Alistair Downs interview with JT

I said to myself, this
isn't going to get me
beat. I'll show 'em'
Two years on from the fall that changed his life, JT McNamara talks to Alastair Down

IN THROUGH the narrow gates to see John Thomas McNamara and his wife Caroline in their much-adapted white bungalow that is house, family home to three young children and 24-hour-a-day high-tech hospital.

John Thomas and Caroline have long resisted any contact with the media, taking the view that they have plenty to endure without subjecting themselves to ordeal by stupid question.

The invitation, via the shining light that is the Injured Jockeys Fund, to go to see them in their home in County Limerick, was accepted as an honour but not without a degree of trepidation.

There is a palpable air of apprehension as I walk in to see a figure venerated in the weighing room as a horseman who was as good as, or better than, 99 per cent of jockeys who ever rode, who carved his reputation as an amateur feared by all, and who was close to retiring at the age of 37 when the sky fell in, random and merciless, at the first fence in the Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Chase on March 14, 2013.

But if you're after gloom or even a trace of pity then don't go to John Thomas McNamara's home. While every day may be a battle, with the struggle of hourly having to deal with stuff you and I couldn't face for a second, let alone forever, this is also a place of sparky wit, cracking lines and an utterly stubborn refusal to be cowed.

"I can be plenty bossy," laughs Caroline and the riposte comes rapier sharp from JT that "you'd better believe it, Alastair".

My feeble response that he must have known that when he married her, draws the typical reply: "Yeah, but I never read the small print!"

There are ground rules to establish about the McNamaras. You could fill a 24-page supplement with the help they have had from shattered friends and fans, the brilliant nurses and doctors - and a few medical practitioners who were less than good. And then there has been the money raised by a bereft public and the endless stream of visitors, fearful but determined to see one of racing's finest in his time of need.

Never in 30 years have I known the weighing room so dislocated and desolate as they have been by John Thomas's situation, not least, of course, because they are terrified of something similar happening to them.

The practicalities are plenty heavy to deal with, yet somehow the McNamaras soar above them, though not without some hard labour and grim determination. But, Christ, there is some team in place to slam through the brick walls of every day.

In recent days I have listened to some hard men cracked of voice in their admiration for Caroline, although of course the orchestration has to come from John Thomas himself, who is an arresting mixture of bloody-minded, determined and genuinely funny, despite inevitable degrees of frustration nobody who is not entirely motionless from the neck down will understand.

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HE CAN spend up to four hours at a time off the ventilator, although it is often less. Three or four times a day - sometimes more - a suction pipe is passed down into his lungs and Caroline says: "It sucks out the secretions and mucus and if his lungs are bad you have to physically shake his chest really hard to move things.

"We have to have two carers here in the house 24 hours a day and the cost of looking after him is somewhere between €300,000 and €400,000 a year. He has amazed me the way he has dealt with his total surrender of privacy and dignity. He is less fazed by it than the rest of us as we have people in the house 24/7 and that takes a lot of getting used to.

"John has accepted that this is the way it is. As long as he gets to the yard every morning and can immerse himself in his horses - he leaves on the van at ten to eight every morning on the dot - then he'll be all right.

"When it first happened I thought 'Oh no, of all the people to be hit by this - a man who would happily spend all his day on horses'. I thought his incredibly strong personality wouldn't deal with the intrusion and sheer frustration. But the anger in the beginning has passed. There's no depression or anger now.

"There was a long period of severe neuropathic pain as the nerves surrounding the diaphragm tried to reconnect but simply couldn't. He said it was like having a rope tied tight around his chest and then yanked by a tractor. It took a long time to get the meds balanced for pain and sleep.

"Now the worst thing is that he gets fed up with looking at me all day!"

Rapier quick, John Thomas says: "Now that's for sure."

Caroline laughs and adds: "And I'll tell you this. I see John as the same man I fell in love with and married. Exactly the same person he was before his injury, same personality, and I treat him the same way I did before his accident.

"Our lives have changed enormously but I can look beyond his disabilities. I have great respect for John and how he has dealt with all the issues and setbacks he has encountered. He still has that great strength and total determination that all jump jockeys require.

"It's impossible to overstate the role my mother, Phil, has played because she has made light of an incredible amount of burden.

