The Big Interview: Johnny Murtagh
Life has at times been a long and painful journey for the jockey, from suicidal alcoholic to top-class rider with the respect of everyone in racingDavid Walsh, chief sports writer
On Thursday morning, Johnny Murtagh had breakfast with his wife, Orla, at the Runnymede Hotel near Egham in Surrey. The only certainty in a jockey’s breakfast is The Racing Post and Murtagh scanned the Gold Cup field for dangers. What could stop his horse, Yeats? At About 9.30am he finished eating, disappeared to his room and then returned to the hotel lobby in his tracksuit.
The morning run is now part of his life, as regular as breakfast and just as beneficial. It is part of the reason he returns to the Runnymede, as he’s only got to walk to the terrace at the back of the hotel, through the garden and he’s standing by the Thames, with miles of riverbank to soothe him on his run. He has an affinity with rivers, ever since his friend Michael “Magic” O’Brien let him in on one of life’s secrets. “John,” he said, “the river doesn’t need pushing.”
“What do you mean?” “Think about it, remember it, the river doesn’t need pushing.”
So, off he went on Thursday morning, the wind in his face and nothing much on his mind except the winning of big races. Today was the day. Already Aidan O’Brien and the team at Ballydoyle had supplied him with three Group One winners at Royal Ascot, but today’s race mattered more. Yeats was a seven-year-old, at that time in his life when Flat-race champions are taking care of all those equine mothers-to-be.
But Yeats had won the Gold Cup in 2006 and 2007, and who could resist the temptation to try for a third and become just the second horse in the 201-year history of the race to achieve the treble? So, on that run Murtagh thought about how he would ride the horse. One thought dominated the others: he wanted to win this race for the horse more than himself, even more than he wanted to win it for O’Brien and the lads in the yard.
It was what the horse deserved. He had spoken to fellow jockey Seamus Heffernan, who rode Yeats at home. “You’re not telling me, Seamie, that he’s getting faster at seven?”
“Johnny, I am telling you that, he’s showing more pace now than he ever did.”
O’Brien reminded him of the horse’s lionhearted courage and how he shouldn’t be afraid to kick for home sooner rather than later. Beads of perspiration seeped through his skin as he ran and he thought about increasing the tempo on Yeats with a mile to go, moving up to the leaders with four furlongs left and making it a battle from there. If the pace was unusually quick, he would wait a little longer and only set his horse free when they turned for home.
Either way, he couldn’t see how the others could beat Yeats. That thought made him smile because with three major Ascot victories under his belt already, he felt no urge to tighten it. He had texts the previous night from friends back in Ireland. “It can’t get any better than this, Johnny,” they said. “It is going to get better,” he wrote in reply.
From the beginning of the week, he sensed how good it would be. They were walking onto the racecourse for the first race of the five-day meeting when, from his perch on the handsome colt Haradasun, he detected a slight nervousness in O’Brien. “Are you happy with the preparations,” he asked the trainer. “Yeah,” said O’Brien, “totally happy.” “Well, you can’t do any more than that, you better leave the rest to me,” said the rider.
Getting to the end of his morning run, he thought about the work O’Brien did, the endless hours, the unrelenting drive, the care that Heffernan put into Yeats’s work on the gallops, the love that the groom David Hickey had for his horse, the dream of the horse’s owners and breeders that he would win a third Gold Cup and, most of all, what the horse himself deserved.
Murtagh was just the last link in a long chain and although he wouldn’t often say this to the lads, he thought he had the easiest job. “Mine is a little job,” he would sometimes tell Orla, “just steering them back up in the right direction.”
Breeder, breaker, trainer, groom, work rider, jockey, horse: whose part is the most important? William Butler Yeats, the poet after whom the horse was named, explained this many years before in his poem, Among School Children: O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
For years, that was the bit that Murtagh didn’t get. He thought he was the dancer. That, somehow, it was all about him. It is a long story and not easy to tell. I remind him of something he said while travelling in the back of O’Brien’s Jeep at Ballydoyle 12 days ago. “I won Derbies and they didn’t mean much to me,” he had said, by way of nothing. What did he mean? “For a long time, I spent my life thinking if I could be champion jockey, everything would be fine. If I could win the Derby, I’d be all right if I could only get there, everything would work out.
“I became champion, I won the Derby, then I won it again, got where I wanted to get to and gave out all the spiel. But there was a void, an emptiness inside. I was missing something but couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Even now, I can’t tell you exactly what was missing.”
He was 15 years of age and on his way to becoming an Irish schools boxing champion when someone sat beside his mother at a fight evening held at a hotel in his native County Meath. “Know what,” the man said, “that young lad would make a jockey.”
“He’s my son, why do you think that?”
“He’s small, he’s light, he’s got good balance, a good sense of rhythm and plenty of courage.”
