Conor Murphy’s well placed bet

The Kentucky Derby was last Saturday.

I didn’t put on a big flowered hat and sip on a mint julep, but I did give a bit of thought to the ponies, thanks to an article that caught my eye in The New York Times.

The article told of one Conor Murphy -  County Cork’s own - and, until fairly recently, a stable hand in England who spent his days exercising racehorses, curry-combing their manes, and mucking out their stalls. (And you think your job entails shoveling shit…)

One day, about a year and a half ago, Murphy decided the place a bet,. He put $75 down online with Bet365.com, on the five horses from the stable where he was working. The bet he placed was an accumulator, which strings a number of bets together. If they all work out, you win. And big.

Anyway, yer man put his money down in December 2011 for a race that was going to be run in March. It was pretty much a house-loyalty, sentimental betting strategy, given that all the horses he bet on had pretty long odds on them.  But he went ahead and made his wager.

Then he forgot about it.

The odds at the time of the bet were long on each horse: Sprinter Sacre (10-1), Simonsig (14-1), Bobs Worth (10-1), Finian’s Rainbow (8-1) and Riverside Theatre (9-1). That all five would win was, well, nearly impossible — about “163,350-to-1,” said a spokesman for Paddy Power, an Irish bookmaking firm. (Source: NY Times.)

That $75 bet paid out over $1.5 million.

Maybe not rags to riches, or even nags to riches, but enough to take Conor Murphy out of his job as stable hand for someone else. And into a new life running his own horse training business, which is in Louisville, Kentucky.

What he did with his money is just great

He bought a few horses.  Paid cash for a house in Louisville, Kentucky – which was where he really wanted to be, rather than in England, and where he had a girlfriend – and started up a business as a horse trainer. He now has a couple of dozen in his training fold.

A horse he trains (not one of his own, but one belonging to a client), Lines of Battle, ran in the Kentucky Derby.

It would, of course, have been a really great story it Lines of Battle had won, but he didn’t. He did finish a respectable seventh out of twenty.

Respectable to me, maybe, but what I know about horse racing is limited to being able to name the three events that comprise the Triple Crown: Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont. Recognizing Man o’ War, Secretariat, Fury and My Friend Flicka as horse names.  And remembering when Ruffian broke her leg.

I did go to the track on a few occasions, when I was in my twenties. I’d go with a couple of friends to Suffolk Downs or Narragansett, and we’d each bring $20 so that we could place ten two-dollar bets in the course of the evening. Our betting strategies were brilliant: a combination of liking the horse’s name and the color the silks the jockey was wearing. Needless to say, we rarely won.

My only other brush with racing had come a bit earlier, when my college roommate and I were hitchhiking and were picked up by a jockey and his girlfriend. The jockey was driving a big honking Cadillac pretty much the length of the house I grew up in. His girlfriend was about six feet tall and looked like Barbie doll. It would have been an excellent lift if they hadn’t been squabbling with each other the whole time.

Speaking of jockeys, as a lad growing up in Ireland, Conor Murphy had hoped to be a jockey, but once he became a six footer, he had to forge a new path so he could stay around horses.

He wisely attributes his winning to “pure luck,” and while plenty has changed for him, some things have stayed the same:

He still rises before dawn, still mucks stalls and still walks his horses for hours on end. He also bathes them himself.

(When I first read that last line, I thought it was “He also bathes himself.” So I was thinking, come on, $1.5M is way not enough to be able to afford to hire someone to bathe you, unless you’re on your last legs and it’s a home health care attendant doing the bathing…)

“Someday,” Mr. Murphy said, “I’ll saddle my own Kentucky Derby winner.”

Good on ye, lad. I hope you do.

And when that day comes, please pick a name (and jockey colors) that I might be interested in putting two-bucks down on.

The names in this year’s Derby were pretty lame (sorry). The one I would have bet on was Overanalyze. (Story of my life.) Overanalyze finished 11th. Figures…

Meanwhile, belated congratulations to Conor Murphy.