The jockey who read his own obituary
On May 2, 1994 in a race at Haydock Park, Declan Murphy’s life ended. He was some jump jockey, winning every major race in less than four years as a professional. But accidents happen in this most dangerous of sports, and he was thrown from the saddle attempting to leap a hurdle. As he lay unconscious on the turf, a following horse trod on his head. So sickening was the impact, caught on live television, that next morning, the Racing Post published his obituary.
Yet somehow he recovered. A week later he woke from a medically induced coma, confounded assumption and learned to walk again. Seventeen months after facing extinction, he made his comeback, winning a race at Chepstow.
‘This was no show of bravado,’ he writes of his return. ‘I wasn’t anybody’s hero. I was just a man searching for his soul.’
Because there was one curious thing about Murphy’s recuperation. Physically he may have got everything back, he may have grown sharp enough to go on and enjoy a two-decadelong career as a property developer. But when he woke from his coma, thinking he was 12 years old and speaking once again in the Hospital, Co. Limerick accent of his youth, he couldn’t remember anything that happened to him throughout his stellar career. And he still can’t, nearly a quarter of a century on.
There remains a blank where his finest competitive memories should be.
Which might not be considered the most fertile of ground for a memoir: man who can’t remember recalls his past. Except that Murphy has delivered a magnificent piece of work, largely thanks to his co-author Ami Rao.
What she did when writing the book was painstakingly rebuild his memory. Through endless trawls of archive footage, through months buried in yellowing newspapers, through talking to those involved, she pieced it together. She is a ghost in every sense, a phantom in his psyche, a spirit trying to reboot the past. For Murphy the process was like therapy – a therapy he had avoided for more than 20 years until approached by Rao to tell his tale.
‘How does a man look to the future when he cannot remember his past?’ is the question he poses. The answer is this book. And the result is never less than enthralling.
The reconstruction of the day he was damaged, for instance, is a thing of dramatic beauty, told from many angles, none of them his. There is the reaction of his parents, his siblings and most forceful
of all, his fellow jockeys in the weighing room, finally tracking down the ringing phone to his kit and taking it in turns to avoid answering the call from his girlfriend, desperate for news none of them dared to deliver.
Through Rao’s compelling, staccato prose comes a picture of a peculiar talent and a stubborn man: hugely intelligent yet wholly uncommunicative, a showman yet withdrawn, a pragmatist who picked his rides in the attempt to reduce the risk yet who ended up lying prone on the Haydock track with a helmet full of his own blood.