If you ever wanted to understand Mal James' affinity with local racing, you had to watch his moving eulogy for trainer David Balfour in late 2014. The passion he showed that day as he remembered his long-time friend was typical of the way Mal has embraced all things racing in South Australia and made him a favourite within the industry and with regular racegoers.
Mal has been an unmistakable figure on the local racing landscape for more than 40 years. He’s been writing and promoting SA racing all his working life, tipping punters into plenty of winners - through the print and electronic media for just as long and passing on his expert knowledge to local, interstate and overseas interests throughout a remarkable career.
If there's been a role relating to the promotion of SA racing, Mal has probably done it at one time or another. He went from doing interstate betting markets for bookmaking father-in-law Andrew Haskett in the 1980s to taking up an offer from racing journo Graham Fischer to join him at The News and, before long, he was writing up the characters of the industry, tipping winners on radio and becoming the first in SA to represent jockeys as their manager. He has since had the likes of Dwayne Dunn, Wayne Kerford, Simon Price and Siggy Carr on the books and currently manages Ryan Hurdle and visiting Singapore apprentice Jai Mamat.
"Trainers were used to speaking to the riders to get their rides and they were set in their ways," Mal recalls. "I overcame that by being a journalist and talking to trainers for stories, so that gave me a head start. My daughter was in England working at Newmarket and she knew a jockey called Russell Price, who rang me one day to say he was coming to Australia and would I be his manager. He caught me on the hop and I made a snap decision and said yes, so when he arrived, he gave me a few pointers on being a manager and away I went."
One of Mal's jockeys, Wayne Kerford, was instrumental in giving him his biggest thrill at the races when his former very good sprinter Sportsbeat - named after the iconic magazine he helped create - won the 1994 Christmas Handicap. He's had a lot of horses and a lot of winners over the years but that race stays with him as his special moment on the track.
"It's hard to get a horse to actually win races and then win them regularly and it's even harder to win a feature race," Mal says. "I've always loved the Christmas Handicap and the fact that I won it with that good horse carrying that name meant a lot to me."
If you've ever wanted to know what made SA racing work, you've only needed to ask Mal. His enthusiasm is palpable. Whether he was showing tourists local racing via his "A Day At The Races" tours, which took them from watching races in the grandstands to meeting jockeys behind the barrier and watching the start, or taking punters to the Melbourne Cup with wife Rose, it was always an experience.
While Mal has always been very keen to promote local racing, and share his love of the game, he has also established himself as one of the best judges of a race in the business. For 20 years, he was studying the fields and watching trackwork as the form analyst for the legendary weekly Best Bets formguide and tipster with Sydney's Radio 2KY. He was also journalist and tipster for TABForm in the late 1990s and for 12 years was the AAP racing man in Adelaide.
The man who got David Balfour his first winning owners and watched thousands of races at Morphettville, Cheltenham, Victoria Park and all across South Australia is widely regarded beyond the state border. He is the SA representative on the Australian Racing Hall of Fame and has been the Australian thoroughbred independent assessor for racing and breeding leviathan Sheik Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum for more than a decade.
"I was just approached to the do the job one day and I've been working for the Sheik for about 12 years now," Mal says. "I even met the Sheik when Rose and I went over for the 2012 Dubai World Cup. In fact, I watched the race from the saddling enclosure with Aidan O'Brien as So You Think ran as favourite. It doesn't get much better than that, watching world-class racing at Meydan in the company of such great racing people."
These days, Mal and Rose keep a very busy schedule running their Glenelg South TAB - a franchise the couple didn't hesitate to buy into for both financial and emotional reasons.
"We love running the TAB agency," he says. "What other job can you have where you watch racing all day and still mix with racing people and punters? I think you have to enjoy meeting people and also know your racing to be successful. We have people tell us their hard luck stories, which is fine because we all have them and want to have people listen when we tell them. I'm not a big punter myself but I understand what makes punters tick and I love to talk racing."
