Ruby

What posts a YouTube video on other forums doesn't seem to work here, but for anyone who is interested there is now a better version of Christy Moore's Ballad of Ruby Walsh on YouTube.
Here are the lyrics, anyway.
The Ballad of Ruby Walsh

There’s Bethlehem and Cheltenham and Lourdes and Limerick Junction
The trip to Mejagorie come up for the extra motion
Good people climb Croagh Patrick with serenity on their faces
But Ruby Walsh saved me life below at the Galway Races.
Hey Ruby hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.

They're under starters orders, Ted Walsh is commentating,
Ruby's up on the favourite, she'll take some beating
Necks are strained, eyes are trained, there's fear upon their faces
There's agony and ecstasy below at the Galway races
Ruby hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.

It's there you'll see gentility and sheep dressed up as mutton
There's double barreled names with Mulherns on old melodeons
The talk is all of tillage of silage and corn acre
I fancy Tracy Piggott in the saddle in the enclosure
Ruby hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go

Sir John Muck-Savage Smith is there with Smurfits and O'Reilly's
The owners and the trainers, the stable boys and jockeys
With silk around their arses getting up on rich men's horses
The convention wives and daughters and marriages and divorces.
Hey Ruby, hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.

There's Celtic helicopters land bank speculators,
Builders and developers, crocodiles and alligators
Soldiers of destiny their in the fields of frenzy
their mouths wrapped round the Lamb Of God come back for the gravy,
Hey Ruby, hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.

Thursday is the ladies day and the women all look smashing
Their lashing on the lipstick, Philip Tracy’s all the fashion
You can see the liposuction, the botox and ogmanation
Brazilian haircuts, the colonic irrigation,
Hey Ruby, hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.

And every one's out in Salthill for the craic and for the porter
There's bookies making odds on two flies walking up the wall
There's folk and trad. karaoke and set dances
While some of us who seen better days were looking to take our chances
Hey Ruby, hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.

Their galloping down the back straight, he has her in the canter
A look at her up the jumps be Gad, she's like a belly-dancer
Over the last she hits the front the other one's going to pass her
Winner alright, it's up Kildare, follow me up to Carlow
Hey Ruby, hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go.
Hey Ruby, hold her back, give her the craic and up she'll go

Lyrics by Christy Moore
 
Thanks And for that - I did listen to it on YouTube from the link on FF -
but not of word of it could I grasp! Very amusing to be sure
 
This time last year Paul Nicholls, the champion jumps trainer, published his autobiography, Lucky Break. Now, as the jumps season gathers momentum once more, his jockey, Ruby Walsh, has followed him into print.


This is excellent news, as Walsh is pretty reticent in the main, and his book, Ruby, written in collaboration with Malachy Clerkin of the Sunday Tribune, makes for an easy, accessible, very entertaining read. In the week that I've spent with my copy, these are the five bits that struck me as most interesting but there is plenty more meat to this book that will be enjoyed by any follower of jump racing.
1) The first win at Cheltenham


Endearingly Walsh has not forgotten what it is like to be a fan of the sport, rather than one of its leading professionals. He describes his first visit to Cheltenham in the kind of awestruck terms you might hear from any punter, saying it gave him "the feeling of being in the one place in the world I would be, if I had the choice to be anywhere".
It is the 1996 Festival, the year of Collier Bay and Imperial Call, and Walsh, aged 16, has skipped school for the week to be there with his family. He is already a jockey but has achieved so little at this point that it doesn't even occur to him to imagine himself one day riding into the winner's enclosure. He is simply there to enjoy the action and cheer for Willie Mullins, already an employer, who rode and trained the Bumper winner, Wither Or Which.
Two years later, as Mr R Walsh, he gets his first Festival winner, riding Alexander Banquet, another Mullins-trained winner of the bumper. The horse was sent off at 9-1, meaning he was among the more likely candidates, but his jockey reports that the thought of winning had not even entered his head. "A Cheltenham winner was a far-off, distant dream," he says, and conveys a sense of shock when, as the field race down the back of the course, he realises he is in with a chance.
A major part of the thrill of victory is seeing his name on a Channel 4 graphic as a winning rider at the Festival, alongside Richard Dunwoody, Charlie Swan and Norman Williamson. Then Walsh reminds us that he didn't make that graphic for another four years, not until he rode Blowing Wind in the Mildmay of Flete.
Walsh now holds the record for most wins at the Festival by a jockey but, if we have forgotten how long it took him to establish himself there, he certainly has not.
2) His friendship with Tony McCoy


