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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Declan Murphy and Ami Rao 2017
Design by Leon Dufour/TW
Horse photo © iStock/mari_art

Declan Murphy and Ami Rao have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473542044
ISBNs 9780857524355 (hb)
9780857524362 (tpb)

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To You
For You
Forever You

‘If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery – isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.’

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

Mayday

The gallop, for example, is a four-beat rhythm: hind leg, hind leg, fore leg, fore leg.

You just have to listen for it, to hear it as I hear it, and you will realize how musical it is; how beautifully poetic.

This is the gait of the racehorse; it strikes off with its non-leading hind leg, then the inside hind foot hits the ground before the outside fore, but just by a split second. The movement concludes with the striking off of the leading leg, followed by a moment of suspension when – in glorious majesty – all four hooves are off the ground. Even at 35 or 40 mph, when the animal appears to be flying, it follows this classic, controlled cadence. In truth, it is not flying at all; it is dancing.

I have always followed this beat when I ride, moulding my body to the rhythm of my horse’s stride pattern. And in this way, we have understood each other, my horse and I, our bodies in perfect sync, the energy between us reverberating like the silent echoes of an unspoken voice.

May Day – Monday, 2 May 1994 – was a typical spring day at Haydock Park. The sun was shining brightly through a cloudless azure sky, the stands were packed with holidaymakers looking to have a grand day out. A gentle breeze blew across the racecourse, carrying happy voices, the tinkling of glasses, the familiar, very particular, scent of the horses …

Ominous feelings seemed improbable in an atmosphere like that. And yet, I was troubled. Just the day before, Ayrton Senna had died in a fatal crash at the San Marino Grand Prix.

I was haunted by this, by the emotions swimming around inside my head like demons. I couldn’t quite compute them. At the most simplistic level, a life had been lost. That in itself was profoundly tragic. But it was more than that. Senna was no ordinary man. Three-time Formula One World Championship winner, he was considered by many to be the single greatest racing driver of the modern era. And yet, he had died.

What was more ironic, adding to the layers of sadness and confusion I felt over Senna’s passing, was that Senna himself had been under immense emotional pressure on the day he died, following the death of Formula One colleague Roland Ratzenberger just one day prior. It was later revealed that a furled Austrian flag was found in Senna’s car, which he had presumably intended to raise in honour of Ratzenberger after the race. That was never to be.

It was little wonder that Senna’s death had cast a pall over the entire sports world. After all, we are all conditioned to believe that our heroes are invincible.

To me, it was deeply unsettling, perhaps because for the first time in my life, it brought home the stark reality of my own mortality.

I don’t say this lightly. I don’t say it with ignorance and I certainly don’t say it with arrogance. I am just telling you the truth.

Yes, of course I knew that, like Senna, I was in a dangerous sport. But if you asked me if I had ever thought about death, I could look you in the eye and honestly say I hadn’t.

My teammate was a 1,200-pound animal, whose will I attempted to control at 35 mph. So to say that my profession was fraught with danger would be an understatement. But I was acutely aware of this. I approached race-riding with intuition and intelligence, equally split; there was no room for fear in this equation. I am not saying that I was fearless. How could I be? I’m only human. But I couldn’t afford to consider fear as part of my reality. Fearing fear would have been as good as quitting. So I conquered fear with belief. I rejected fear. I shunned it. And to the extent I could, I tried to keep it at bay.

That I had suffered fewer falls than most of my colleagues was no coincidence. I was deliberate, measured and tactical. I would ride, feeling my horse’s rhythm, the beat of its movement; I would time my every stride, approaching my obstacles with almost academic precision.

But the horse is an animal. An intelligent, unpredictable animal; a combination that can be as exhilarating as it can be deadly. And not even the most controlled and skilled jockey can predict which one it will be and when. So while I knew, as all jockeys do, that broken collarbones were lucky, death sad but not impossible, I certainly didn’t want to think about it.

These were the thoughts in my head as Jim Hogan, my friend, driver and former European champion distance runner, drove me up on that beautiful spring morning to the racetrack at Haydock Park for the Crowther Homes Swinton Handicap Hurdle.

On arriving at the racecourse, as was customary, I went into the weighing room and sat down in my place. Next to me was Charlie Swan, Irish champion rider, my rival and my friend.

I must have seemed preoccupied – not the picture of quiet calm that I was best known to present before a race – because he asked me if I was all right.

