The Professor

I started today in the manner in which all Sundays should begin: in a leisurely way. This involved finishing the book I'd been reading before getting out of bed. This was a particular treat because the book is excellent. It is called 'The Professor' and I bought this second-hand copy of it in the shop in the racing museum 'Champions' when we were in Melbourne in January. As can be guessed from the title, the book is the autobiography, written with Terry Vine, of Melbourne's former champion jockey, Roy Higgins, generally known as 'The Professor'. The book was first published in October 1984, seven months after The Professor's retirement from the saddle. As one might expect from a jockey reknowned for his intelligence and shrewdness, the book is a gem. To illustrate this I will quote from the chapter about Higgins' friend and rival George Moore, who died last year. I am sure that this will be of interest to anyone who remembers Moore riding in Europe, in particular his season (or part thereof) retained by Noel Murless in 1967.

Higgins starts off by recounting a visit to Sydney when Moore stunned him by worming his way out of a seemingly secure pocket, finding/creating a gap up the rails to win the race. "I suppose that's when I began my study of George Moore. In the days when Sydney boasted horsemen like Sellwood, Mulley, Cook, Munro, Lake, Thompson, just to name a few, George was the best. He was the most thoroughly, happily and contentedly disliked jockey in Australian racing - and that's precisely how he wanted it. In fact, he worked at it. There was none of this palsy-walsy stuff with other jocks and George. Moore didn't want any favours from them and he certainly didn't want to be in a position where he owed any one of them a favor. Even in France, where he enjoyed enormous success, the other jockeys would talk about him as Moore the bastard. If he was a bastard, he was a cunning bastard. He knew precisely what he was about and he knew precisely how to go about it. His motto could well have been: Keep 'em all upset.

"George was tense, temperamental, truculent, abusive, abrasive, abhorrent, highly strung, volatile, unpredictable and above all, a loner. He was a master horseman, a superb tactician, painstakingly methodical, a psychologist, brilliant beyond comparison, shrewd, ruthless in his will to win, an enigma, a genius and unique - as Tommy Smith once said, the best horseman ever to throw a leg over a saddle the world has ever seen. He could also take my money off me any time we stepped on to a golf course.

"George's fights with the great T.J. are legendary in Australian racing. He had just as many fights in the jockeys' room, some of which were publicised, others not. He once threw a loaded lead bag at another jockey. Woe betide anyone who accidentally kicked one of his saddles or trod on one of his towels. The younger riders were terrified of him, and he made sure they were. If George got up to make a cuppa, if George went to the toilet, if George went to the scales, they gave him his ground. They thought of him as a martinet, a tyrant, a dictator.

"They were all wrong. George Moore was a professional. He left nothing undone in his quest to be the best and quite frankly, I admired him immensely. George didn't just sum up a race, he did just sum up horses. He was summing up the horsemen and if there was a flaw, he'd find it and then he'd capitalise on it. The night before a race in Sydney, Moore would lock himself into his own mini-cinema at home and spend hours dragging out films of his opposition in races the next day, studying them for faults in both horse and rider. If that's not professionalism, I'll give the game up. That's why this man was so great. You don't see that sort of thing these days.

"... He would much prefer to outsmart you, outwit you, than try to knock you down. He got more satisfaction in winning by out-thinking you than any other way. That's why the man was a genius. That's why he could hold his own anywhere in the world. I know jocks in Melbourne who consider it some kind of achievement because they once kept Moore in a pocket which caused his defeat. That to me was childish enough but when they'd go on to say that he couldn't ride as well in Melbourne as he could other places, that to me was a load of crap. Moore won the Arc de Triomphe in France, the Epsom Derby in England, every feature race in Australia except the Melbourne Cup, and he still holds the record for the number of feature races won by an Australian jockey in Australia.

"I studied this man more than I studied any other rival in my life ... Despite our rivalry - or perhaps because of it - George and I became great friends. George never socialised with his fellow jockeys. He was not the type to go to their homes and he never invited them to his. But when George was in Melbourne for the carnivals, he and I would play golf nearly every day and he would have dinner at my home two or three nights a week. When I was in Sydney, I did the same with him. I am very proud of that. I am proud to have his friendship. George Moore was George Moore. He was the greatest."

Isn't that great? I don't think you'd ever see a greater tribute to a jockey. And it's particularly meaningful coming from such a respected source. Roy Higgins' career in Europe wasn't nearly as great as those enjoyed by other Aussie hoops of the same era - he spent two seasons in France early in his career, 1963 and 1964, on the recommendation of Neville Sellwood, who was killed in a fall at Maisons-Laffitte the day after making the recommendation, and was only moderately successful, perhaps his most memorable win from a British point of view coming on a Rae Johnston-trained horse owned by Peter O'Sullevan - but he really was a race-riding great in his homeland. I can claim to have been his colleague as he wrote a (very good) column in Winning Post for a few years, and I was pleased to see when we were last in Melbourne that he is still doing his excellent mounting yard assessment slots on the radio. And now, having read his book, my respect for him has risen further. The book is a great little slice of racing history, but it is a also a great insight into a great racing mind.

(And, by the way, I know that I have used the word 'great' three times in one sentence, but the bar for inelegant use of English has been raised so dramatically recently that I think that nowadays it seems as if anything goes. As ever, Racing UK is to the forefront in the mangling of our language. How about this one, said by one presenter to his colleague "Could you please nutshell this race for us"? Or the invention and subsequent frequent use of the word 'physicality'? If it is acceptable for us to have to hear the phrase "in terms of physicality" on a channel which we pay to watch, I think that I need not feel too guilty in making you read a proper word (ie one which does actually exist) three times in a sentence which you can read for free.)