Sheila Murtagh has always been a sporty woman. She played Gaelic football with her son and two daughters and when the snow fell, she was with them at the top of the hill, sliding down on fertiliser bags. Someone thinking Johnny could be a jockey interested her because Michael, her husband, had wanted to be a jockey but he was told you couldn’t be a jockey if you weren’t brought up with them.
She wasn’t so easily put off and so wrote to the school for apprentice jockeys in County Kildare, got a two-week trial for her son and sent him on his way. The teenager thought it would be a bit of fun but as soon as he stepped into the world of horses, he knew it was for him. From the trial, he got on the 10-month course and within a year, he was apprenticed to John Oxx, one of Ireland’s leading trainers. He was 17 when he rode his first winner, 19 when he became champion apprentice and 22 when he became first jockey to Oxx. And so began one of the most successful riding careers in the history of Flat-racing in Ireland and the most difficult battle Murtagh would face. “I don’t know where it came from but I remember that when I was young, I loved to hear people say, ‘Well done, Johnny.’ Lived for it, I did. I was a people-pleaser and it nearly killed me.”
The difficulty for a pleaser comes when he is asked to do the wrong thing: “Come on Johnny, you’ve just won a Group One, you’re entitled to celebrate.”
Success was followed by excess, insecurity masked by arrogance, and Johnny Murtagh changed. “I had come from a humble background, but when you start riding winners, you think, ‘I’m able to do this,’ and you start looking down on people. I got the big car, I would look at people and think, ‘I’ll talk to you because down the line, I will be able to get something out of you,’ or, ‘He’ll get me places, I’ll talk to him.’ And the small fellow came along, ‘Ah Johnny, how are things?’ ‘Nah, I’m sorry, too busy now.’ And that fellow was where I came from and I was treating him like dirt. The guy with the few quid, I had plenty of time for him.”
He drank more than he should and without realising it, alcoholism crept up on him. Not that he saw it. If there was a problem, he would just ride a few more winners and things settled down. And on he carried, as before. “I was full of ego and full of nothing,” he says. “I knew everything and knew nothing. Somebody would tell me something and I would say, ‘Yeah, I already knew that.’ But it got to the stage where you knew you knew nothing. Then I went to a party on a Thursday night, woke up Friday, went to the sauna, and couldn’t sweat. On the Saturday I rode three pounds overweight for John Oxx and got beaten by a neck.
“John wasn’t very happy. ‘Look Johnny,’ he said, ‘the stories I’m hearing back, the owners are talking, this can’t continue. It would be better if we went our separate ways.’ I thought this was the worst thing that ever happened to me and was determined to show them. I rode four winners that weekend at Galway, 10 winners that month and it was, ‘Well done, Johnny’ again.”
He lost his job with Oxx in 1993 but remained in denial about the extent of his problem. “I knew there was a problem and wanted to do something about it. I went to St Pat’s clinic in Dublin, booked myself in for six weeks. That was 1993, the first time I did something serious about my problem.”
Two years later, Oxx gave him back his old job and for eight years, he had plenty of success but no true contentment. “I had stopped drinking but didn’t have one year sober. I would stay off it for nine months, then have one night out, wake the next morning and start again. During those years, I couldn’t let on I was drinking. I didn’t want Orla to know. When riding in England, I would have a few glasses of wine, ring Orla and tell her I was going for an early night. Instead, I’d meet the lads in the bar, stay there all night and wake up the next morning with 18 missed calls on my phone. Then I’d go down to the hotel gym and hammer myself on the treadmill. ‘You’ve had your fun, now you pay for it.’”
He won the 2000 Derby on Sinndar, the 2002 Derby on High Chaparral, and one of the things he remembers is buying champagne for the lads in the weighing room and thinking as he left, ‘Them ###### can drink that, I can’t.’
Through the winter of 2002-03, he rode in Dubai, drank too much and reached a critical crossroads. “I’ve had great people in my life. John Oxx and his wife were always very good to me. I’ve got a wife, Orla, a beautiful woman whom I love and who might not have stayed with me if she wasn’t the woman she is. And I don’t want to offend her by bringing up bad things from my past. I haven’t told many people this but I nearly didn’t get the chance to put things right.
“That winter in Dubai, I was living on the 10th floor of an apartment block and was looking out over the balcony thinking people would probably be better off without me. That’s how close I got to not getting back. I came home from Dubai and I was like a time bomb and it was ticking. I was arguing with people, getting in trouble with the stewards, using people and finally realising I had to change.”
It was around that time that Murtagh met “Magic”, a man who once drank too much but had been sober for 23 years. They met for coffee in the morning and talked about life. “We call him Magic because he works magic with people, not with cards. He helped to change my outlook on life. I would tell him about the day I was annoyed by the guy who said to me, ‘You did well on those two winners Johnny but you should have won the last.’ And it bothered me that he found fault with my ride on the one that got beat. Magic just said, ‘Why didn’t you just enjoy the compliment and forget the rest?’ He was right.”
