse. On Over the Creek in the novice hurdle, Murphy had taken the lead three from home to make it a test of stamina. In the novice chase, he had to drive Vodka Bleu hard from before the last to hold off Mount Karinga. But Celestial Gold, a headstrong type, was ridden the Murphy way, lulled into lobbing along at the back and then produced steadily from the top of the hill. Finally, on Stormez, a dicey jumper with only half an inclination to race, Murphy produced one of the rides of the season, niggling at him all the way but somehow persuading him to use his speed at the end. Schooling at home that week, Stormez had refused at the first and only just climbed over the second but Murphy had bet his trainer £10 he would still win on him, and he collected.
At Newbury, Timmy Murphy again won the big race by having the nerve to settle his mount at the back while the leaders tore away on the first circuit, then creeping through the field to unleash his strike at the right moment. In the first race he had cruised to victory on Pipe's Marcel at the moment he chose. In the novice chase he outsmarted the much-touted Fundamentalist in a falsely run race, and finally, in the handicap hurdle, he contested the lead much of the way to win on Andrew Balding's Distant Prospect.
Murphy's repeat four-timer brought the comment from a delighted David Johnson that he had fulfilled every expectation. Ian Balding, these days an assistant to his son, revealed that he had told Andrew when Timmy Murphy first came to ride out for them that he was the best schooling jockey he had ever seen. 'He has such beautiful hands, a sense of knowing where to be. But he can ride in front if he has to, and when the others went by he just gave him a little breather and came again. He is a brilliant horseman.'
Does Martin Pipe yet share that opinion? When we asked him at Cheltenham about the pressure on Timmy Murphy, his comment was: 'I hope he is under pressure. Jockeys should always be under pressure.' At Newbury he declared, 'He's clearly a very patient rider and very confident,'
though he did add that on Vodka Bleu Timmy had been 'brilliant'. It would be nice, though, Martin, to have just a little more con brio about a jockey who is currently riding his socks off and who, having paid for past sins, is now making a great job of his redemption.
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