Roy’s Racing Royalty
Paula Xiberras
It’s spring carnival time and perfectly timed for the new biography on arguably Australia’s greatest jockey, Roy Higgins.
The Age writer Patrick Bartley takes on the challenging task and I spoke to him about Roy and his book recently. Patrick tells me he is a big fan of Tassie having taken ‘a couple of beautiful holidays here, one with his 12 year old daughter when they went horse riding at Port Arthur, enjoyed the Sydney to Hobart yacht race and the Taste Festival. Patrick says that Tassie is ‘one of the great, great unappreciated places in the world’.
Appreciation is something we should have when talking about Roy Higgins; just the name evokes royalty. Higgins means ‘knowledge skill or ingenuity’ something Roy had more than ample of but Higgins has its origin in a name once famed by an Irish high king of Tara, and in French, his first name Roi means ‘king’.
This all gives credence to Roy’s position as ‘king of the turf’ and as we Roy’s racing royalty gained fame in France, a place where his battles with weight were not of such importance as they may have been in Australia.
Roy always had a large persona; a large baby, Patrick says that with his physique, Roy would have seemed to have been better suited to football or rugby than to the diminutive world of the jockey.
Yet life had other plans for Roy; his father worked with draught horses and Roy became enamoured of them, happily taking on duties of providing them with their food/drink buckets.
While Roy was enamoured of horses, Australia from the ordinary Australian to the upper echelons of society would became enamoured of Roy. When writing the book Patrick rang at half past two in the morning, Andrew Peacock, then living in Texas. After the initial chastisement for the early call once Andrew found out what the call was about he was happy to chat about the man he called ‘Superman’.
Mothers would berate their sons why they couldn’t look as elegant and speak so eloquently as Roy when he appeared on ‘Wide World of Sport’. Roy’s elegance and attitude was in part because of the people he would mix with, from the ordinary punter to politicians and royals, as a jockey he thought he should be educated and well spoken.
On the racetrack, Roy, as Bart Cummings and others would attest, had an uncanny ability when riding to sense the feeling of horses in front of him and when they tired. Roy was something of an original ‘horse whisperer’ before the phrase became trendy.
Patrick says Roy, was always striving to bring honour to racing and he did this not only by his impeccable manner and standards but by supporting charity and in all actions demonstrating the racing industries heart.
Some examples included visiting a young man in hospital and inviting him to the races, rescuing a little kitten from the stables, nursing it to health and supporting fellow jockeys like Tasmania’s own Craig Hewitt.
There is no doubt Roy loved racing, such was his love for the sport, he would sacrifice his appetite for food to satisfy his appetite for winning races.
In those days without all the sophisticated dieticians that are involved in racing today it was a tough business especially for a well-built man like Roy to slim down for races. Severe saunas in plastic wrap and other dietary measures meant Roy’s stomach shrunk in size and as Patrick said ‘he suffered perpetual hunger for 20 years’. At that time ‘Racing was as big as AFL’ and he ‘lived in the glare of publicity’, indeed, says Patrick ‘Churches and school halls were deserted on Sundays when Roy was holding court on ‘Wide World of Sports’.
From a shy apprentice at Flemington, that barely slept the night before he was to meet Henry Bolte Roy transformed himself into a debonair kindly man who was king, not just on the racetrack but as a humanitarian. For his sporting greatness and his humanitarian acts Patrick is behind the call for a statue of Roy to stand with the greats. Patrick says of Roy, he was ‘a beautiful man’ with ‘no aloofness’.
Roy Higgins: Australia’s Favourite Jockey by Patrick Bartley is out now published by Penguin Books …
HERE …
http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780143799726/roy-higgins-australia-s-favourite-jockey ?