DAY IN A LIFE: DESSIE SCAHILL, RACING COMMENTATOR:Grand National day on Monday was similar to any of the other 210 meetings across the country
"JP’S DONE me in here,” says Dessie Scahill, half-smiling, half-grimacing as he runs his finger down the race card. It’s half an hour before the tapes go up in the Irish Grand National and we’re standing just outside the weigh-room at Fairyhouse. In the next 10 minutes, 25 jockeys will leave here and go to the parade ring to be legged up onto their mounts and head out onto the course in numerical order, by which time Scahill will be in position in the commentary box to introduce them to the crowd.
Once the race starts, his will be the voice that rings out across the grounds, talking the 15,196 paying customers through it.
It is a task not helped by the fact the country’s most famous racehorse owner has decided to fire scattergun at the race this year. Six of the runners will carry the green and gold hoops of JP McManus and to the untrained eye, the only thing to distinguish them will be the colour of their caps. Scahill’s eye is far from that – he’s been calling races now for close to 40 years – and he’ll be able to pick out jockeys on their style in the saddle as well as the hue of their headgear.
But all the same, he could have done with McManus heeding the old racing saw that says if you think you have six Grand National winners on your hands, chances are you probably don’t have one.
As it turns out, the race is a pretty straightforward one to call this year. The Dessie Hughes horse Done Deal sets off at a ferocious gallop and finishes the first circuit about 15 lengths clear, stringing the field out behind him. By the time he inevitably comes back to the pack, the relentless pace has finished the hopes of a good three-quarters of the field.
Only two of McManus’s are involved in any serious way as the race hots up and one of them, Glenstal Abbey, exits at the third-last to leave Sunnyhillboy to dispute the finish with Western Charmer and Organisedconfusion.
Nina Carberry surges clear on the latter from the second last and Scahill gets to call home only the second female jockey to win the Irish Grand National – 27 years after he called home the first, Ann Ferris aboard Bentom Boy.
He only has to deal with three fallers the whole way around, although the mad gallop forces a further 10 horses to pull up before the end. As Grand Nationals go, it could have been a lot more complicated.
The crowd begins to peter out after the big race and it’s back to more humdrum business for the rest of the card. His daily bread. Scahill does this 210 days a year at courses and meetings all across the country, for crowds that often wouldn’t reach up as far as four figures.
If you’ve ever watched a horse race in Ireland, you’ve heard his voice. He’s the wallpaper in every room, the carpet on every floor. Always there, always assumed to be there. Utterly unnoticed unless something goes wrong. “When you’re right, you’re supposed to be right and when you’re wrong, you’re a gobaloon,” he says. “That’s the way of it. It’s very, very fickle. The margins are tiny.”
He doesn’t sit up poring over the colours the night before a meeting. He knows he could but he’s too long in the game now to go changing the way he’s always done it. He arrives 90 minutes before the first race, takes the race card and goes through the first two races. “There’s no point in me looking at the colours for the fifth or sixth before the start of the others. You’d have too many colours, you’d only confuse the thing.”
Half an hour before the first, he goes to the weigh-room. The assistant clerk of the scales gives him the jockey changes and the non-runners. He watches the jockeys weigh out in their silks and makes notes in the margin of his race card. As soon as the bell is rung for the jockeys to come out, he heads up to the commentary box. He’ll repeat the process for each race on the card.
“I’ll watch them canter down to the start and when they’re at the start that’s where I put it together in my head. When they’re walking around at the start, I just keep banging through them one by one. Then they head off on their journey and you hope it will work out.”
Once the race starts, he switches between the monitor in front of him when the horses are at the far end of the track and his binoculars as they come by the stands. The worst days are the best days, when a glorious sun blinds the lenses and causes the shine off the jockeys’ silks to make everything the one colour. Heavy ground is no picnic either, as it turns each jockey into the same shade of mud by the end. He doesn’t mind the fog, though. “At least with the fog, nobody else can see the horses either,” he laughs.
Mistakes happen. He’s called a horse the wrong name the whole way round before and hasn’t realised until an owner or trainer has collared him afterwards. Falls happen at such a speed that the field can be at the next fence by the time he’s sorted out who went at the last one. There was a time when he’d take an educated guess if he saw a blue or a red go down. Nowadays, he waits. Better be right than be quick.
“It has changed an awful lot over the years. When I started to do it first, you came to the racecourse, did the commentary and went home and that was that. You were doing it for a couple of hundred or maybe a couple of thousand people at the track and that was as far as it went.
“But now it’s such a big money, global thing. If you believed everything you heard, every semblance of a mistake now is supposed to be costing fellas millions. With Betfair and betting-in-running on every race, it’s crazy now. I mean, how these fellas can be holding me responsible is beyond me. If they can’t back on their own opinion, how can they be backing on mine?”
Beyond grumbling bettors and layers, the road is his greatest foe. He’s never off it. Living near Kildare town, he’s generally within a 90-minute drive of every course in the country now since the roads have been improved. Killarney would be the furthest he’d have to go but at least there, he’ll do an overnight because they always have a couple of days’ racing in a row in Killarney. But most days, he’s there and back in one. Fairyhouse Monday and Tuesday, Ballinrobe Wednesday, Tipperary Thursday, Kilbeggan Friday . . .
“The travelling is the worst of it. You’re away all the time. My son is 25 today and I hardly can remember any of his birthdays. I have a daughter who was a great dancer all the way up and she’d land home every weekend with all these medals for dancing but sure I was never there to see her win them. Always on the road. That’s the worst side of it.”
He’s not complaining though. It’s a fine life he’s carved out. A manic Manchester United fan, he can pick up the phone and Alex Ferguson will greet him cheerily on the other end. Well, as cheerily as he can muster. A single-figure golfer, he played alongside Rory McIlroy at the JP McManus Pro-Am in Adare last summer. He’s seen every great horse, jockey and trainer of your lifetime, not just on great days and but on days where only a couple of hundred souls paid on the gate.
“I might have been a bit disenchanted with it all a few years ago but not anymore,” he says. “You come to appreciate it a lot in times like these. Plenty of people are struggling for work and I’m lucky to have a job like it.”
DESSIE SCAHILL'S DAY
8am– He will play golf as many mornings a week as he can, often fixing a tee time for a course close to wherever that day's racing is. Tomorrow for example, he'll play in Adare before heading on to Tipperary.
11.30am – Set off for Fairyhouse. The drive through the back roads of Kildare and into Meath takes around 50 minutes
2pm– Head down to the weigh-room to see the jockeys weigh out for the first race. With eight races on the card, there will be 123 different horses running. Trying to memorise them all would futile so he goes race by race, moving between the weigh-room and the commentary box for the next four hours.
4.30pm– The race before the Grand National is especially tricky as the field is full of point-to-point horses having their first run at a racecourse. As it turns out, the favourite Simonsig, a grey horse wins. "You always love to see a grey horse coming out in front," he says. "Makes life an awful lot easier."
6.40pm– Last race over, he heads for home and will be back again the following day. His next day off is a fortnight away.
