When, back in the mists of history, I proposed to Mrs Oakley (in the rather naff Caribbean cocktail bar of what seemed at the time to be a fashionable London venue patronised by a set we could not afford to join) I prefaced my question with a long preview about the perils of marrying a journalist. Fortunately, she did not take me seriously.
A young CNN producer told me the other day that she was warned on starting her journalism course in a Spanish university that the failure rate for marriages in our trade was worse than any other. But Mrs O has stuck with it through a train-wreck life of cancelled dinner parties, curtailed holidays and mortally offended ex-friends with more predictable occupations.
My Christmas reading has consoled me that she could have done worse. She could have married a jump jockey.
In public there have been few more amiable, intelligent and good-tempered National Hunt riders in the past 20 years than Mick Fitzgerald, for so long the stable jockey to Nicky Henderson in Lambourn. But the private side he reveals in Better Than Sex — My Autobiography (Racing Post, £18.99) is a fearsome warning to any lady thinking of taking up with a rider over obstacles.
Before his first marriage he told his wife that his career came first. The day he rode a treble at the Cheltenham Festival she wasn’t there and he reflected, ‘She just wasn’t a factor, she was largely irrelevant. I was going to Cheltenham with four good rides on Gold Cup Day and that was massive. What my wife did that day was not even a green dot on my radar.’ Even if he did later feel guilty and leave the celebration party to go home.
It was so reminiscent of Richard Dunwoody’s searingly unsparing autobiography in which he recorded how his all-encompassing desire to win made him a danger to himself and those about him. He described how after a fall at Newbury at the height of his championship battle with Adrian Maguire he had a row with his wife ‘who didn’t have a mean bone in her body’ in which ‘all the malice and anger came from me’, how he raged about the house after a riding mistake battering himself against doors and walls in self-reproach.
It was a reminder, too, of those descriptions of Tony McCoy boiling himself like a lobster to do the weight, endlessly pressing the video re-wind button on the rare day when he hasn’t won a race. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he once told a friend. ‘You don’t have to live with me.’
Those of us who thrill at the way these warriors fearlessly throw half a ton of horse at obstacles many times a day sometimes forget the obsessive drive which lies behind the conviction they impose on themselves that they are immortals who will survive and who simply have to win.
I had waited eagerly for Mick Fitzgerald’s book. His first, with Carl Evans, contained the best descriptions of riding and schooling horses I have ever read. The new life story, written with Donn McLean, is an enthralling picture of a jockey’s life. The beginnings on a pony bought from a tinker. The early disappointments, the breakthrough with Jackie Retter, the next stage trying to escape the shadow of the relentlessly successful Dunwoody. Along with the great rides and the great races we get the full flavour of the boozy nights and the craic, the rivalry with fellow riders and the manoeuvrings to make sure you are on the right horse on the big occasion.
It is glorious macho material from the thinking man’s jockey, particularly through the great years with Nicky Henderson. How did he feel, John Francome asked Mick on air, when he was injured and Ruby Walsh rode his great favourite Marlborough to a big race success: ‘I feel like someone has just driven a stake through my heart. And I’ve just watched eight grand flutter away out the window.’ Having a stake driven through his heart was about the only injury Mick didn’t suffer and he describes, too, in harrowing detail ‘the pungent smell of bone on bone’, the shattered ankle, the two broken necks , the last of which, after L’Ami’s fall in the Grand National, ended his career.
The first time he lived with the pain for 11 days before going to see a specialist. ‘How did you get here?’ ‘I drove.’ ‘You won’t be driving home — you’ve broken your neck.’ The stoic Mrs Oakley walked around for 20 years after she broke hers, until a ski injury X-ray revealed the problem. It does happen, but fortunately she doesn’t ride over fences.
But that, of course, is the other reason for not marrying a jump jockey. When they walk out of the door you can never be sure they’ll walk back in one piece. It took the second broken neck and the devotion his partner Chloe showed when he did it for Mick to marry a second time.
As for the title of the book, that comes of course from Mick’s unforgettable remark to Des Lynam on live TV after he had won the Grand National on Rough Quest. The inevitable ‘how does it feel?’ question: ‘I’ve never enjoyed 12 minutes as much before in my life. After that, Des, you know, even sex is an anti-climax.’
What we have not heard before is the response from his then fiancée Jane Brackenbury. She told him later over a drink that she had heard the interview and the sheepish rider apologised, saying he had got a little carried away. With a wry smile she said that she had just one question for him. ‘Yeah?’ ‘How often is the Grand National run?’ Oh, yes, women do always have the last word.
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