Literary help in gaining horse sensibility

LockerRoom I switched on the TV the other night just in time to hear Liam Griffin on Questions and Answers. Liam set out a passionate and reasonable defence of "the horsey set" in the pernicious matter of oiks like me referring to said set as "the horsey set". For those of us in the "GAA crowd" (but for very few of "the soccer shower") Liam is a bona fide hero and his words gave me pause (or hoofs) for thought. If Liam Griffin is getting behind this whole horsey-set thing I want in at the bottom floor. I'm buying in while stock is cheap.

I have several disadvantages which I feel can be overcome in time. Firstly, whatever about the horsey set, I don't actually like the horseys themselves. More to the point the horseys don't like me. There have been times when I have sought to bridge this gap, when I have reached out the hand of friendship and horseys have just bitten the fingers of that hand. I have favoured other horseys by withdrawing sums of money (which while not large by horsey set standards were important to me in my own little way) and wagering those sums of money on the lucky horseys. I have been rewarded by nothing but sloth and indigence. Are these things sent to test me?

Then there is the fact I don't go racing that often. Once, as a starving freelance, I got a gig wherein I had to attend the Budweiser Irish Derby as a guest of Sheikh Maktoum. Well, not so much a guest, as a low-life sent to cover the demeanour of the guests. Times were very hard for me as a work ethically-challenged freelance and net income for the year at that point was £7.49. That's no excuse but when myself and partner hit the Curragh we got our snouts into the ample trough which was the Sheikh's buffet and didn't lift those snouts till it was time to go. Never saw a race.

I went to Cheltenham once on another work gig but had to leave before the Gold Cup. Then I interviewed Tony McCoy at Warwick but Leeds were playing Wolves in a big FA Cup game and I watched most of it on a big screen and missed the actual racing.

Finally I went to the Kentucky Derby a few years ago. The infield had more scenes of drunkenness and mass fornication than I was able to explain to my eight-year-old and the horses flashed by in such a blur (Well, you try spotting your horse while making a genuine effort to involve yourself with drunkenness and mass fornication) that I recently had to look up a reference book to discover who won the thing that year.

So I come, cap in hand, to the horsey set and offer myself as a near virgin in their world. I want to partake fully of their scandals, their fornication and their wealth. In exchange I ask only to be allowed continue reading their books.

It would be wrong to say that the three best books I have read this year have been horsey books and if asked by one of those vox pop people to name the best book I've read this year I will of course claim to have been rereading Ulysses but the horsey set are blessed with a fine canon of literature.

Some sports are like that, they attract good writing. Boxing and golf in particular have wonderful libraries attached. Others generally inspire dross. Soccer has a very poor ratio of decent books per bushel load published. Rugby is poorly served and the GAA, with a few notable exceptions this year, is generally badly served by the scribbling community.

The horses, though. That's another world. I think I got hooked after consuming Laura Hillenbrand's SeaBiscuit in one swallow last year. I moved quickly onwards, digesting My Turf by William Nack and this year, mistaking it for a self-improvement guide, I purchased Stud by Kevin Conley - an astonishing book for someone like me.

Stud isn't about Coolmore but there are enough mentions of Coolmore to keep the average jaw dropping to the ground. At Keeneland, the Kentucky auction ring which is Mecca for the top layer of the horsey set (if not quite literally so for the Maktoums), the locals like nothing better than a bidding war between our chaps from Coolmore and the four Maktoum brothers who are known around Keeneland as the Doobie Brothers.

John Magnier apparently has an impossibly glamourous surrogate, one Demi O'Byrne, who nervelessly does his bidding. Conley describes the sense of theatre when the Sheikhs and their entourage slip into their assigned seats while the Magnier posse slip into theirs. I'm not sure about the sheikhs but the Coolmore gang never say anything to anybody after a bidding war or it seems after anything.

By way of explaining the madness, Conley describes a losing battle the Coolmore's once fought. Bidding against a Japanese venture capitalist for a colt, the Coolmore dropped out of the war at around the $4 million dollar mark.

Strangely the horse went on to win the Kentucky Derby (It was Fusachi Pegasus. I was there. I ought to know) and claimed six races in its first nine starts. Not long afterwards Coolmore became involved in a private bidding war for the horse and according to Conley eventually paid something in the region of $60 million for him. It was a costly lesson about fearlessness. It doesn't take a feather out of them then to spend $6.8 million on a colt at the auction which Conley attends.

By the time I was finished Stud I was addicted. I rushed out and purchased a copy of the brilliantly written Blood Horses by John Jeremiah Sullivan a book which is subtitled Notes of a Sportswriter's Son. There's a wistful knot running through the book about fatherhood and death but the meat is horse. Blood Horses dips in and out of the history of the horse with a sensibility most becoming of an author who reckons himself to have been the youngest ever member of the American Socialist Party.

Sullivan gets his quirkiness from his sportswriting father, who once decided for a short period of time to communicate only via the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs. So, when asked a question, Mike Sullivan would fast forward and rewind through a tape till he reached the appropriate lyrical response and then play it back to his inquisitor. When you've interviewed as many mumbling, reticent footballers as I have you can understand how an eccentricity like that might flower.

Sullivan tells astonishing stories. The book is packed with them. I was especially astonished by the misfortunes which have befallen horses in time of war. In the Crimea in 1944, the retreating Germans realised that retreat meant leaving their horses to the Russians. Instead, they decided to get rid of them and shot 30,000 animals and pushed them over a high cliff in the Bay of Severnaya. After a while the bulk of the animals sensed what was happening and began to panic, so the Germans had to open up with machine guns to hose the horses off the precipice. That story comes at you like a slap in the face.

Finally, for light relief I have moved onto Jane Smiley's A Year At The Races, working on the grossly sexist notion that I thoroughly enjoyed Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing and would therefore appreciate Smiley on horseys. I was right too. From the moment of the introduction of the little Irish exercise rider at her stables - who has such cherubic features that he is known to all as The Baby Jesus - I was smitten.

This is a world I never imagined when getting my hand bitten by several nags over the years. I'm going to persevere.

Be warned. When you sneer at the horsey set you sneer at me. I'm off now to check with my godfather on how much money he has. I need a horse if I'm to be truly accepted.