Grandstand made it seem normal to be watching motor-cross, the indoor athletics from RAF Cosford featuring the great Ray Smedley, or a mudbath entitled Rugby League which was usually Featherstone Rovers versus Wakefield Trinity but you couldn't tell which was which.
It was the horse racing, however, that most grabbed my imagination, included then among mainstream sport rather than the esoteric specialist subject it has been hived off into since. It was the numbers shown on the screen before each race that in some mysterious way were portents of what was going to happen that was first so beguiling. I liked numbers in those days, I was a mathematician before I was ever interested in words. One horse would have changed from 3/1, through 5/2 and then be 9/4 whereas another had started out at 7/2, briefly been 100/30 but then gone back to being 7/2, and Bar had changed from 25/1 to 16/1 but there were two fewer horses listed.
My grandpa, who liked horse racing, explained to me about Bar but I didn't quite get it. And it was he who took me to my first race meeting, at Stratford circa 1974. I slipped away to have a few shillings on a race, unsure if I would get told off or if the bookie would take the bet. I backed two because I wasn't sure. They were called Seldom Daunted and Straitjacket and at the second last hurdle, I think it was, one of them in second place fell and brought the other one down. That wasn't enough to put me off and over the next 40 years, more of my money became bookmaker's money. We lived next door to a bookie at the time. He had a Jag and we had a Hillman Hunter. I never quite took the point. It is an article of faith and as long as it doesn't become a ruinous addiction, it is a pastime that can sometimes pay you to do it. It is a good feeling to see your horse is going ominously well, the jockeys on the others starting to get more agitated, then you put in a good jump at the last and you can start working out how much you are due as the gap between yours and the rest stretches out into a satisfied feeling. There is nobody more smug than them that said what would happen and then it did, and you are a meaningless amount of money better off.
Because, increasingly, it has been the winter game that I like, the novice hurdlers spotted in the Autumn that will make their way to Cheltenham in March, and we will see which of them will mature into the top hurdlers of their generation and which were only really doing their apprenticeship towards a career over fences. There are goodies and baddies, which is a shame because I'm sure that all the horses I take against are wonderful animals to know. But sentiment mustn't overide science and just because you want The New One to win the Champion Hurdle, one can't jeopardize this year's profit so far when Faugheen has until now looked nothing less than a machine.
The louche, dodgy side of the industry is part of its dark glamour. Just because Barney Curley is not so much in evidence that doesn't mean there aren't plots being hatched. There is money involved and it's a professional sport so there is no point imagining that it is all Corinthian, healthy and good for you. And since I am against hunting, shooting and fishing and later this evening will add another animal charity to my direct debits, yes, in an absolutely perfect world, we might not make horses race against each other. But, without wanting to veer off into a moral debate, those horses are bred for racing and most are well cared for. I have nothing at all to do with the industry that breeds animals for eating. As a vegetarian for twenty years, I no longer understand how one can put a fellow animal in one's mouth, chew it up and swallow it. I'd rather eat my own foot. But I don't know how that could be explained to a carnivore, like a lion, for instance.
No, virtually all other sport has fallen off my agenda since I stopped being a footballer, a cricketer, a runner, a cyclist or a pool player in some low grade of amateur involvement. If I go to the cricket, it's the crossword that really needs looking at; I didn't even know Fulham were playing Forest this week until I saw the result; if Ronnie gets knocked out of the snooker I lose interest very quickly and I try to keep up with the cycling partly in case anybody asks me about it. But horse racing is a different matter. Not much gets in between me and the telly of a Saturday afternoon from October to April these days and with tomorrow's Cheltenham meeting due to show us where some top candidates for the festival are, it should be better than usual.
If Peace & Co gets beaten in the first then I will be temporarily distraught but when the odds shrink to the likes of 4/9, it's not about the money. I only want to see his price for the festival contract further because I have a good value ticket for the Triumph Hurdle in my account. Surely, Dynaste (1.50) must win tomorrow. Heaven knows, he deserves to.
