William Pike: A Better Man Than Jockey
William Pike: A Better Man Than Jockey
“Historically, we’re looking at the most successful jockey that there will ever be in this state. He’ll finish with a record that will be unsurpassed.”
Powerful words from Darren McCaullay, Western Australia’s premier race caller for the past two decades.
McCaullay has seen and called WA’s best riders since commencing race commentary in 1980 and places William
Pike at the top of an elite list. His comments about Pike were made between races at WA racing headquarters;
Ascot racecourse, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. Just moments later, the jockey was legged aboard an Adam Durrant-trained runner, Witchery Woman. It was having the fifth start of its campaign – but its first with the “Wizard” in the saddle. The filly’s form read ninth, sixth, seventh and sixth in her previous four races and after opening at a $15 betting quote the day before, she closed a $5.50 outright second-favourite. The money came for Pike, the punters’ pal, and he duly saluted to bring home another winner.
As Pike, 32, closes in on a 10th Perth jockey premiership, his success is extraordinary. After being on top for so long and raking in half-a-million dollar earnings year after year, you could expect him to live a life of luxury, have an aura of self-assurance or at least a strut in his step. But not this boy from Coolgardie, a small country town of less than 1,000 people, 38 kilometres from Kalgoorlie.
There’s no lavish SUV or top-of-the-range performance vehicle, instead he drives a new Isuzu D-MAX four-wheel-drive ute with a tray for his four-wheeler motorbike. He would rather stay at home playing video games than go to a party and would much prefer being at his Kojonup farm than at a racing awards night collecting another accolade.
He considers the constant attention he gets “unwarranted” and sometimes resents the expectation thrust upon him. He loves his family more than anything, still calls his old apprentice master “boss” and never forgets where he came from.
Growing up as the youngest of four brothers in a working-class family, the Pike household was rough and tough. There were fights, beltings and a sense of ‘work it out as you go’ while his parents were busy working, which has shaped how Pike fathers his own kids; Jett, 8, and Aspen, 5.
“I think I would be a lot more lenient with my kids than my parents were on me, but I also probably have the luxury of doing that because I’m in a better position,” he says. “They had their own problems but I’m lucky that the problems I’ve got are only problems that I’ve made for myself; like getting a farm.”
When asked if he’d be in support of his kids becoming jockeys, he didn’t hesitate with his answer.
“Absolutely. Racing in general has been good to me and it’s an area I could probably help with,” he explains. “If they were to be brick layers then they’d have to figure it out themselves because I couldn’t help. But truth be told, I’m happy for them to be anything they want to be.”
Pike speaks fondly of childhood memories in the gold rush town of Coolgardie and makes mention of a life full of sports and pony riding. He got his own pony when he was eight-years-old and stabled it with his mother’s horse at the “horse blocks”, located a few kilometres out of town. Unknowingly, those early experiences would help mould Pike into later becoming one of the most household names in WA racing history.
“Every now and then Mum would have time and we would get on our ponies and sometimes go for a four-hour trail ride. We’d just pick a direction and go,” he says with a grin. “It was the best fun ever. We’d get lost all the time but we’d just let the reins go and let the horses walk for an hour and, inevitability, they always took us home.”
As Pike reflects on his early days you can sense he cherishes the times running amok as a young lad in a knockabout mining town. Whilst he isn’t close with his brothers and has been estranged from his father for the best part of 20 years, Pike has set his mother up in a renovated, self-contained granny flat at his 10-acre rural property in Mardella, 50 minutes south of Perth. Also on the premises is the home Pike and his partner, Jessica Valas, built five years ago. Valas, a former jockey-turned-trainer, was apprenticed to prominent city trainer Lindsey Smith in the mid 2000’s when their relationship began.
She tells the story: “We were friends first. He was a funny bloke and a bit different compared to everyone else,” Valas says. “He’d help anyone. Obviously he’s successful in what he does but I’d still love him if he wasn’t.”