"She's a nurse and never had illusions about what we all faced. She's a very strong, driven lady and she has become our children's second mother. She holds the fort and without her encouragement, strength, help and energy we wouldn't be where we are today. We would be lost without her and John would be the first to say it."

When you talk with racing people there are plenty who trot out the trite view that John Thomas would be better off dead. There is no malice in them, it is effectively just an admission they could not begin to deal with what he faces for the rest of his life.

But the man himself is not prepared to vote in that lobby of despair. "Of course there have been low days and the worst were when I was in hospital in Dublin because they gave me no hope. That just made me more determined and I said to myself this is not going to get me beat. I'll show 'em.

"The sheer number of visitors and the support from the public helped me keep going. All those people making the time to come to see me - it showed a few people liked me anyway!

"Not being able to play with the kids is the hardest thing. And it always will be."

And Caroline has had to be plenty firm from the very first days she saw her husband in Frenchay hospital, near Bristol - an experience for which there can never be anything approaching an adequate preparation.

She says: "When the lads first started coming to see him I told them: ‘Guys, it might be hard but we don't cry. If you get upset, you'll have to go outside.'"

In a sense, the policy is still in place. "We're not a teary house," she says, before adding in a voice that trails quietly away in the breathtaking understatement: "Though we've had plenty of cause."

But laughter was never far away, even in the grimmest of times. Racing photographer Liam Healy has been a great friend of John Thomas for more than 20 years and visits the house so often he must be paying council tax on the place.

"I first saw him about ten days after the fall in Frenchay and it was something about his eyes that relaxed me, though he couldn't talk at the time," says Healy.

"Then a while later Caroline asked me to fly over again and we walked into the intensive care unit and John Thomas had been fitted with a voice box. Straight away he whispered "And you can f**k off Mr Healy," and I replied 'Oh Jesus, you're fecking back, you old bollocks'.

"It was a great moment but all the nurses looked at us horrified."

 

The one thing I wanted more than anything else was to be back home'
JOHN THOMAS can still grind his teeth and needless to say there are tooth-grinding issues, not least his allegedly high-spec but low-achieving powered wheelchair.

"I got the thing last February. When you go and buy a car the two things you need it to do is go forwards and backwards. This thing arrived without any reverse. Not until two days ago was that sorted, but now I can use it without help from anybody and that is a major boost to my independence.

"But the bracket that swings in to let me use controls with my chin is too short. Getting parts is a nightmare - everything will arrive in 'another two weeks'. A feller was meant to come out to look at it at five o'clock yesterday and never turned up - didn't ring or anything. Jesus, he won't forget the experience when he finally gets here!

"But it's not just us - there are two-year-olds and lots of kids in wheelchairs. It's not only me."

Caroline can't resist needling him affectionately. "The trouble with you, John, is you have no patience," which is a scandalous slander and rightly gets the retort: "I've loads of patience."

But Caroline isn't done and says: "The last time I saw you show any patience was when you won the four-miler at Cheltenham on Rith Dubh."

That was back in 2002 and it remains one of the great Cheltenham rides on a horse with plenty of his own ideas and tricks up his sleeve. In a duel with Davy Russell on Timbera from two out, John Thomas held on to Rith Dubh like a man cradling a baby and never dared touch him with the whip.

But in the dying strides he cajoled Rith Dubh ahead to win by a neck. It was vintage JT, the instinctive horseman at his brilliant best.

John Thomas left Frenchay for treatment in Dublin at the end of April 2013. In October he was finally moved to the North West Regional Spinal Injuries Centre in Southport.

Making a joke of the bleakest days he faced, John Thomas says: "I weighed 8st when I left Dublin and I never liked doing light weights as I was never one for missing my dinners.

"I'd have died if I'd stayed in Dublin but the minute I got to Southport I began to thrive - a bit like a horse who suddenly starts doing well.

"The doctors were prepared to take risks and give things a go. I'd been told I would never breathe for one minute off the ventilator but straight away they started to get me off it.

"First it was five minutes, then five minutes four times a day. Then we got to ten, 15, 20 and so on. Even they were surprised at the progress, but they'd given me hope and told me, 'We'll get you home because you have a yard to run'.

"Throughout all this the one thing I wanted more than anything else was to be back home."