And quite unlike the light-hearted banter that usually takes place in a jockeys’ weighing room on any normal day, Charlie and I exchanged thoughts on Senna, his untimely death, and our own vulnerability. It helped to talk to a friend. By the end of our conversation, my mind was more at ease. I felt more relaxed, more myself, more ready to face the challenge that awaited me in a few minutes – my race.

I put on my colours – distinctive red silks – and I went out into the paddock. Arcot was my only ride on the day. There were eighteen horses running in the Swinton Hurdle that afternoon, and I was riding the favourite.

From the moment I got on the horse, I shut everything else out. This was my way – blocking out the world, distractions fading into the background, giving way to a laser-like focus. When I am in this state of ‘flow’, nothing else matters. And so, just like the blinkers on my horse, I had blinkers on my mind. Senna – for the duration of the race – was forgotten. My only objective was to win.

As I started the race, I slotted Arcot into a good position, quickly finding his cruising speed. My judgement told me that there was sufficient pace in the race, so I got him to settle into a comfortable rhythm and I felt he did this well.

After jumping the first five hurdles, I considered that the front runners were going a stride too fast, but I was quite content to be where I was for the moment. It was when jumping the last hurdle on the far side that I started to creep a little bit closer – still completely effortlessly, still completely in control. I felt I had everything in front of me covered, and I felt good.

I was third in line approaching the second last hurdle and I could see the two horses in front of me were picking up speed again. I let out the rein, just a touch, maybe half an inch, and in doing so I was communicating to Arcot that I wanted him to lengthen his stride.

I realized at this point that to have any chance of winning I would need two exceptional jumps from my horse, at the second last and last hurdles respectively. He came through impeccably at the second last, but I knew it was imperative for us to be in sync – body to body, muscle to muscle – to make that last and crucial jump.

There are a lot of things about race-riding that can’t be learnt, they have to be felt. A jockey has to feel every movement of the horse underneath him and understand what each one means.

And going into that last hurdle, I felt something very telling from the movement of that horse beneath me. I realized three things, each separate but inextricably linked. First, that the stride ahead of us was too long. Second, that Arcot would have to reach, to extend himself, to make it. And third and most important, that in my judgement, I didn’t think he could.

When I was a little boy, I had a Shetland pony called Roger. He was my pony and he was beautiful, small and lithe, a rich chestnut in colour, with a cheeky white face and two white legs. I loved Roger – he was intense and expressive, independent and strong-willed, with a definite rebellious streak within him. And, like me, he didn’t like to be told what to do!

One chilly autumn day, I rode Roger out across the fields with the sole purpose of getting him to do what I wanted him to do. We started off well, jumping all the ditches across maybe three or four fields, Roger dutifully obeying my every command. I remember grinning from ear to ear, feeling smugly pleased with myself. Alas, a little too soon!

Because a few minutes later, when I decided it was time to turn back, Roger decided that he didn’t want to. Try as I may, he wasn’t going to jump the ditch on the way back.

Horses are living beings. They are spirited. They are stubborn. They are strong. In their natural state, they have a soul that is wild and free until the point they earn our trust. But even then, they have an instinct of their own. And the right to exercise it, at will.

So I tried and I tried, first by coaxing and cajoling, and then – as I grew more impatient – by chiding and rebuking. My efforts were completely futile. Roger wouldn’t move.

Then, stranded three fields from home with no way of getting back, I had an idea.

I took my coat off and put it over Roger’s head. His head completely covered, and unable to see where he was going, he had no choice but to place his trust in me. He quietened immediately and I reversed him slowly into the ditch, then I climbed on his back, pulled the coat off and waited. Finding himself in the ditch now, Roger had no option but to jump out. No sooner had he done that, I turned him around in the direction of home. Roger jumped the ditch and jumped all the way home.

Roger remained a pony of tremendous character, but something subtle changed from that day forth. Roger understood my will as much as he thought that he could force his will on me.

At that last hurdle at Haydock Park, when I realized that my horse simply did not have the reserves to take off the way I had tactically imagined, I made a split-second decision.

I decided to give him the opportunity to take an extra stride before he made his jump. But he didn’t take it.

If I’d had the opportunity to take my coat off and put it over his head, so he could trust in my instinct, I would have grasped it in a heartbeat. But of course, I didn’t. Instead, I stood by helplessly – stranded like that day three fields from home – while our communication, that crucial silent dialogue which bonds horse and rider, shattered like a thin, fragile sheet of glass.

