“We were at a party on the 15th floor of one of Durban’s top hotels and a chick pulls out a crack pipe. She was gonna smoke but warned me not to.
I thought I was too good to get addicted, so I tried some. All my pain was gone, I was in heaven. I could have jumped off the building.” — Champion jockey Andrew Fortune describes his first “hit” eight years ago.
SO there was Fortune , sat in the lounge of his mum’s Elsies River home dressed only in his underpants, explaining how he used to cheat the dope-busters.
First he would have an apprentice jockey pee into an empty eye-drops bottle. The testers would rock up and ask him to do the necessary. Off he’d go, doping official at his side. Such is the nature of these things that the official would insist on watching from close up. “Hey,” Fortune would squeal, “you wanna hold it?”
Embarrassed, the official would take the smallest of backward steps and Fortune would perform his sleight of hand, squeezing the concealed pee into the cup.
“They should have known it wasn’t mine — I would have burned a hole in it.”
Fortune, 40, is one of South Africa’s leading jockeys. He’s placed in the top three of the Durban July, the J&B Met and the Summer Cup. He’s won four Guineas crowns, the Queens Plate, the Cape and Durban Derby and 20 or so Grade 1 races. On Tuesday, he won three races at Durbanville. He’s already ridden 25 winners since getting back in the saddle on February 1. He knows his oats and is rated among the ballsiest, smartest riders on the circuit.
Fortune is also a recovering drug and sex addict who later this month will offer up a silent prayer to God. He’s been to hell and back and on March 26 he plans to celebrate a year of sobriety, having escaped the demons that nearly killed him.
He won’t do so with a drink, but in the company of good friends at Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, whose meetings he attends daily (and twice on Sundays).
“It keeps me sane. I take it one day at a time,” says the man who might qualify as South Africa’s most remarkable sportsman. He’s certainly had a life like no other.
It’s the language of the recovering addict. Fortune’s speech is peppered with such homilies; life’s lessons learned since getting clean a year ago.
He may use the gritty jargon of the streets but he’s surprisingly well-spoken for a product of the Cape Flats. That’s because he was told to “fix” his Cape coloured accent at the jockey academy at Summerveld.
“Ja, none of that ‘jou ma se ... ’ or djous and djays,” laughs Fortune, one of eight children.
Fortune’s life began to fall apart at the age of 32, amid a divorce. After that first crack hit, he wanted more. He quickly moved to cocaine and so began a vicious downward spiral of addiction and denial.
His race winnings fuelled an expensive habit. He had a credit facility of R70000 with a group of Nigerian drug lords and blew an average R100000 a month on drugs.
He would do his hits with hookers at escort agencies, his habit degenerating often into three-day sex and drug benders. “It was with anyone, any time. I felt invincible. If I came down, I’d do another hit with the pipe.”
Things were so rotten, he would tell his young kids he wanted a hit, take them off his lap and smoke a crack pipe before picking them up again.
Incredibly, he continued to ride. Often, he was in a drug- induced haze. “I’d be smoking crack between strings. With drugs there are no rules. I didn’t care. I could ride high because I knew horses. People can say I’m a f**k-up, but I can race, hell I can race.”
One time, the race stewards came to investigate his behaviour, arriving unannounced at his home. Fortune indulged in chit-chat, sporadically going to the bathroom to indulge his habit. He was out of control.
He had lost his wife and two of his four children had been taken away. He didn’t care and finally admitted his addiction to the Jockey Club of SA.
“I just wanted them off my back.”
Suspended, the days and months flew by. Fortune reckons he took drugs every day. He tried going straight in 2006, even getting a few rides, but the drugs were never far away.
Things got worse. He tried Tik (crystal methamphetamine) and was soon cooking up the lethal concoction at home. He once spent five mad days in his car, taking one hit after the other.
Last March, he found himself in a house in Worcester, another wild weekend of drugs and sex under the belt.
Fortune was on his knees, begging God to take his life.
“I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I thought life owed me a favour. My life was f****d. My addiction had brought me to my lowest point.”
Drug-addled, he checked into a rehabilitation centre. “When you’re an addict, the hardest thing to do is surrender.”
Every day was a desperate struggle, but he fought hard.
His new-found friends at AA and NA became his salvation. They share their deepest secrets. Fortune’s spiritual awareness grew. He started pulling his life together again, somehow shunning the temptations of parties and bad friends.
He’s even tried to put sex to one side because addicts are most vulnerable in their first year of sobriety.
Obsession, he says, is one of the side effects of being an addict. As a consequence he’s extremely careful — “once an addict, always an addict” — and starts each day by taking an inventory of his life.
“One day at a time,” he says, “one day at a time ... ”
Cleaned up and energised, Fortune accepts invitations to present talks at schools and elsewhere.
His story is immensely powerful and he knows that if he can change one life for the better, his path to hell and back will have been worth it. Asked how much he charges, he says: “When God bills me, I’ll bill you.”
Fortune returned to racing on February 1 and found a world without blame, anger or disappointment.
Racegoers, trainers, owners and jockeys thrilled to see the smile on his impish face again. And when he rode that first winner it felt much the same as it did when he was 15, when he was young and innocent and full of vigour.
God help him.
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