The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

SPORTS NEWS 11 THE GUARDIAN Saturday January 2 1993 PSrii'Si ftniYMWA Biited by Jemmy Aloter UniUlir (SLl lUU uSEr and Neil Robinson The garden path that leads to Cup stories for today Chris Hawkins on the woman jockey who refuses to think about retirement from a hazardous occupation that has left her with broken bones, mounting bills and the need to take in lodgers to pay the mortgage as the quality of her mounts goes into decline I New Year is a quiet time for Gee Armytage. Although virtually a non-drinker, the 27- year-old jockey is far from a shrinking violet but a crushed vertebra in her back after the fall of Merry Master in the Welsh National on Monday means that she must spend the next two weeks in bed. She had only just returned to the saddle after an earlier fall had meant 20 stitches in her left forearm. The offender left a visible hoof print she will carry for life. Armytage's catalogue of injuries during her career includes both wrists broken, both elbows broken, a broken left knee, seven broken ribs and three broken collar-bones.

Yet with ample time to lie and reflect on her hazardous occupation, which to be frank is leading nowhere, the thought of retiring has not entered her head. "I'm still obsessed with race riding and I can take these falls because they are not bad and you get better from them. They are just a nuisance," she says with a jump jockey's unique ability to call a disaster a little local difficulty. "I thrive on being on a knife-edge of uncertainty and excitement every day, not knowing whether I'm going to ride a winner or get hurt. I could give up race riding and get run over by a car," she adds.

When emancipation began to infiltrate racing 20 years or so ago many thought that women should not be allowed to ride over fences, but the strong belief of some of them, that they had just as much right to smash themselves up as men, eventually prevailed. For Armytage the early years as a professional, when she was claiming a riding allowance, were good. She rode two winners at the 1987 Cheltenham Festival, The Ellier and the co-incidentally-named Gee-A, and she had an exhilarating ride on the latter, leading for much of the way, in the Grand National the following season. If anyone of her sex was going to make the grade, one thought, it would be she, with her horse-riding background and good connections her Smiling through Armytage Golf T'T'lp- lts gf Woman's best friend Gee Armytage out for a training run in the countryside with Benjy, her Jack Russell terrier Armytage down but not out as the falls mount up Today they face Arsenal, whom they last met 22 years ago at the Hulsh Yeovil lost 3-0 and Arsenal went on to the double. 5.

Today is the first time since January 7, 1956 that Arsenal and Tottenham have played non-League opposition on the same day. On that occasion Arsenal were held 2-2 by Bedford Town (Southern League), winning the replay 2-1; Spurs beat Boston United (Midland) 4-0. 6. Reading and Manchester City meet today for the first time in the Cup since January 1968, when City were heading for the Championship and Reading were in the Third Division. The teams drew 0-0 at Maine Road; City won the replay 7-0.

7. Wolves' record Cup win is 14-0 against Crosswells Brewery in 1886. They have since played 299 Cup games and reached double figures only once in a 1912 replay against Watford. The first game (0-0) was one of the first filmed for newsreels. Watford watched themselves at a Wolverhampton cinema before being thumped 10-0.

The sides meet at Vicarage Road today. 8. Leicester City are the only South Somerset District Council's draft plan. The issue goes to a public inquiry on January 26. With sport and heritage under one Whitehall umbrella, it should be no contest.

Botham scored his century for Buckler's Mead School, Yeovil, against Holyrood School, of Chard. It would be just Holyrood's luck to lose their sports fields. Last autumn, when the school league tables were controversially published, their pass rate was given as six per cent. It was 46 per cent. WIGAN have called Bar-rie-Jon Mather Into their squad for today's Regal Trophy match.

The immediate reaction is wrong spelling, wrong code but not as far as Mather is concerned. He always had his sights on league, though he played union for England under-18 schoolboys first. "The Lions had just come back from beating New Zealand, and the Wales fly-half was on This Is Your Life as the christening approached," says Mather. "Mum wanted Barry, which Dad a union man for Orrell didn't like. Dad liked John, which Mum didn't." So they compromised with a hyphen.

The spelling amendments were just as well; Barrie-Jon is a 6ft 7in second-row. THOSE who read the Guardian's feature on Allan Donald on Thursday will have been surprised to learn that South Africa's unerringly accurate fast bowler is a devotee of the unerringly wayward Devon Malcolm. Donald is so impressed by the Malcolm rhythm that he watches a video of the England bowler's action whenever things go wrong with i vate insurance but the premiums amount to 700 a year. The parcel contains an unla-belled bottle of some evil-looking brown stuff sent by an admirer who is adamant that it will make a new woman of her. She does not want to become a new woman, although she is surely quite capable of carving out a more lucrative career.