And at that very instant – that fleeting snapshot in time – we rewrote my destiny.

In reality, the series of events that followed unfolded within milliseconds of each other, but in my head they seemed to play out in slow motion, frame by frame until time itself stood frozen in disbelief.

Arcot launched himself towards the belly of the hurdle in a valiant gesture of misplaced ambition.

The hyperextension of his body in reaching for the hurdle – the freakish, unnatural motion of it – snapped his pelvis in mid-flight, dragging his now lame rear end down to the ground.

Then, fractions of a second later – as the same cold horror of realization dawned on the beast – his front legs paddled helplessly in the air before they smashed into the timber of the frame.

And right then, in that moment of truth, I felt a strange calm, and my body and mind seemed somehow to disconnect, as if what happened next wasn’t happening to me at all.

Just as my head flew forward with the momentum of the stride, the distressed horse’s head flew back, our two skulls colliding with a sickening thud that pulsated through the air. I lost consciousness before I was catapulted off the horse and thrown to the ground. And there we were, man and beast lying motionless in one mangled, burning heap of broken flesh.

In the quiet stillness of the moment came the deafening roar of the thunder of hooves. I was now lying unconscious, directly in the path of the horses approaching me from behind. Next in line to finish the race was Cockney Lad, carrying aboard him an ashen-faced Charlie Swan.

Trapped in the rhythm of his own beat, Cockney Lad advanced towards us, panic and fear filling his head when he saw our lifeless, tangled bodies on the ground ahead.

Frantically trying to avoid the larger of the two objects that lay stricken before him, he swerved away from the horse and made his choice.

Eyes wide in frenzied resignation, he thrust his body forward and, capitulating under the force of his own momentum, his hoof hit my head, shattering my skull in twelve places.

Roger

The Aftermath

The dull, hollow thud of hoof hitting head – life hitting life – reverberated hideously through the air.

In a cloud of dust, the other horses galloped past me to finish the race that they had begun, the sound of their hooves drowning out the sound of silence.

Spectators gasped, colleagues prayed, reporters clocked the seconds. And everybody waited – frozen faces, bated breath – for me to awaken.

But I lay in a deep, silent sleep, while the blood gushed out of my mouth and on to the ground of Haydock Park, staining it a deep, vivid red.

My Ghost

She makes me watch videos of my old races on YouTube – videos I didn’t even know existed. ‘You were a beautiful rider, Declan,’ she says.

When I say nothing, she sighs. ‘You mustn’t take it lightly, you know. Your riding is brilliant – so natural, so effortless. You were meant to ride; some things are just meant to be.’ Then, ‘How could you not want to be a jockey and be so fucking good at it?’

‘Don’t swear,’ I say. ‘I don’t swear. I want this to be an eloquent book.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t swear, I didn’t drink till I was thirty, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble, I don’t lie.’

She shakes her head then. ‘I’m not writing your book unless you are perfectly honest with me, Declan Murphy. Everybody has sins.’

My Declan

This is the natural order of things, nature’s way of giving warning before disaster strikes.

On Monday, 2 May 1994, there was no such warning. The sky was blue, the sun shone bright. The thunder didn’t come, and neither did the storm.

And when that lightning struck, it struck with a vengeance. Little arcs of light danced across the roof of 5 Bank Place and then they all converged, to strike at its very heart.

At 1.45 p.m. on Monday, 2 May, my father, Tommy Murphy, walked through the kitchen of our home, at 5 Bank Place, where my mother was engrossed in baking her third batch of bread. He stopped for an imperceptible second, and then said casually, almost in passing, ‘Mam, it’s the last big race of the season. Declan’s riding the favourite, I’m just going to put the television on.’

This was his way of asking my mother to watch the racing with him. He knew she had little interest in the sport, so he never asked explicitly.

Maura looked up from her dough and nodded. Every married couple has their own particular and idiosyncratic way of understanding one another. Tommy and Maura understood each other perfectly.

Five minutes later, at 1.50 p.m., Tommy settled himself comfortably into his favourite armchair and switched on the television. Tommy was content. Sitting in the chair made him happy – it occupied pride of place in the Murphy household, positioned strategically so that it was both directly in front of the TV as well as closest to the fireplace that bathed the room in warmth and light on many a chilly night.

