All on my tod pondering fame's fickleness

LockerRoom:In an attempt to improve the quality of these columns and by extension, no doubt, the quality of your life as a put-upon reader I have gone to Paris and am as you read this riding a high stool in Harry's Bar on the Rue Daunou. Down these mean rues a man must go.

Harry's Bar on Rue Daunou is a pale knock-off, I feel, of Harry's in Kinnegad, but the Paris version boasts an alumni body of highly literate soaks whose buttocks oft dented these stools. If the DNA of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, de Beauvoir or Moreau can thus be absorbed along with a few Bloody Mary's (the drink Harry's Bar invented) then so much the better.

(Cynics will note that this column misspent a youth in the world's finest saloon, the Palace Bar in Fleet Street, without catching any sort of favourable wind in the literary DNA stakes. As the philosopher Roy Keane says, to keep doing the same thing while expecting different results is the definition of stupidity. We shall, however, persevere.)

No doubt in your capacity as the Plain and Hill People of Ireland (Ha! See!) you are asking now if this column has any theme or point or is it to be the same old nonsense.

In fact, today's epistle has several poignant yet topical themes that shall become evident as you read anxiously on.

Harry's Bar is a testimony to the capricousness of fame and legacy. We live in an age of ravenous media (I speak for myself here) and it is possible to parlay a short life of zero accomplishment into a life of luxury and a legacy of fond remembrance by artfully tickling the media's G spot and if possible dying conspicuously. Fame is cheap.

Harry's Bar wasn't even founded by Harry. It was set up by two Americans as the New York Bar in 1911. The provenance of one of the Americans can be guessed at. His surname was Clancey and he was a tavern keeper in New York city but not surprisingly took a stand against Prohibition and ripped out the fittings (including mahogany walls and a swinging door) of his pub and had them shipped after him to Paris, the namby-pamby denizens of which city had no ideas about good, old-fashioned, two-fisted drinking.

Clancey's partner in this venture was a man called James Foreman Sloane, of whom very few people (including myself until the other day) have ever heard but whose name we take and use constantly. The head barman was a man called Harry McElhone, a Scot (surely a Scot with Donegal tendrils?) who would later buy the bar and modestly rename it, thus ensuring himself immortality.

Sloane was not so lucky. His fame was far greater but far more perishable. He was the first sports superstar the world had known.

Sloane was an American jockey who had enjoyed considerable success by the time he arrived in Britain in 1897 to revolutionise the sport. Until Sloane invented the crouching, short-stirrup riding style every race jockey today uses, jockeys rode along much like showjumpers, sitting upright with backs straight. Sloane shortened the stirrup and rode crouched forward with shortened reins.

When he took this style to Britain the locals were most appreciative of the innovation. Vanity Fair commented that Sloane, "rides like a monkey up a stick . . . but he wins races".

He certainly won races. In three years in Britain he rode 254 winners and his style, though initially derided (Boom! Boom!), was soon adopted by most jockeys. Legend has it that his riding style and appearance and extremely short legs earned Sloane the nickname Toad, which later became abbreviated to Todd or Tod.

He was a genius in the saddle. In 1896 he won nearly 30 percent of his races; the following year he won on 37 per cent of his mounts; and in 1898 he won on an incredible 46 per cent - almost every second time he raced. That September he rode five consecutive winners at Newmarket.

Sloane won the 1899 One Thousand Guineas atop Sibola and the following year annexed the Gold Cup at Ascot riding Merman.

Befoe Devon Loch was a twinkle in his sire's eye Sloane was involved an incident just as sensational at the time and even a little more poignant than Devon Loch's collapse in the 1956 Aintree Grand National.

He took an early lead in the Epsom Derby of 1899 on Holocauste and kept the lead till near the end of the race, when he got caught in a slugging match with Flying Fox. Sloan was holding back Holocauste for the home stretch when his mount stopped abruptly and collapsed with a shattered leg. Holocauste had to be destroyed.

Flying Fox won the race.

Later that year Flying Fox went on to add the St Leger to the Derby and the Two Thousand Guineas; he had won racing's Triple Crown.

Sloane worked the fast track away from the courses as well. He was a charmer and a seducer of women. He lived flamboyantly and hung with the flashiest of gamblers (to his detriment; the Jockey Club declined to renew his licence after 1901). He was chums with the multimillionaire philanthropist Diamond Jim Brady and travelled with a personal valet and a trunk full of clothes (okay, okay, jockey-sized clothes but still impressive). In his day he must have thought immortality was his.

Hemingway used Sloane as both characters, father and son, for his short story My Old Man. George M Cohan's Yankee Doodle Dandy was based on Sloane.

In the unimaginably arid world of the intellect people endured before Hello! magazine this was unprecedented celebrity for a sportsperson.

After the Jockey Club cut up rough, Oscar Hammerstein fixed Sloane up with his own one-man show, which flopped. Sloane tried his hand at movies and flopped their too. With the hothead Clancey he bought the bar that would become Harry's but went broke living the life of a dandy or a Charles Haughey and had to sell the premises in 1920. He dies of cirrhosis in 1933 in California, the state where he had first enjoyed racing success.

Despite the celebrity, the spectacular achievements, the legacy of wins and innovation, the afterlife that included founding one of the world's most famous bars, Sloane is all but forgotten.

It is said his style was sufficient to spin off the little oddity by which we inadvertently recall him and his name.

An aggressive rider, he liked being the front runner and the style of being out front alone was so distinctive and pronounced that any rider adopting similar tactics was said to be doing a Tod Sloane. This was smoothed over by the waves of everyday usage to become a little bit of rhyming slang for being alone: to be "on your Tod Sloane", or just to be "on your tod".

The most famous sportsperson of his time, friend of gamblers and patrons and royals alike, Tod Sloane could never have suspected that all this time later he would be less remembered than the barman he hired for the opening of his pub or that, indeed, he would be remembered only as the answer to a question about rhyming slang.

You look at a Joey Barton or a Stephen Ireland and wonder what their legacy will be a century from now.

Perhaps Tod ain't doing so bad, being embedded, a Sloane, all a Sloane, in our language.