She is highly intelligent and at school gained 12 O-levels "without doing any Three years ago she wrote a book about her life in which she quoted a school report from a perspicacious teacher which read: "Gaye has many assets but it is a pity she does not harness more of her energy into her work." There can be no complaints on that score now but she is not side to lose all four of their Cup finals. Last season they reached the fourth round for the first time in eight years. Today they face Barnsley. whom they beat In 1961 and 1969, two of their final years. Barnsley, finalists in 1912, beat Leicester that year.

9. Liverpool have twice conceded five goals in a Cup tie this century both times against Bolton, today's opponents. They lost 5-2 (aet) in a fourth-round replay in 1929 and 5-0 in a fourth-round first-leg tie in 1946. 10. Liverpool are one of four sides to have lost to non-League opposition while league champions.

In 1902 Southampton (Southern League) beat them 4-1. Others to fall were: Preston NE, who lost 0-3 to Stoke (Football Alliance) 1891; Aston Villa, who lost 2-1 to Millwall (Southern League) 1900; and Blackburn, who lost 1-0 to Swansea Town (Southern League) 1915. Wolves are the only Cup holders to have been similarly humbled 4-2 by Crystal Palace (Southern League) In 1909. The Guinness Record of the FA Cup by Mike Collett will be published this year. his own.

This week Donald took 12 wickets against India. And the video? Apparently he left it at home, by accident of course. DELHI will no doubt bring back pleasant cricketing memories for Keith Fletcher, England's manager. When called upon to present the team to Mrs Gandhi as captain in 1982 the absent-minded Gnome not only forgot Jack Richards's name "tell 'er y'ruddy name, will ya" but introduced Paul Allott as John Arlott. BUFFALO BILLS, expecting close to their capacity of 80,290 for tomorrow's play-off against Houston Oilers, are promising tighter crowd-control.

Snowballs are banned. This follows boisterous behaviour at their last home game against Denver, which led to fights and arrests. The general manager Bill Polian may have got steamed up about nothing. There is no snow now. "COLOUR pictures can be a v-f mixed blessing for newspapers.

Thursday's Western Mail carried a front-page story of a golfer, Mark Williams, who, playing the 14th at Mountain Lakes in Caerphilly, was struck by another player's ball, which ended up in his pocket. "Unhurt by the high-speed orange golf ball," says the report, "and much to the chagrin of the other golfer, Mark removed it from his jacket and dropped the ball where he stood." The other golfer had hoped he would carry it to the green and drop it there. Accompanying the tale is a picture of "Mark Williams with the ball shot into his The ball is white. mas. Having coxed Thames, he had two chances to steer the senior eight.

"I goofed. It took me two years to regain confidence and respect." When the Searles, having beaten Redgrave and Pinsent in Britain's Olympic trials for the coxless pair, failed to sustain that form, Herbert was brought in to impose discipline In the coxed version. Jonny knows how much they owe him: "If he hadn't been given an MBE we wouldn't have accepted ours." The Barcelona excitement did little for his studies: "It was hard to get back to producing essays." Off the water, as on it, he is the voice of the threesome, easiest with the spotlight. He was first on Question of Sport This week he was spotted on a bus. "D'yer want a Kleenex, Garry?" He did not mind.

He is glad "to have touched the heart of the nation. And the chap did add, 'Show us yer gold medal'." IN A converted shed at the bottom of a south London garden thousands of years of FA Cup history are taking shape. For the past two years Mike CoUett. a Fleet Street journalist, has been working on the definitive guide to the FA Cup. It will include a club-by-club record of every team to have played in the competition proper.

That is almost 600, some with 120 years of history each. Here are 10 things you almost certainly never knew about soccer's premier competition: 1. WtBbech Town (Eastern Counties League) have posted the biggest win of this season's competition, beating Wellingborough Town (United Counties) 10-0. 2. The highest goal aggregate is 12: Moor Green (Beazer Homes) beat Bourne Town (United Counties) 8-4 away.

3. Three non-League teams are in the third round. Last year there were four. The record Is five in 1931-2, 1970-1, 1974-5, 1977-8 and 1987-8. 4.