Tommy was happy for another reason. There was nothing he enjoyed more than watching his son on TV, ghosting yet another winner past the finishing line, and into the annals of racing glory.

For the fact remained that Tommy Murphy was immensely proud of his youngest son. So much so, that the residents of the little town of Hospital (Irish: An tOspidéal, named after the crusading Knights Hospitaller) had become quite accustomed to the sight of him walking down the street, newspaper open, stopping to show people the photographs, as he declared in paternal delight, ‘My Declan did this’ or ‘My Declan did that’.

To Tommy, the specifics of the ‘this’ or ‘that’ were of little relevance; the fact that it was ‘My Declan’ doing the ‘this’ or ‘that’ was what filled his heart with joy.

At 1.55 p.m., he focused his attention on the TV just as the jockeys began cantering down to the start. He could pick out his son straight away, even from a distance. There was something about the way he sat on a horse that made him easy to spot.

Just then, Maura Murphy walked into the sitting room, considerably less animated than her husband. She was a petite woman, with a kind face and a quiet, soft-spoken demeanour.

If anyone believed that watching three sons perform the same death-defying feat for a living had hardened her in any way, they couldn’t be more wrong. When any of her boys were racing, she preferred not to watch, opting instead to go for a walk. When she did stay home, she watched each race while holding her breath, releasing it only with a ‘Thanks be to God’ when it was over. And so, as far as Maura was concerned, it mattered less if her sons won or lost as long as they were still on the horse’s back when they finished the race.

Today was no different. She sat down reluctantly on the edge of the chair, hands together, fingers linked.

At 2 p.m. sharp, the Crowther Homes Swinton Handicap Hurdle began, as a field of eighteen ambitious, talented, seriously competitive jockeys battled for distinction.

As the race progressed, Tommy kept his eyes fixated on the figure in the red silks towards the back of the field, riding – in his characteristic style – a patient race. But Tommy knew he would pounce in the end, when the time was right. It was the way his son always rode, with his head – a clever rider. And so it was hard to contain the excitement in his voice when he spoke, ‘He’s going to win, my Declan is. He’s going to win.’

‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ Maura said by way of reply, as if announcing the banality of the task would somehow cement her disinterest in her son’s potential victory.

Precisely 3 minutes and 27 seconds into the race, on a racecourse 25 miles outside the city of Liverpool, a horse crashed into the last hurdle.

Even as the Irish sunbeams crept cheerfully across the room and the smell of freshly baked soda bread filled the air, a mother and a father watched their TV screen in horror as their son plummeted headfirst into the turf and then, within seconds, appeared to be kicked in the side of the head by an advancing horse.

Barney Curley

Sometimes, these are the people we are most conscious of. Other times, they are just an idea.

I first met him on a Saturday night in the spring of 1984, sitting on the sofa of my living room. I was leading amateur jockey in Ireland at the time, all of seventeen years old. He was on the other side of my TV screen – tough, inscrutable, intelligent – star of The Late Late Show.

At this time, I was in my final year at school and every Saturday night, as a matter of course, I would go to the disco in either Galbally or Ballylanders or Kilballyowen with my friends John Farrell and Gerry Gallagher. Purely by chance, the night in question happened to be that rare one time when I didn’t end up going out with my friends. And so, much against my adolescent will, I was subjected to The Late Late Show by my mother, who watched it religiously every Saturday night.

When you think about the fact that we had only two TV channels in the whole of the country at the time, RTÉ 1 and RTÉ 2, you will understand why The Late Late Show was such a phenomenon. The presenter, Gay Byrne, was a renowned, well-respected public figure, and whether or not it was intended this way, the show had become a forum where previously taboo social-interest topics were discussed openly, along with book reviews, music acts and guest visits from famous and interesting people – politicians, actors, authors and others with stories to tell.

Even then, he was a controversial figure – shrewd, outspoken and articulate, the perfect foil to the charismatic Gay Byrne – and though I had started off watching the show reluctantly, the dynamic duo had me hooked. He was being featured on the show because he had just successfully raffled his mansion in Mullingar and was talking about the gambles he had pulled off – some of the biggest betting coups in racing history.

I sat glued to the television, awestruck, filled with admiration and wonder. Here was a man who did his own thing, kept his own counsel. He had originally studied to become a Jesuit priest. Now he was one of the most famed people in racing, a legend of a punter. He had successfully outsmarted the system in ways that no one could even imagine, let alone execute, and all entirely legally. All of this struck a chord within me; I was totally, completely fascinated.

