BARRY BROGAN "ALIVE & KICKING"
Byline: Neil Morrice catches up with Barry Brogan, former jump jockey, alcoholic and jailbird, and now leading a life transformed as a top trainer in Malaysia
THE Swinging Sixties had reached their mind-blowing peak when Barry Brogan burst on to the jumping scene as No. 1 jockey to Ken Oliver and then to Fulke Walwyn, riding such charismatic horses as Flyingbolt, Even Keel, The Dikler and Charlie Potheen. The ensuing years have told an astonishing tale of self-belief triumphing over adversity, as the man from County Meath emerged from a path of self-destruction to become a leading trainer in the Far East.
Brogan's tortured times fighting alcoholism and an addiction to gambling, as well as coping with the ravaging effects of four separate jail stretches, were left behind when he emigrated to train winners in Australia before moving to Malaysia, where at Selangor racecourse he orchestrates the biggest training operation and has never been out of the top three in a seven-year period.
However, he then had to summon up the courage and determination to recover from a riding accident that threatened to put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Despite a pronounced limp, Brogan, 61, looks somewhat younger than his age. There still remains a sparkle in his eyes that might have gone a long way to affording Brogan the 'pretty boy' tag of the weighing room four decades ago.
Such natural charms comfortably lent themselves to temptation in that free-spirited, liberal period when Brogan both rode for Oliver and assisted the trainer's wife Rhona in preparing the second most powerful team in the north, then - and even more demonstrably - in his two-and-a-half-year spell as first jockey to Walwyn in Lambourn.
As a dual amateur champion in Ireland, Brogan had ridden for many of the top trainers, including Tom Dreaper, and he recalls: "I rode Arkle on the gallops several times and, when Ken Oliver employed me at Hawick, I partnered Flyingbolt to his last career win at Haydock. I also rode Red Rum in a couple of races.
"For all Arkle's brilliance, I felt Flyingbolt was the better horse. If Pat Taaffe was alive, he'd tell you the same."
Brogan won 27 races on the enigmatic Even Keel, trained by Oliver, and remembers: "He was a headstrong devil, a freak of a horse who was a horrible ride as he wouldn't bend his head back. It meant he took liberties with some of the fences, but his talent was awesome."
In 1970, Brogan's first wife Mary (now trainer Mary Hambro) received an important telephone call. Brogan says: "She got a call from Fulke Walwyn who asked if I would ride The Dikler in a two-and-a-half-mile chase at Cheltenham. The Dikler pulverised his rivals - it was the ride that led to me getting a retainer at Saxon House that lasted two and a half years. My life in England was fantastic. I loved the people and the place.
"Fulke was a lovely man and the best boss I ever rode for. He was very conscientious and his bark was worse than his bite. The Dikler was a massive horse and on one occasion he cocked his jaw and galloped off with me into the mist on the Downs, but I managed to restrain him. He was a good horse but didn't have the class of Arkle and Flyingbolt."
Accompanying his triumphs in the saddle was a growing attraction to alcohol, while he freely admits he was prone to backing horses, and not always those he was riding himself.
He explains: "When I look back, I just don't know how I came through. I had a lot of fun with alcohol as well as a lot of heartache. I regularly had blackouts and had to dry out in hospitals all over England, Ireland and the West Indies.
"I was pushed to the brink, but unlike a couple of jockeys I knew, such as poor Johnny Lehane, I never thought about committing suicide.
The amount I drank was staggering and would have made George Best look like a teetotaller."
Gambling had also entered his life.
"I was betting on everything - cards, dogs, horses - and I was favourite mad. I was good friends with bookmaker John Banks, and I owed the local bookie in Lambourn more than I could afford to pay him back."
During that time, Walwyn had been staunchly loyal to Brogan and contacted him in a drying-out clinic.
"Fulke asked me what I was going to do about the Cheltenham Festival of 1973 and I told him 'no'. I watched that Gold Cup on television and was choked when Ron Barry got The Dikler up to beat Pendil by a short head.