When he was 21, Murtagh took his father Michael to his first AA meeting. He knew his dad needed to address his problem and at the time, he just accepted that he too needed help. Michael committed himself to staying sober and hasn’t taken a drink for 16 years. “One of the most difficult things was when my father was in the early years of his recovery, he would call me, ‘Johnny, how are things?’
“Good, Dad, how are things for you?” “Good, really good. I’m sticking to the programme. They were two good winners yesterday. But how’s your head, where are you at the moment?”
“I’m sorry, Da, there’s a fellow calling me on the other phone. We’ll talk later. I couldn’t bear it when he asked me how I was doing. But he stayed with it, and when I saw how much better he was getting, the example was there for me. It gave me hope. We have a great relationship now, he’s a great man. Imagine telling your father you love him. Well, I do and I’m thinking, ‘Jaysus, what’s wrong with me? And he says to me, ‘I love you son.’ Imagine him saying that, a typical Irishman, f******* hell don’t tell anyone. But that’s what we have now. I mean my mother used to always say it, but that’s to be expected. I often think my da is living the life he once wanted for himself through me, and I like to think that.”
Through the six years of sobriety, Murtagh has lost the feeling of being a fraud, something he had felt through the first 15 years of his career. “People shouldn’t misunderstand this,” he says. “I had some great times through those years, big winners and a lot of laughs, but there was always something missing and the fact that I didn’t know what it was only made it worse.”
Magic talked to him about what was important, how true happiness could come only if a man lived his life in the right way, and Murtagh began to notice how much people wanted him to stay sober, his own parents, Orla’s parents. He remembers his mother telling him how pleased she was that he was no longer drinking. “She told me how she worried when the phone rang late at night, always worried something bad would happen. I thought of those 18 missed calls and the upset I was causing people.”
He told Magic about how much better he felt in himself, how he felt like a proper human being since he had got his life in order. Two and a half years ago, the Coolmore operation considered how best to replace stable jockey Jamie Spencer. The choice came down to Kieren Fallon and Murtagh. Both talented jockeys, they went for Fallon. Murtagh needed to talk it through with Magic. “The river doesn’t need pushing, John,” he told him. “You don’t need to rush things, just take it easy, let things flow. These things are happening for your greater benefit.”
Fallon rode many magnificent races for the Ballydoyle team but his life wasn’t where it needed to be. The call to Murtagh came from Michael Tabor, one of the partners in Coolmore. “Johnny, we’d like you to ride for us.” He says he asked for time to think about it and one second later accepted.
Magic had been right. The river hadn’t needed pushing. His time had come. He loved the ride down to the start on Yeats, glancing back at the grandstand, marvelling at the size of the crowd (73,130), and telling himself that if a jockey couldn’t perform on this stage, he couldn’t perform anywhere. And Yeats felt so good. “With over a mile to go, I was still swinging out of him, trying to get him relaxed, and sensing they weren’t really going fast enough for him. I pulled him out with five furlongs to go and started to get him going with a half-mile to go. I knew how fast I was going, I looked across at the French horse on my inside and thought, ‘Well, you’re not going to last at this pace, there’s only going to be one winner here.’”
Turning into the straight, Coastal Path moved more fluently through the bend and pinched a half-length lead. Then Yeats accelerated and soon the French horse was faltering, withering in the heat of battle. “We got to the front, my fellow then relaxed a little and the other fellow, Geordieland, came up on our outside. For a few strides it was a bit of a battle, but my lad just kicked on again and that was that.”
Through the final furlong, Murtagh only needed to push Yeats to the winning line, each stride creating more daylight between him and the challengers. Horse and jockey went past the post in triumph, the jockey crouched low on the horse’s shoulders, as if he was part of the horse, or, at least, an intricate part of the performance. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” The jockey didn’t gesticulate as he crossed the line, didn’t draw attention to himself, except to tell us he understood he wasn’t the dancer, rather he was just a part of the performance.
That was his fourth winner of the week, his fourth Group One at Royal Ascot. Any doubt he might be the leading rider was banished by yesterday’s fifth victory on Macarthur in the Group Two Hardwicke Stakes and his win in the meeting’s final race on Honolulu. Success in the biggest races meant he was buying a lot of champagne for his fellow jockeys but this time, without a hint of regret. That old Johnny had long gone.
And the explanation for that came the morning after we had met at his hotel. He called because there was something he wanted to include. “Do you know when I was telling you stuff,” he said, “I kept saying that something was missing, that emptiness that took away from the good days, and I said I didn’t know what it was. I’ve been thinking about it since. Peace of mind, that’s what it was and for almost 10 years, I didn’t have it.”