He went on to tell Gay Byrne that he had decided to move to England, and that he was taking all his horses with him. Then, he said – and my ears pricked up like a horse’s – ‘I’m going to take the best jockey that I consider in Ireland or England to ride them.’

Now, here’s the thing about me, about my life, the fundamental truth that might surprise you, even shock you, and now’s as good a time as any to tell you, and it is this: in all my life, I have never, ever harboured any ambition of making a career out of racing horses. There, I’ve said it. I didn’t ever want to be a jockey, and this truth hasn’t changed from the moment I got on my first horse to the moment I got off my last. It was a glorious hobby. I was riding for fun. And, for me, that’s all there was to it.

But on hearing him make that remark on The Late Late Show, it sparked something within me. I remember saying to my mother, without even thinking about it, the words tumbling out almost as an automatic reflex, ‘If I were ever to ride horses, I’d love to ride them for him.’

Why would I say this, you ask, a young boy of seventeen who had no interest in becoming a career jockey? What was it about this man that drew me to him in this way?

I don’t know, is my honest answer. How can you say what’s in a man? Only that whatever there was in him, I was fascinated by it. It was as simple as that. If he sold chickens, I would have wanted to sell chickens for him. It so happened that he needed someone to ride horses, and I could ride horses. And I could ride them as good as anyone else.

A man who was unusual. A man who was ingenious. A man who was cleverer than anyone I could think of. A man who was like nobody I’d met before, like a character out of a novel or a movie – only he was real.

I was born Declan Joseph Murphy on 5 March 1966, to Tommy Murphy and Maura Murphy (née McCann).

The second youngest of eight, I was a precocious child, eager to learn, eager to absorb, ever-ready for a challenge, but always very much in control. There was a self-assurance about me even at a young age, a quiet confidence that somehow gave the impression that I was older than my years. Much later, in an interview for Reader’s Digest, my father would say of me, ‘When Declan was eight years old, he spoke like an adult.’

As a child, I was intuitive and self-aware; I knew what I could do and what I couldn’t, but when I believed I could do something, I generally did it. I was sensitive and shy on the inside, but outwardly, I came across as fearless, unfazed by it all.

I believe that the nucleus of who we are, as people, rarely ever changes. Because as much as I am a product of the experiences that have shaped me, I still believe that at the core, who I am today, my way of being, has always stayed true to the child I once was. I am still a deeply instinctive person, whether in my interactions with people or horses; my first impressions are rarely wrong. Trust and loyalty are sacrosanct to me, and when I offer someone my friendship, it usually lasts a lifetime.

This is the way I approached horses, it is the way I approached racing, and it is the way I approach life. It is the only way I know.

Growing up in rural Limerick amidst green, open spaces, horses were a natural part of my childhood. My father, an engineer for the local waterworks, was an avid follower of the sport but never rode himself. My Uncle Mikey did, however, as did most of my brothers and my sister Kathleen, who would end up being as good as, if not better than, the rest of us.

Horses and ponies were part of the family – how many we had at any given time depended largely on how much space we had to look after them. But my childhood wouldn’t have been the same without them: Barney, Roger, Misty, Lightning – my first ponies, my first teachers and my first friends.

My earliest proper recollection of horses goes back to Strawberry, the very first pony my family owned. If you were to think of a white canvas, flecked all over with red-brown strawberry shapes, and stretched over the body of a horse, that was the very aptly named Strawberry for you. He was a big, strong-willed character, who had been an excellent show-jumping pony in his early life. We used him as a workhorse – my older brothers Laurence and Pat used to ride him and he would tow the cart to deliver firewood all around the village.

I had probably just started walking when I first became aware of Strawberry, but it is amazing how much of some things one can remember (and how little of others), and he stands out in my mind as the first introduction my big blue toddler eyes had to the wide world of equestrian wonderment.

It was maybe only a couple of years later, when I was about four years old, that I scrambled aboard my first pony to ride for fun. And what fun it was! My older brothers and sisters were already riding by now, so it was almost a rite of passage that I would join them on horseback, as soon as I possibly could. The curious thing with us, even as we grew older, is that we were never taught to ride, we learnt to do it ourselves. It was a normal part of everyday life; we rode horses like kids in other parts of the world ride bicycles – we would ride for pleasure, for the sheer joy of it.