"Fulke made me promise not to ride any more that season, as there were only a couple of months left, but Alan Jarvis offered me one he said would win at Ludlow, and I took the ride.
After riding work at Saxon House the next day the boss sacked me." THINGS then went from bad to worse for Brogan, as he admits. "I sank to my lowest point when found guilty of defrauding banks of between six and seven thousand pounds of a trainer's money, for which I copped a three-year stretch.
The first three months in an Edinburgh prison really sobered me up mentally. Altogether, I spent 14 months and three weeks inside, including in Wormwood Scrubs. It was the turning point in my life."
In 1984, with his riding career in tatters, Brogan set off for Australia.
He recalls: "I walked into Harrods, bought a return ticket to Sydney and never went back to Britain." He visited the racetracks of Sydney and found a job with fellow Irishman and trainer Paul Cave as a track rider and breaking-in horses.
He explains: "I worked very hard and in 1989 applied for a licence to train. I told the Australian Jockey Club my life story. The chairman seemed to like me but someone else in the hierarchy didn't, which sparked a move from Sydney to Kembla Grange, a provincial track, where I trained under somebody else's name.
"That person was Des Lake, the former jockey who'd ridden Prince Tenderfoot and Bold Lad, champion two-year-olds for PJ Prendergast.
They called him 'Dashing Des' and he was as mad as a hatter. I was registered with the AJC as a supervisor and had 35 horses, but after eight years that door closed and I was back to square one."
The gambling side of his complicated mind surfaced to assist his next move. For this, Brogan spun a coin to decide where he went. He says: "It was either heads Melbourne or tails Brisbane, and it came down heads. So I was off to Melbourne with three horses and three cats.
"I resumed the trackwork there and met an Irishman called Michael Walsh, whose father owned a restaurant near the Curragh called The Red House. Michael managed to get me a meeting with Bruce Gadsen, chairman of the Victoria Racing Club, and that way I got a 'B' licence that enabled me to run horses at picnic meetings, which consist of regulated amateur Flat races. That was a leg inside the door. I trained half a dozen winners, applied for my full licence and got it straight away. I'm pleased to say that I've never been inside the stewards' room since."
Brogan's next move, to Malaysia in 2001, saw him quickly establish himself as a leading light among the local trainers, and the following year he was the top money-earner. He continued riding trackwork, only for disaster to strike.
"One morning at Ipoh racecourse I was on an old horse called Narcissus, who I loved," he says. "We'd cantered one lap on the sand when he suddenly had a massive heart attack and died. I went out over his neck and fractured my spinal cord in two places. I could feel my head, but not my body, and I couldn't talk. I spent the next year - six months in intensive care - flat on my back in hospital looking at the ceiling. It was the same accident as the actor Christopher Reeve suffered.
"I could move one toe, and the Chinese doctor said I could take a chance on an operation to move my voice box. What could I do? I was paralysed and I said go ahead. The doctor slit my throat and moved the voice box, and when I came round, the first thing I remember was that I could talk. I underwent physio every day to stimulate feeling back into my body, and through it all my wife Robyn was a rock, spending each night with me but going back to supervise the horses in the day. The training operation therefore continued unabated and gradually I regained feeling in 50 per cent of my body."
Brogan is happier than ever in his new life and has no thoughts of moving on. When attending his mother's funeral this year it was his first visit to Ireland for a quarter of a century. Of his Malaysian set-up, he says: "I have 84 boxes at Selangor and employ 40 people, while we also use two other tracks, Ipoh and Penang.
"I've trained more than 250 winners here. I enjoy the quality of life and can say I came here with a small amount of finance but now have a big stable, and own 60 of the 80 in it myself. We have one race worth 1.5m ringit £300,000 and another six worth 1m £200,000.
"There are different values in my life now, and I feel lucky to be alive.
How I came out of what happened to me I'll never know."
'I could feel my head but not my body, and I couldn't talk. I spent the next year flat on my back in hospital'
'I just don't know how I came through. The amount I drank would have made George Best look like at teetotaller'
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