KEY POINTS:
Michael Walker says he can't wait to pick up his son Kase again.
He tried last week and couldn't lift the toddler, who will have his first birthday on Friday.
The back pain that has threatened Walker's riding career for a number of years is intense.
He will carry it into tomorrow's $700,000 SkyCity Auckland Cup on the back of the favourite, Pentane.
This is a win Walker wants desperately. If it weren't for Pentane he'd still be sidelined waiting for the operation that he knows will fully kick-start a career so volatile it has screamed to a halt a couple of times.
Walker knows there will be sceptics, but he says he is a changed person.
Apart from an odd beer when friends call around for a barbecue at home, the former champion apprentice says he has given alcohol away. And he wants to put his very public admission of cocaine use when riding in Melbourne far behind him.
"That life of going out all the time is behind me - it's not for me."
Walker has moved back to his original Taranaki base with his son and partner Candice and is getting advice again from his former boss Allan Sharrock.
"I'm loving it here," he says as he prepares for New Zealand's premier 3200m race.
When he split with Matamata trainer Mark Walker late last year, Michael Walker decided to take a year off, during which he intended having an operation on the damaged spine that has caused him grief for four years. But Lance O'Sullivan got in the way.
Walker won the Auckland Cup on Pentane last year and was offered the ride again.
"I'm back riding only because of Pentane. But for him I'd still be sidelined."
Walker's spine has not been stable since he had a bad fall at Ellerslie four years ago, and has been worse lately.
"It was reasonably good until a horse I was riding stopped suddenly on me at Matamata one morning in October and it jolted my back quite badly."
Walker has to be careful how much work he gives his back.
"At Matamata I was riding a lot of work and riding on raceday and it was too much.
"Now I'm down here I'm riding a few for Allan maybe once or twice a week and restricting my raceday rides and it helps."
Last week Walker rode at meetings only two days apart and could barely walk.
"If I rode two days in a row I wouldn't be able to walk."
Walker had to get a clearance from ACC to come back and ride Pentane and the rider hopes to hear in the next few weeks when his surgeon will be given the all-clear to operate.
The upside to enduring so much pain has been that Walker has been told the operation can now be done through an endoscopic process.
Because muscle tissue will not be be cut into, Walker's standdown time from racing will be only four to six weeks, not six months.
Pentane showed he was coming to form at the right time with a storming finish into fourth over a too-short 2000m at Matamata last Saturday week.
As good as that was, Walker's summation is even more telling.
"He feels better than he did last year."
He says he's very bullish going into the big race.
"Kase's coming up to watch ... " The previous incarnation of Michael Walker might have added " ... his father win the cup."
Yes, there have been some changes.
* Walker was handed a lengthy suspension following racing at Ellerslie on Saturday.
He was suspension from the end of racing at Ellerslie tomorrow until the end of racing on March 21 for careless riding aboard Clifton Prince in the group three Darley Plate, and faces another careless-riding charge following his ride aboard Stolen Thunder in the Mercedes Derby.