Yeovil boast the best non-League record, beating 12 teams, four of them (Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, Southend, Walsall) twice. IT HAS not been a good end of year for sporting marriages. Besides Graham Gooch, there was the distressing case of John Daly, who has checked into an alcohol treatment centre after spending too much time at the 19th hole. Daly's decision followed his arrest for third-degree assault on his wife Bettye, who once served him with a paternity suit at the US Masters and from whom he had parted (temporarily) after discovering that she was 39 and not 29 as claimed. The latest incident occurred at a Christmas party when Bettye, now 40, asked a guest "if he could control his girlfriend as she was hitting on According to the arrest affidavit, Daly threw his wife against a wall, pulled her hair, "lost his temper and destroyed the Sheriffs officers found broken glass all over the home, smashed pictures and windows, a big-screen television pushed over, broken liquor bottles, two large holes in the basement wall and blood splattered on a wall.

Daly then left, apparently for Arkansas. NO ONE is looking forward to Super Bowl week more keenly than California's avocado growers. The week-long festival this month will see 25 million Callfornian avocados consumed enough to make 5.4 million kilos of gua-camole. "No other single American event impacts the sale of avocados like the Super Bowl," said the president of the state's avocado commission. Enough will be consumed to bury a gridiron field, Including the end zone, under 17inof guacamole.

BASS voices are threatening a site of special cricket interest in Somerset. The brewers are applying to develop Dening Fields, home of Chard CC since 1861 but more famous as the ground where Ian Botham, aged 13, scored his maiden century. The club has raised 6,000 signatures for a petition, to be presented today to the mayor. It currently pays a nominal rent to Bass to play on the land, which is designated for recreation use in Honours even as A HISTORY student at Reading University has made his own bit of history this week. Garry Herbert is the first cox to be honoured for services to rowing.

He is made an MBE along with the Searles, Jonny and Greg, with whom he won the coxed pairs gold in the Olympics. His was the disembodied figure-head that was first across the line before the broad backs of the brothers. His was the voice that, as Greg recalls, called each of them by name in the memorable gap-closing stages and said: "How much do you want this?" His were the eyes that on the water could see the Abbagnales falling apart, then on the podium, equally memorably, could see nothing as the words of the national anthem faded mistily in a gulp of emotion. horses that I think are dangerous or are real headcases." Here is the nub of the problem. The quality of her mounts has deteriorated, reducing her chances of success and increasing the risks of a fall.

But she prefers not to think in such harsh, rational terms. "I just don't ask myself awkward questions," she says. "While I still want to do it as much as I do and I still get a thrill out of it, I'll try to keep going. And I've got a good horse to ride in Merry Master, one of the best I've ridden. He's quite capable of winning a Welsh National type of race." As we talk the postman arrives, causing her constant companion Benjy, a Jack Russell who is lying on the bed, to become very excited.

Letters and a parcel are brought up. One envelope contains a bill for 207 for a new clutch for her car; another is about her professional riders' insurance scheme from which she receives 125 a week when she is laid-up. She has her own pri gradually seemed to reassert itself, and for her and the handful of women like her the opportunities have-become scarcer. Financially, for Armytage these days the job is making little sense. She has her own house, but to payithe mortgage she needs three- lodgers.

Her car has done 150,000 miles and gone are the days of sponsorship. Mind you, she did crash the BMW supplied to her by a local garage. She has had only 30 rides this season but insists there are people still supporting her. "I really try to look after the people I ride for to a far greater extent than most other jockeys. I organise schooling grounds for trainers who don't have facilities and I do a lot of riding out in the mornings," she says.

"And I always give a horse my best on the day, whether they are lesser animals or not. I suppose a lot of the horses I ride arc not so good and as a result they get more tired more quickly. But I don't ride any In the footsteps of Calamity Calc mother was a professional snow-jumper and her father a trainer. But the feeling -that a good woman was not a match, and never would be, for a man in this game of strength and nerve is at her happiest on a horse card. It had seemed such a good idea, when the opportunity to play the course was spotted in a British Airways Holidays brochure, to come and experience one of the world's most famous lay-outs for oneself.

Eleven days of golf at Myrtle Beach, Kiawah and Hilton Head for around 800 in November what could be better? That was the theory. The reality, as I stood staring at the mile-wide lake that separated the tec from the green, was rather different. A startlingly summer-like day on what, a few holes ago, had appeared to be a wonderful golf course in a stunningly beautiful setting was rapidly turning into a dies horribilis. A few holes earlier I had been four up with five to play, a position in which it is practically impossible not to smirk, if not snigger, especially if one is playing one's wife. Now I was one up, but she was already over the lake, on dry land, and I was not.