Your experience of him may be different but I think of Walsh as someone who puts quite severe limits on his media exposure, which is why it was a surprise and a delight to learn that he was working on a book. In it he explains that he is naturally disposed to be shy of strangers. "Most of my close friends are the lads I knew as a teenager," he says.
In December 2001, with Jim Culloty injured, Walsh is asked by Henrietta Knight to come over to Wantage to school some horses. He asks a friend if there is someone in racing who lives in the area who might put him up for the night and gets the answer, Tony McCoy. "'Jesus,' I said. 'I don't really know him that well. Is there nobody else?'"
Five years older, McCoy has been champion jockey six times by this point, so it is not to be wondered at if Walsh feels mildly intimidated. They had chatted to each other while hacking round for third and fourth place in the Grand National, after remounting Blowing Wind and Papillon, but that apparently accounts for most of the words they had ever said to each other at this point.
But there is no one else, so Walsh makes the call, McCoy says yes and, nine years later, Walsh says he is such a frequent guest at Chateau AP that he practically has squatter's rights.
If they hadn't hit it off, Walsh's career might have been very different, since he has never made a home in England and, by his own account, would not have been able to bear the depressing experience of staying many nights in hotels or in digs. Had it not been for the welcome offered by McCoy and his wife, Walsh estimates that he might have lasted no more than a couple of years as a regular rider on this side of the Irish Sea.
Someone, somewhere is undoubtedly wondering if he might not have ended up as Kauto Star's regular rider, if only McCoy had been a bit more standoffish.
3) Keeping two champion trainers happy


Walsh is firmly established as Nicholls' jockey of choice and received glowing praise in the trainer's own book. Together the pair have racked up 17 Festival wins and I'm sure neither wants to contemplate how things might have been without the other.
But it seems to have taken them a very long time to get together. Nicholls made the first approach in early 2001, offering a retainer of £30,000 per year and generous terms. Walsh would be allowed to nominate two Irish-trained horses that he would still be allowed to ride on any day in any race, against whatever Nicholls-trained opposition. But, says Walsh, "I'm a home bird. I love living in Ireland," and so he elected to stay there and continue riding for his father and for Mullins.
A year later Nicholls was still looking for a jockey, having been turned down by Barry Geraghty. Walsh decided "there had to be a way of doing this".
Off his own bat, he comes up with a compromise that will allow him to ride the best horses from two stables, each of which has since become the dominant force on its side of the Irish Sea. On Thursdays and Sundays, days when there is generally jump racing in Ireland through the winter, Walsh would ride there for Mullins. From Monday to Wednesday and on Saturdays, he would be in England for Nicholls.
He would take no retainer, thereby freeing himself, when Cheltenham or other major festivals came round, to pick which stable he would ride for in each race.
Walsh acknowledges the amount of toil and travel involved in making the deal work, as well as a great need for diplomacy. "I was going to have to make a fair few political decisions to keep the peace," he writes. "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."
But Walsh is clearly not short of diplomacy or he would never have been able to get Nicholls and Mullins to sign up for his deal in the first place. For years now he has been having his cake and eating it, if a jockey can ever be so described. He has two young-ish, driven and successful trainers fighting for his services and somehow he keeps them both happy, with the result that he gets to pick his rides on the biggest days from a very large pool of equine talent.
Walsh's genius is not just confined to the racecourse.
4) What he says when asked for tips


This is a really tricky issue for jockeys and I'm so pleased to know what Walsh thinks on the subject. As you would expect, it happens to him all the time.
At 17 he was told what to say when asked for a tip. "Pick a horse, any horse. All the punter wants is a name . . . If it wins, it makes their day and they'll raise a glass to you. If it doesn't, sure that's racing and we go again."
It seems a sensible approach, so long as you can count on such equanimity from the losing punters. But Walsh admits that he struggles to stick to it, "because I'd genuinely have doubts" about the chance of each mount that day. This gets him into trouble because the punter assumes Walsh just doesn't want to share information with him, a view that is confirmed if the jockey gets a double that afternoon.
"Everybody you meet wants to think they have the inside track," he says. "And I understand that, I do. But it can get fairly tiresome."
So there you go, folks. If you want Ruby to respect you, ask for an autograph, wish him well and let him go about his business. When you want to bet, study the form and trust your own judgment.
5) Remounting Kauto


