The Players: Wally Pyrah

Some people are born with their destiny so indelibly mapped out for them that, try as they might in life, there’s no way they will ever quite get away from it.

So to imagine Wally Pyrah spending his life surrounded by anything but bookmaking would be like imagining Michelangelo the hairdresser, Liberace the bullfighter or Kieren Fallon the brain surgeon.

It’s possible to believe he was suckled on horse milk, weaned on Sporting Life and spent his early days kipping in his bookie father’s satchel.

The only time he was away from the racing world was for his unsuccessful teenage trials for Crystal Palace FC. ‘I really wanted to be a jockey, so when I left school I went to Epsom and signed on with a Staffingham stable, but within a year or so I got too tall so had to think again,’ he reflects. Indeed, he’s a man who has enjoyed many opportunities to think again in his life.

He may display many of the traits of the chirpy Cockney sparra, but the sharp-dressed Wally is as keen to justify his support for Manchester United as anyone else with an obvious London accent might be expected to be.

Wise after Morecambe

‘I was born in Morecambe,’ he says defensively, ‘and, being a Lancastrian, I got a nasty shock while researching the origins of the name Pyrah to find that it’s from Yorkshire.’

And it was in Morecambe that his father Harry was a ‘corner shop’ bookie in the days when it wasn’t entirely legal, and where, while the young Wally (who’s now 56) was still in nappies, that the Pyrah family suffered its first reverse.

‘My dad ran a pub called the King’s Arms in Morecambe and was tipping a horse called Sheila’s Cottage in the 1948 Grand National. He was taking everyone’s half crowns and all the action and it won at 50/1. That’s how we came to move down to Croydon.’

There, Harry worked for credit bookmakers as a settler and in the process further immersed his son into romance of the racetrack.

‘He was a million-dollar man, my dad – wonderful man.’ Certainly, he was a big influence on the young Wally, who was running a book at his school aged ‘oh, I don’t know, eight or nine’.

It seems his activities were secretly tolerated in the staff room, especially after he laid his history teacher 2/6d each-way on Hard Ridden in the 1958 Derby. It won at 18/1, Virtually guaranteeing Wally an A.

‘The great thing about horse racing is that it means the same to royalty or the bloke with two bob in his pocket. You have one thing in common: if your horse is in front come the final furlong, you’re both cheering loudly.

‘It brings in every kind of character you’d care to meet, and that will never change.’ He should know. Even a blind man would find it obvious on a first meeting with Wally that he’s a round peg in a round hole. He fits his job/ hobby like spandex underpants.

The great attraction for Wally is the sheer romance of the game, even when considering his greatest ever gambling coup: a horse called Spur On in a handicap at Epsom.

‘It was owned by an old bookie called John Pegley and had been sorted out. I backed it, and it was a great gamble that paid off. The following day I went on holiday to Italy with my girlfriend. I would have been about 16 then,’ he says with an audible grimace.

Cockney not cocky

‘I could tell you that I had £100 each-way on Well Chief to win the Arkle at 33s, but there’s no romance in that.’

Self-confidence without a trace of arrogance is a rare and old-fashioned trait in the English, but it’s a characteristic of Wally’s that rubs off on those around him. We meet for lunch in the AA-list St James’ London restaurant, The Avenue, where doe-eyed retainers f it constantly about seeking to please ‘Mr Pyrah’.

He’s grateful for their attention, and they for his thanks, and seamlessly continues the conversation while pleasing those around him.

After leaving the stables, he went to work in the sweat-shop atmosphere of Raceform in Battersea, south London, before a stint on the Evening Standard’s Londoners Diary in the company of such names as Janet Street-Porter. This led him to 12 years as a sub-editor on the racing desk under the guidance of Les Murray, known as ‘Falcon’, who could ‘price up an entire meeting in ten minutes’.

Redundancy followed the demise of the midday edition and then Wally, lured still further by the life of the bookie, took a job – and a big pay cut as the first in-house odds-compiler for Corals. He welcomed the challenge of making markets not only on horses but snooker, darts, whatever, then spent six years as Corals’ PR man. Next, in came Sporting Index and Wally found the world of spread betting very much to his taste.

A touch of Midas

As befits a PR man, he has the rare gift of being able to turn even his losses into wins, even if the win is just a laugh. ‘I was hosting a lunch for about 12 journalists and we were talking about one of the lads whose wife was about to give birth. Some glasses of wine had been drunk, and so I offered a spread on 7lb 8oz for the little one.

‘They all went high and when a few days later this monster child emerged weighing 10lb 4oz, it cost me more than £800. It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he chortles, knowing full well that the outlay elevated him to the front of 12 contacts books.

‘What has changed most over the years is the quality and quantity of the information available to bookmakers. It’s astounding. The internet has a lot to do with it. Take cricket, for example: would you have known the exact state of the pitch or the state of the players 20-25 years ago?

‘Sometimes information just reaches you – you can call it research, if you like, or the bookie’s ear’ole. It was before an international cricket match and I was very friendly with this girl who was, shall I say, a fit, athletic young lass having an energetic love affair with an Australian batsman, who was at that time making piles of runs.

‘It was my guess then that this lad would be a little bit tired and might not exactly be in the nick of his life when he went out to bat. I was on Sky Sports and just said I had "bad vibes" about him. I was right – he made sod all.’

So potent is the Pyrah dynasty’s draw towards the satchel that his son is fast making a name for himself as a face on the same scene working for promoter (and punter) Barry Hearn.

‘I get people saying to me: "You’re Andy Pyrah’s Dad" and I think "Fuck me, that’s my lad – it should be the other way around!"’

Sporting Index’s secret weapon is Wally, king of the novelty bet. He was behind bets like the ‘Jerry Springers’ – the number of German footballers to head the ball in a match – and got into hot water with a bet on the Japanese team, called ‘Nip in the Air’.

It may be one of the reasons why Sporting Index claims 60% of existing sports spread-betting markets, with 30,000-odd clients. ‘Rightly or wrongly, you have to have attention-seeking markets,’ he says. ‘It’s so, so competitive now, you have to have something the other companies don’t have.

‘Spreadbetting is the way forward. It’s the thinking-man’s punting, the most complete way of gambling.’

Clowning around

He adds: ‘Spread-betting traders are much better than fixed-odds traders, so much sharper. The mentality is so much quicker – that’s why so many of them have a broking background.

‘Any bookmaker out there who hasn’t heard of our chief trader, Alastair Hunter, doesn’t deserve to be in business. If you’re taking on Sporting Index, you’re on Alastair.’

Just how well known is Wally, though? ‘People think I’m a big cheese in this little, tiny travelling circus we’re all involved in, but that’s nonsense. We think racing is huge and we think we have a lot of personalities, but it’s a very small circle in sport,’ he says, being serious for a moment.

‘AP McCoy – now, he’s a big cheese. Pound for pound the strongest sportsman there is,’ he adds – that glint of romance returning to his eye once more.

Some people are genuinely lucky and others just seem that way. Either way, the world seems to want to please Wally, and as we leave the restaurant into a drizzly afternoon, a black cab sheers across the busy street and, as fast as you can say, ‘Where to Guv?’ he’s away before he’s had a chance to extend an elegantly-suited arm.

‘I’ve been really lucky,’ he says. ‘I’ve had so much fun doing what I do, I really have.’