Mike Dillon: Lest we forget TG and terrible risks jockeys face

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Lying behind a hospital waiting room curtain at 1.30am with a shattered humerus sticking menacingly through the skin of your upper arm is no day at the beach.

Particularly when you're refused painkillers.

You don't forget those things.

Outside the curtain arguing with doctors, who seemed to forget us after 9pm while attending to drunks who had crashed cars, was jockey Tony Williams.

Like myself, Tony had had enough.

"Listen you bastards, fix my mate up, he needs your help," he said as he did his kahunas - all 49kg of him.

You don't forget those things.

Particularly as Tony, who had accompanied me in the 8pm Friday night ambulance, had to get home to waste and sweat hard to ride a full book of mounts at Te Rapa races that Saturday afternoon. He did and rode a couple of winners.

Those things come flooding back with the news that Tony died midweek after 30 years in a wheelchair as a tetraplegic.

Over the many social tipples Tony and I shared through the years he would tell the sad story of his earliest memories being of viewing domestic de facto violence.

You don't forget those things.

If you believe life is fair consider that the man who deserved just the best of later life spent it in a wheelchair after a race fall at Rotorua when the entire field went over the top of him, snapping his back.

Yet Tony could still put on a brave face and create a smile and tell a joke with his great mate, former jockey Bob Vance.

Vance made a point of always having a drink with Tony on the anniversary of that tragic fall, which might seem odd to many, but that was typical of the man everyone knew as TG.

"I will never be able to forget that fall," Bob Vance offered at the Ready To Run sale at Karaka this week.

"Nine horses fell in that and Tony was the second to go and I was back in the field watching it happen and I was second last to go.

"We all got up and walked - except Tony - and you always look back on that with guilt."

Tony was a very good rider and a sensational judge of a horse's work whether ready or not to win.

It was something admired by greatly underrated trainer, the late Baggy Hillis, who took Tony away from his early life to become his apprentice jockey. Over the years I've often been accused at times of siding too much with jockeys in the area of pulling the pin on a raceday when conditions get slippery.

Always remember this, jockeys are the only coalface participants in horse racing asked to put their lives on the line.

Tony Williams didn't lose his life in his Rotorua crash, but he lost life as he knew it. You don't forget those things.

And nor should we.

Ever.

• The funeral service is at 2pm on Tuesday in the Newmarket Room at Ellerslie Racecourse.