Out of the traps

TheLastStraw: As the owner of a minority shareholding in a greyhound, I was startled by a detail in last week's Village magazine. During the course of a short article reviewing the accuracy of GAA correspondents' big-match predictions, the writer acknowledges the superior performance of this newspaper's Sean Moran.

Then in a curious aside, he adds that Moran "literally flew out of the traps" in early summer.

The writer clearly has a high regard for my colleague's athleticism. But the event he describes seems to me highly unlikely. I would be broadly similar in body size to Sean. And even assuming that I could literally enter the traps at - say - Shelbourne Park, the question of my literally flying out of them would not arise. I would more likely have to be removed by the fire brigade. Literally. Or perhaps laterally: they might have to cut through the side panel to free me.

It's arguable whether even greyhounds could be said to fly out of traps literally. Certainly, flying has been beyond the talents of any of my dog syndicate's investments: except once during a hurdles race at Harold's Cross, when our greyhound was airborne for short periods. Unfortunately he soon came back to earth, as did our hopes, and the hurdles experiment was deemed a failure.

A syndicate sub-group met in Neary's the other night to review pre-tax earnings for 2004 (nil) and projected earnings for 2005 (also nil). Luckily it's love of sport rather than profit that unites us. True, two of our 15 members are lawyers, whose line of work is often referred to, figuratively, as a goldmine. And there's one guy whose business is literally a goldmine (I think he has some zinc interests as well). They'd be exceptions, though.

But getting back to canine aerodynamics, some readers are probably asking: what about Mick the Miller, the legendary depression-era greyhound, whose eponymous ballad includes the chorus line, "Let's give three cheers to good old Mick/As he goes flying by"? Well, indeed, Mick the Miller's fly-pasts were a popular sight at London dog tracks in the early 1930s. In fact, an incredible 70,000 crowd packed White City in 1931 to see him robbed of what would have been a third English Derby win. I know all this because I've been reading The Legend of Mick the Miller, an absorbing if sentimental account of his life.

It details his humble beginnings in Offaly, where he was the runt in a litter of 10 (big families were the norm back then), through emigration to England, and on to sporting immortality. Such was his fame that, on his death, his body was embalmed like Lenin's, and displayed in the Natural History Museum.

It's hard to know where to draw the line with the book's anthropomorphism. Everybody agrees that Mick was unusually intelligent, and tactically very shrewd. But accounts of him weaving his way through race "traffic", avoiding bend-trouble, and timing his sprint finishes to perfection, make you wonder.

All of us who admire greyhounds are occasionally troubled by the fact that, race after race (81 of them in Mick the Miller's case), they obligingly chase a fancy-dress "hare" - one that makes rattling noises as it passes the traps - and never get near it. You'd think they'd cop themselves on eventually.

Of course, Mick's talents were not confined to the racetrack. He later starred in a film called Wild Boy, in which among other things he had to negotiate actual traffic, looking left and right before using a zebra crossing. Apparently there was no trick photography involved.

By common consent, the greyhound was the film's outstanding actor, although the reviews suggest this was faint praise. The movie was chiefly notable for a scene in which Mick appears in bed with his male owner. One has to remember that these were the innocent 1930s, and it didn't seem as wrong then as it does now.

Sadly, his cinema career did not develop. We can only lament that nobody in Hollywood saw the opportunity for a genre-uniting romantic comedy, "When Mick Met Lassie", in which our heroes overcame the social prejudices of their time to raise a family of super-fast collies. But there you are.

In real life, Mick the Miller enjoyed a long career at stud and died just short of his 13th birthday (91 in dog years). The end was peaceful. He slipped into a coma and, at 6.40pm on May 5th, 1939, he passed on. Or, as his biographer puts it, poetically: "Mick summoned up one last effort and ran toward the bright white light of eternity." And you know what? I wouldn't be surprised if, at that moment, he literally flew out of the traps.