Furthermore, like, I suspect, Calamity Calc, I knew there was no possibility of ever getting there. Splash, and splash again. All square on the 18th tee and she hit a belter. I missed the fairway by five measured paces. The ball, as it usually is when in the sandy wastes at Kiawah, was in a footprint, made in this case by the Colos David Davies finds himself all at sea and adrift of his wife during a round at Kiawah yet prepared to make full use of her assets except her cheerful personality and her riding talent.

But the time must be fast approaching when she needs to take stock. A body, particularly a slight female frame, can take only so much. Broken man Mark Calcavecchia during his dreadful Ryder Cup day the cox makes history with the oars sus of Rhodes. I took a drop. It ran into another footprint, made this time by King Kong.

I took a hack and did not shift it. Another, and it flew into a bush. After six shots the ball was not on the fairway; it was, indeed, in my pocket, and now there was a fresh outbreak of smirking and sniggering, coming from a fresh and wholly predictable source. "Well," said a so-called friend afterwards, "at least Calcavecchia lost out to a golfer. You couldn't even beat your wife." I had lost to a combination of factors, the principal one of which being that she hit a scries of very good shots and remained at all times on the fairway.

The secondary one was that on two of the occasions on which I had missed the cut stuff during those last five holes (by a total of six yards) I was completely unplayable both times. Kiawah, with its vast sandy, trampled dunes, can do that to you, making it, for the average golfer, one of the hardest in the world. In fact it ranks in my mind with the likes of Pine Valley and PGA West the latter, like Kiawah, a Pete Dye creation as being almost unplayable for anyone but a low handicap golfer. All of them are just too difficult. What would rank on most courses as a reasonable shot by a reasonable club golfer of, say, 5-15 handicap is punished severely by the Kiawahs of this world.

A fellow golf-course architect has called some of Dye's creations The Theatre of the Absurd because of the demands they make. Oddly, though, this has led to the courses concerned acquiring a notoriety which has in turn fuelled a curiosity, which presumably is inspired by masochistic tendencies. People are qucueing to pay between $120 and $150 (80-100) for the pleasure of losing, as did one of our group, 15 balls in a round, including four at the 13th. They then boast to their friends that they lost two boxes of balls and that, by contrast with the 87 or so they would normally take to go round their home course, they took 125. I might have been a little better than that, for we played off what arc called the Regular tees, a course of some 6.244 yards.

To attempt the Championship or Tournament tees, 6,824 or 7,371 yards, would be to risk being there still. But at least we have experienced the one thing that golf has to offer its poor and downtrodden, its huddled masses; the thing that sells the Ocean course at Kiawah. and attracts the visitors in their droves. We have trodden, quite literally, in the footsteps of the famous: where Scve and Nick have been, so have we; where Calcavecchia has been, so have I. Memories arc made of this, although they also say that time is the great healer and I think, in years to come, when they ask if I've ever played Kiawah I shall say: "No.

Never been there in my life." THE sound of sniggering, never pleasant, resounded around Kiawah Island on September 29, 1991. It was the last day of the Ryder Cup and early in the singles scries that man of bombast, Mark Calca-vecchia, had just hit his tec shot at the short 17th into the water. Not only that, he had hit it into the water after his opponent, that man of ballast, Colin Montgomerie, had dumped his there too. Calcavecchia, who had been four up with four to play, was obviously, openly and for all to see, choking like a dog. It was evident even then that he would not win the 18th either, and when he duly lost it he surrendered what might well have been a crucial half-point.

He surrendered some of his dignity, too, by rushing from the course pursued now only by the sounds of silence. The sniggering had had to stop when the match was over: it would have been too much to laugh at a broken man. In any case, golf spectators are invariably golfers, even if inadequate ones, who can identify with failure. For most, it is all we ever know. A year or more later memories of Calcavecchia and much else crowded into my mind on that same nth tec on Kaiwah's Ocean course.

"America's Host For The 1991 Ryder Cup" is the boast on the score- "I never thought I'd react like that," said Herbert, proud and properly unabashed. "At the time the last thing I was thinking about was that this was being beamed into millions of homes. I was so engrossed in what was going on." Herbert, 23, soon realised he was not going to grow into an oarsman. He is 5ft 6in, Bst in the boat, 8'i after Christ-. Herbert, MBE dry-eyed.