An easy-going man who lives a surprisingly low-key life, Pike is described as a “loner who loves his family and is happy in his own company” by his former apprentice master, Jack Cockell. He’s never smoked, barely drinks and is just a “clean, straight-to-the-post jockey” according to Cockell. Pike attributes his clean-living style to some unpleasant experiences earlier in life.
“I got drunk a few times when I was 13 and got pretty sick,” he says. “My friends were experimenting with smoking but I absolutely hated it. I remember we’d got a new car and my one memory of the car was that we had to have the windows closed while the aircon was on. Dad would light up a smoke and it was filthy but we still weren’t allowed to open the windows.”
A fierce competitive nature and sheer will to win are also key factors in what separates Pike from his peers. While most jockeys would be basking in the glory if they rode a winning treble, Pike instead laments the one that got away. It’s that mentality and hunger for success that’s helped him ride the most winners of any jockey in the country for the past three years.
“Because I’m used to winning and I’m expected to win then I’m looking at the one I didn’t win,” he says. “Just because I won three other races doesn’t mean I wasn’t expected to win on the fourth one.”
Jack Cockell, 88, is one of WA racing’s most colourful characters and a self-confessed graduate from the school of ‘hard knocks’. An old-school straight shooter who swears like a trooper, he’s not backward in coming forward. Pike remembers being taken aback when being introduced to him by his uncle, a friend of Cockell, at the age of 14.
“I met him at the front of his house in Mundijong. He looked me over and assessed me almost like a horse,” Pike laughs. “He said ‘you look like you’ll make a jockey. You have good shoulders and you stand straight’.”
From that moment on, Pike was signed up to be an apprentice jockey. Although he’d ridden ponies for years, the ‘sport of kings’ was completely foreign to him. He had never even stepped foot on a racecourse. However, over the next six years, the Coolgardie kid would live and breathe his new world at Cockell’s Mundijong training base, some six-and-a-half hours from his hometown.
As Pike learned his craft throughout his apprentice years, it was other life lessons taught by Cockell which would also become instilled in him. Punctuality, respect and humility were traits he would retain forever. Cockell, a country trainer, has no more than a handful of horses in training now and races them almost exclusively at bush meetings across the state; like Mount Magnet and Norseman. Pike seldom ventures outside of the metropolitan and inner-provincial racing circuit and rarely rides Cockell’s horses in a race but he still, to this day, gallops the “boss’s” horses in trackwork each week. Pike’s only other regular trackwork commitment is for leviathan owner-breeder Bob Peters, once a week, which speaks volumes of his respect for his former master.
Cockell is a likeable larrikin who is renowned for spinning a few yarns. But as he sat in his living room while his chickens roamed around cackling, you could feel his demeanour become more serious when he began talking about the 14-year-old bush kid he first met 18 years ago who later became the state’s best jockey.
“He’s no different now to the first day he ever came here. It’s never gone to his head,” he says. “He was here yesterday and I had hay on the trailer and he asked where it had to go. I told him ‘in the shed’ and he hooked the trailer onto his car, backed it into the shed and unloaded it all.”
In Pike’s mind, he’ll be forever indebted to the man who gave him a start. He aims to be in a financial position to retire by the age of 45; however, his success in the saddle is not the only reason for his gratitude.
“Jack was probably more a father to me in the six years I was there than my own father was leading up to that,” he says. “He’s been everything to me from a mentor to just someone I can ring for advice. He’s not shy in telling me when I rode one bad too!”
In light of all of Pike’s stellar achievements to date, Cockell pauses while he thinks about his answer to what he is proud of his former apprentice for the most.
“I’m not proud of him for any other thing than this,” he says. “He’s a better man than a jockey. It wouldn’t matter who he was or if he was black, white or brindle. If you get a bloke that treats you like William treats you, why wouldn’t you think that’s his finest point?”
Cockell’s next assessment is as blunt as it is frank.
“Very rarely a shit man becomes a great jockey. He may become alright, but the shit will always end up coming out of him. There’s always something that goes wrong with them,” he says. “You get a bloke like William Pike, nothin’ goes wrong.”
Michael Heaton