As soon as I opened his book, I wanted to know Walsh's thoughts about what happened at Exeter on 31 January 2005. That was the day when, with a bit of bad luck, Kauto Star's career could have been over before it started.
Having only his second start since joining Nicholls from France, Kauto Star was 2-11 to beat two rivals but fell at the second-last when 12 lengths clear. One of the other runners had already been pulled up and the other was going so slowly that Walsh felt he could still win if he remounted. So he clambered back on Kauto Star, jumped the last fence and rode a furious finish to be beaten a short-head.
The next day it transpired that Kauto Star had a hairline fracture of one hock. He would miss the Cheltenham Festival, though he was able to resume racing in peak condition nine months later. Given his subsequent career, there is no chance that the incident had any lasting effect.
Still, it is likely, as Walsh concedes, that Kauto Star sustained his injury in the fall. That would mean that Walsh asked him to jump a fence at racing speed with a fractured hock, a horrifying idea.
Walsh was criticised, once the injury was known, though the horse apparently showed no symptoms until the next day. He rejects the flak as unfair and says that remounting is "all I'd ever done", whether on a pony as a youngster, in the hunting field or schooling a novice. In Walsh's experience you get back on the horse unless injury prevents it.
That kind of perseverance has taken him far in life but I'm relieved that remounting has since been banned, even though Walsh thinks this is a "ridiculous" outcome. As the Exeter race showed, it is simply not possible to tell, in the moments after a fall, whether a horse is injured or not. If he appears to be fine, he should be walked back to the stables unencumbered.
Walsh and his colleagues get any amount of respect from me for their daring and attacking approach to the sport but the horses need to be protected and remounting involves too much risk.
Click to expand...
 
I wouldn't underestimate the role played by Mullins in making the triangle with Nicholls work. It's the same as Oxx's impact on Johnny Murtagh when he was having his troubles.

Ruby has ridden for us and hopefully will in the future. As a jockey he is top notch, as a personality I'd take McCoy over him any day.

I thought it was a bit rich of them to charge €10 for you to attend his book launch. I would have gone and bought a book to boot if it had been free but a tenner for the pleasure....no thanks. And I think everyone else, bar 50, thought the same (second hand info from someone who was there). It was a pretty poor showing and most there were given tickets.
 
Who's written those observations, Granger? The book sounds fine, but I'm pleased that whoever's written the above remarks isn't a star-struck toady (re the remounting issue).
 
Think Carberry will have a book out next year too, that should be interesting............................
 
As a matter of interest, do you think there would be interest in a book about the four hurdlers that dominated Irish hurdling for three or four years Hardy, Brave Inca, Harchibald and Macs?

I was chatting to a lad yesterday about it and it seems like a good idea. You could flick from horse to horse through the opening half of the book and concentrate on some of their bigger wins later.
 
Cantoris said:
As a matter of interest, do you think there would be interest in a book about the four hurdlers that dominated Irish hurdling for three or four years Hardy, Brave Inca, Harchibald and Macs? .
Click to expand...

It would definitely appeal to a certain demographic. I won a copy of the Denman/Kauto book from the Irish Field a while back. What I found most interesting was finding out about them before they were famous, how they were bought, broken in etc..
 
Cantoris said:
As a matter of interest, do you think there would be interest in a book about the four hurdlers that dominated Irish hurdling for three or four years Hardy, Brave Inca, Harchibald and Macs?
Click to expand...

First chapter would have to be THAT Champion Hurdle! The angle would be the people behind the horses as much as rehashing the races they took part it themselves.
 
There are so many stories around the events. Brave Inca beat Newmill and War of Attrition in the Deloitte and Supreme and all three won the championship races at cheltenham in 2006. Brave Inca and Hardy Eustace were sold at the same sale! We bid on Central House at that sale, the horse that Hardy beat when he won the Land Rover. Brave Inca is probably the reason some of the Forpaddytheplaster guys went into racehorse ownership. After Hardy beat us in THAT champion, I met Lar Byrne in 21 Club at the Paddy Power meeting and we had a bottle of champers as a bet for the following March. Lar gave it to me on the Wednesday night of that Festival!
 
Talk about ups and downs - two brilliant wins and now the RP is reporting Ruby has broken his ankle hope it is premature and it is just a sprain.
 
Seriously, Cantoris, if you make it a softback which can retail for £9.99 and whatever that is in Euros at the time it's published, it'd sell well at racecourses. You'll need to put in some colour plates and get it done by someone who will write fairly cheaply for you, unless you're already a writer and know what you're doing. If you don't want to do it yourself and don't know an existing racing writer who would, I could put you in touch with someone who might take it on, and who'd know where to get it published reasonably, too. You want to make your money back and a wee profit, too.
 
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