Mullins: Rubyisabit like Johnny Sexton – he’s one in a million
Just 110 days after horrible leg break, unflappable Walsh is back to his best
THIS great, yawning valley is no place for a pessimist and few know better than Ruby Walsh how Tuesday’s dreams end up buried with Wednesday’s rubbish. He’s broken so many bones for his trade he must rattle when he jogs and that pale, translucent face is a panorama of dents and tiny creases. Across the years, his rope-thin frame has drawn so much bad news out of x-ray scanners he ought really be sponsored by the manufacturers.
And Walsh has taken such life wisdom from that endless quarrel between mind and body, people cease to judge him in a rational light.
They assume things of him, demand them even. In recognising his innate hardness, they take it that he doesn’t so much overcome misfortune as disregard it.
Yesterday, it was easy to see why. Even easier to recognise the grand assumption as a lie.
This is his art, of course, and the classicism of great artists plays tricks on the senses.
So the loud thunder of approval that found expression as he began bringing Footpad from another county to win the Arkle was, largely, the giddiness you associate with a man in a cape rescuing Gotham from destruction. This movie must always have the one ending.
It was only afterwards, only in close proximity to the faltering voice and rheumy eyes of this innately hard man, that you got a sense of the human investment required for Ruby Walsh to be the force of nature that everybody demands.
Here he was after all, precisely 110 days after suffering an horrific leg break at Punchestown, doing what the Almighty seems to have decided is his vocation.
Winning another big race while calm as a village-green cricketer.
As it happens, he would guide Benie Des Dieux to victory in the Mares’ Hurdle too, bringing his overall Festival tally to 58, with Barry Geraghty next up on a distant 35 after piloting Buveur D’Air to a successful Champion Hurdle defence.
But it was Footpad’s victory that brought this place to the heart of human genius.
A big mistake on the back straight just as Davy Russell on Petit Mouchoir and Aidan Coleman on Saint Calvados were torquing away with all the abandon of Serengeti wildebeest suggested the 5/6 favourite was in crisis, yet Walsh remained an essay in absolute coolness on his back.
Saint Calvados was first to break, but Russell would have known that he – too – was doomed the moment he heard that familiar rumble from the grandstand.
Racing people talk of a “clock” in Walsh’s head separating him from all others in the weigh-room. And, watching now, Willie Mullins could sense that clock was accurate to Swiss precision.
It’s 23 years now since he watched Ruby guide the filly Young Fedora to victory in a Leopardstown bumper, turning immediately to his wife Jackie afterwards to declare “that’s not ordinary stuff!”
Yesterday, everything he glimpsed in Ruby all that time ago was seen in multicolour as Footpad arrived at the top of the hill.
Asked if he knew of any other rider who could summon such murderous patience, Willie was emphatic.
“I don’t think so,” he reflected. “Just putting the experience and his confidence together to do that coming back off a 110-day break… Right, he rode a winner on a little filly down in Thurles, but he was able to ride his A-game after 110 days off, after everything going wrong in the first race (with Getabird).
“He still had the confidence to pull off a ride like that. Even after making a huge mistake. A lot of guys would have been slapping and pushing to get him racing. He just sat, sat, sat and he has the balls to do it.
“There’s not anyone that I know as good as him.”
For a race-rider, injury rehab is a familiar if pitiless place. That November leg break was Ruby’s fourth; he’s also suffered crushed vertebrae, three ankle breaks, a hip break and dislocation, a shoulder dislocation, three wrist breaks, a broken hand, broken teeth, numerous concussions and – maybe most terrifying of all – a ruptured spleen.
Walsh was riding competitively within 26 days of life-saving surgery after that latter misfortune, encountered in a November meeting here in ’07.
His instinct is that of all raceriders. To rush recovery. To push the boundaries of medical opinion.
So, in the Santry sports clinic, the staff became familiar with a man in a hurry. His physio, Enda King, especially.
“Every week I’d go in, I’d say to him, ‘F**k, I’m not making the progress quick enough...’,” Ruby explained.
“He’d say, ‘You are. You’re bringing the pain with you, but you’re better every day!’ You know I was there two and three days a week, he could see the progress. I couldn’t. He said he’d have me right and to be fair to him... I wish I’d met him when I was 20.”
That frustration made Walsh difficult company at home and, in his own words, “an average dad and terrible husband”.
Wife Gillian was in tears after Footpad’s victory, offering a glimpse of the darkness they were now emerging from.
“I never thought I’d see him ride again,” she said starkly.
And Ruby did not sugarcoat it. “I’d say Gillian had a very long winter!” he told us. “When I’m not in good humour, I wouldn’t be great company. They say behind every good man, there’s a great woman. And I definitely had that. I mean, to have a newborn and three kids is hard enough, but to have a newborn, three kids and a husband who’s about as much use to you as an ashtray on a motorbike...
“Look, it’s the same for every sportsperson, it’s not the physical pain. You can put your leg in a cast, take the pressure off it and it stops aching. But it’s the incapacity of it. You go from being an active sportsperson, working every day of the week, to doing nothing. And that feeling of uselessness, that’s the hardest part. Ah, a lot of low days and ordinary days.”
Yet, through them all, he never stopped travelling to Closutton. Mullins did not ask him to, but the professional in Walsh demanded he kept a weather eye on the horses now essentially motivating him back to race-riding health.
“He was down with us three or four days a week, discussing the horses as they worked and improved,” explained Mullins.
“We had some wretched weather during the time and he had his foot sticking out of a plaster, trying to get around the gallops. It’s not an easy place to navigate on two feet, never mind on crutches.
“But he wanted to see all those horses. He knew everything so he didn’t have to go ask anyone. The whole thing was just clicking in his brain.”
In the week that’s in it, a kindred spirit perhaps to the Irishman about to wear 10 at Twickenham this Saturday?
“Yes,” agreed Mullins, warming to the Jonathan Sexton comparison.
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, fellas will be afraid to make those decisions. He has the confidence to take that drop kick, for want of a better word, in the final minute of the game.
“Ruby is just like that. One in a million.”