Kathleen and I used to have races around the field, imagining we were riding in the Grand National, and our ponies were Red Rum and Ben Nevis. Or sometimes they were L’Escargot and Little Wolf – every horse that was on the television at the time, they were them! And when the Dublin Horse Show was on, we would pretend to be Eddie Macken and Paul Darragh, representing Ireland in show-jumping. We would hop up on two ponies, bareback and no bridles, and they would gallop down to the end of the field under the trees, where one of us would fall off and the other would be declared the winner!

Later, when I moved on to more sophisticated riding and was first shown how to use a saddle, I actually remember not understanding why people used saddles at all – it seemed so much more natural just to ride bareback. That was the way we all rode, starting out – no saddle, no bridle, just a head collar with a piece of rope tied to each side. It was mad, but that was the fun of it for us.

Looking back, I realize just how much I learnt from those early days of riding ponies – it really served to hone my natural instinct for handling horses. Sometimes, when you don’t have the luxury of formal instruction, you don’t overthink things, you just rely on ‘feel’. All the time, you’re talking to the pony, you’re working it out between yourselves – how to stay on, how to get him to keep you on; the unspoken communication. This would prove such a valuable lesson later on in my life when I was out there riding racehorses at big races – it didn’t matter really, the enormity of the event, the key to success was exactly the same. Instinct, intuition, judgement. Back to basics.

Once, when I was ten years old, my father took me to the horse races at Tipperary Racecourse, which is just a few miles from where we lived. My second-oldest brother, Pat, was already a jockey by this time, and my other brother Eamon was successfully racing ponies. At the track we met pony trainer Christy Doherty and, mistaking me for my brother Eamon, he looked at me and to my surprise and delight said, ‘Eamon, would you ride my pony on Sunday?’ My father had stepped away for a minute, and I thought it the funniest thing in the world to pretend to be my brother, so I shrugged and I grinned and I said, ‘Sure!’

On that Sunday, my father dropped me off at Newcastle West, where I jumped in the car with Christy Doherty and, with the pony, String of Pearls, safely in the trailer behind us, we set off for County Cork. It was when we were about halfway through our two-hour journey that the trainer stopped the car at the side of the road – there was nothing around us for as far as the eye could see – next to a gate that opened out on to a field. He then led the pony out of the trailer, took her into the field and let her have a long roll in the grass! He explained to me that a roll in the grass was as good as a stone of oats – it spoke volumes about the wellbeing of a horse. It was at this point, while String of Pearls was having a good old roll in a field in the middle of nowhere, that Christy Doherty started to realize I wasn’t Eamon. He stopped mid-conversation, leaned forward, squinted at my face and asked, ‘Are you Eamon?’

He told me then that he was very sorry but he couldn’t risk letting me ride his pony because of course I had never ridden competitively before. I was disappointed, naturally – I thought I would have really enjoyed this race – but I said, ‘Sure, no problem, could I come along anyway?’

When we arrived at the races, I wandered around, taking in the atmosphere – the buzz, the banter, the boisterous laughter. It felt so vibrant, so electrifying. I wished I was participating in the excitement rather than merely spectating, but by now Christy Doherty had already found a more experienced rider for his pony. As luck would have it, however, I overheard Bosco McMahon at one of the horseboxes saying that they needed a rider for a pony in the 14.2hh race – the same race that I’d been hoping to ride as Eamon. So I pulled on the most earnest face I could conjure up, told them I’d ridden many winners before, when of course I’d never raced before in my life, and got myself on the pony.

Whether it was skill, fate, or plain dumb luck, I will never know, but there I was, racing my first pony, The Rake, in wellingtons and a borrowed helmet, and I won, beating the pony that I was taken to the races to ride. My win surprised trainers and the other competitors, who couldn’t believe that a ten-year-old child who had never raced before had actually walked off with the prize. For me, it was my first taste of victory, and I was on top of the world.

The only thing sweeter than winning the race was the look on Christy Doherty’s face as it happened; that still makes me laugh. He could never say my name properly, he always called me ‘Del-can’. He walked up to me that day, after the event, and said, ‘Oh, Del-can, you should have rode my pony!’ ‘It’s Declan,’ I remember saying to him, smiling innocently, ‘not Del-can, but Declan.’ And from then on and for evermore, in Christy Doherty’s eyes, I went from being ‘Del-can, the boy who had never ridden before’ to ‘Declan, the boy who could ride’.

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.’

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 remiss 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.

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