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THE moment came last June after eight months in Southport. Two of the nurses who had worked with him every day returned with him to settle him in for a few days - their first-ever home delivery of a Paddy jockey.

Home meant being back with the kids - Dylan, eight and a half, six-year-old Harry and Olivia, who is just three and hadn't even had her second birthday when the world changed.

Caroline remembers: "Harry came in the front door and sensed he was here and just said 'Daddy!'

"All along their attitude has been 'whatever has happened we just want Daddy home'. Olivia took a bit of time to get used to it - all of 20 minutes.

"Dylan, being the oldest, was hit hard by John's absence. He came home from school at three o'clock and was so excited he didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

Plenty of both, I imagine.

"But you could see what it meant on the faces of all three of them."

And you can see what it means on John Thomas's face now.

It is almost two years since the fall but there has been no diminution in the support, both practical and emotional, for the McNamaras. Their fight is still fought fiercely by many.

The Turf Club, Irish Injured Jockeys and the IJF have all played their part and somewhere in the background, unobtrusive as ever, you sense the open heart and hand of JP McManus.

John Thomas says: "JP is unbelievable and if for some reason he ever had to pull out of Ireland it would be like a tsunami. I have the highest respect for him. The things he does for the racing industry - and half of Ireland - are incredible."

The IJF has been at its superb best. "All the almoners we have dealt with have been magnificent," says Caroline. "They're an amazing bunch and do things without you having to ask. They have this calm about them and my relationships with them are very important to me."

John Thomas and Caroline recently had a day out at Limerick, scene of the awesome October 2013 fundraiser that whistled up a staggering €800,000 for JT and Jonjo Bright, who at the age of 18 was left in a wheelchair after a point-to-point fall in the same month as JT's accident.

John Thomas says: "Bryan Murphy of the Dunraven Arms in Adare, where Caroline worked for five years, and [racecourse manager] Conor O'Neill organised a box right on the winning pole. Throughout the afternoon about 50 people came up to see me - jockeys, valets, trainers and all sorts of friends I'd not seen for a long time because of what happened. It was a very good day."

As his wheelchair gets fully sorted John Thomas will gain more independence and as the evenings draw out he will get out and about more with his children. But he can't pick them up to hug them and the big, pale hands lie utterly without life on the arms of the wheelchair. He can eat but has to be fed and Caroline says: "In Southport he developed a fondness for sausages in onion gravy but back home he's a chicken man." But with nothing chicken about him.

Despite his immobility there is an extraordinary amount of life in him. He has acquired the skill of conveying a lot with his eyes, his brain is pin-sharp and there remains a bucketful of mischief about him.

He strikes me as still every inch a jump jockey. Confined, yes, but plenty of that wild, raw courage still pulses through those beleaguered veins.

By all means feel sorry for him but don't pity him because time spent in his company tells you there is nothing pitiable about John Thomas McNamara.

He has at his side a woman who is nothing less than a triumph of humanity. Tough, tender, utterly resolved and fighting her husband's corner with a heart the size of Limerick.

John Thomas is hugely likeable, funny and with that pleasing and essential streak of stubbornness that won't allow events to grind him down. And you can't help falling quietly in love with the phenomenon that is Caroline.

It would be easy to reach for lazy labels such as inspirational or uplifting, but it isn't like that because somehow they have removed the drama from the crisis. What must have been terrifying at first has been tamed, contained and turned into the everyday. It is some achievement.

Each day is endless hard work on a scale only to be guessed at. But in the hospital of a home just outside Adare, a husband and wife, a dad and a mum, are grafting away for each other like demons.

There has been no miracle but there is an abundance of triumph

 

Thanks for posting Wooly. Alastair Down is such a fine wordsmith.

Such a brave and courageous couple to overcome such a tragic twist of fate.

 

Great piece, thanks for posting Wooly. Brings some perspective to the day to day irritations which annoy the hell out of me!

 

I haven't the words to do it justice but what an awe-inspiring fightback from that man and his family. When you watch Cheltenham in a couple of weeks and there are the frustrations of a losing bet- just have a read of this and put it into context.

Wonderfully portrayed by Alastair too. Brave interview of an even braver man.

 

Great piece, thanks for posting Wooly. What a story of courage. Makes you be grateful for what you have and puts into perspective people's problems in life.

Clearly Channel 4 got rid of Alistair Down as he's too talented...