Mickey Walls began his journey to the Hall of Fame as a 16-year-old, 98-pound stripling at Hastings Park. He finished it 12 years later, unable to hit even the generous weight zone of 125 pounds at Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Along the way he won 1,432 races, lost and regained untold pounds, and earned a reputation as one of the most gifted jockeys Canada has produced . In 1990 he won a Sovereign Award as Canada’s top apprentice jockey. The following year he won Sovereigns as top apprentice as well as the top rider overall. In the United States he was honoured with an Eclipse Award as the top apprentice in North America. It was the only time a jockey accomplished that trifecta--two Sovereigns and an Eclipse in the same year. Today, at 33 and a contented 150 pounds, he shares a house with his parents, Joe and Carol, and lives comfortably off the 7.5 per cent residue from his purse earnings of more than $37 million. Since retiring in 2002 he has spent winters exercising horses in Florida before moving to Woodbine in the spring. But his southern sojourn was cut short in mid-January this year when he suffered a serious right knee injury in a spill at a training track in Ocala. He is now facing at least two surgeries in February. “I tore ligaments and cartilage,” says Walls. “It hurt a lot more than the broken leg I had back in 1992.” He expects to be back exercising horses this summer, particularly the ones trained by his father. He is also part owner of some runners in the family stable.

Mickey was literally born to be a jockey and it was his good fortune to be carefully nurtured by his father and mother, who were both immersed in horses. It was his bad fortune to be born one-size too large.

His reputation as a top prospect preceded him to Hastings long before he rode his first winner aboard Chocolate Kirsch in August, 1990. three days after his 16th birthday.
“I could ride almost before I could walk,” recalls Walls. First it was ponies, the show ring and then thoroughbreds.

After riding 72 winners in 454 mounts (15.8 per cent) at Hasting he moved to Ontario where he won 41 in 23 days and then ran away with the riding title at Greenwood.

The following year (1991) was nothing short of sensational. He booted home 222 winners at Woodbine, easily surpassing the great Sandy Hawley’s record of 190. He finished with 285 winners, 54 of them after he lost the five-pound apprentice allowance.

He was the hottest thing on four legs in Canada.

But early in the 1992 campaign he was leading a 12-horse field when his mount broke a leg. “I think half the field went over me,” recalled Walls. “My dad just happened to be watching the race from the backstretch on the far turn and he was one of the first to get to me. I was sitting up, dazed. ‘Don’t look down, don’t look down.’ my dad kept saying. I didn’t look, but they told me that my foot was pointing completely the opposite way.”

Surgeons put the leg together with a steel rod and 14 screws. He watched the rest of the season from the sidelines.

“It happened right before the Canadian Oaks where I had a live mount. I had a lot of momentum and I lost it all.”

He did win the Oaks with Touch Dial in 1999, the same year he won all the Guineas with Woodcarver in the Queen’s Plate. But one of his biggest thrills was in the Breeders Cup Classic at Woodbine in 1995 when he finished a breathtaking fourth aboard longshot Mt. Sassafras, beaten only one-half length in a blanket finish with Alphabet Soup, Louis Quatorze and Cigar.

“I had the lead at the eighth pole and I couldn’t believe it. I was grinding, grinding, grinding and then here they come,” said Walls.

He got his green card in 1994 and saw action at numerous U.S. tracks: Arlington, Keeneland, Churchill Downs, the Fair Grounds, Santa Anita and a few others.”I more or less followed the outfits that were hot for me,” says Walls.

He enjoyed his most enduring success at Woodbine, his home base for the latter part of his career. He was a fixture there until one afternoon in 2002 when he spent hours in a sauna and didn’t lose a pound. “Pulling weight was so tough mentally and physically,” he says. “I had reached the end of the line.”

He and his family feared he might be doing some permanent damage to his body which was dehydrated much of the time. Health had become a more crucial and sensitive issue after his sister Nicola was killed three years previously in an early-morning, head-on collision while driving to work at Saratoga.

He was 28 years old and had hoped to ride until he was 30. A possible extension arose when top international rider Frankie Dettori encouraged him to go to Dubai where the scale of weights was about 10 pounds more forgiving.

But he couldn’t quite make it there either. He got down to 126, but felt so debilitated he knew it was over. “I just decided enough is enough,” he told the Toronto Sun. “I want to be able to have popcorn when I go to a movie. Or a sandwich. Or coffee. It’s time to try to live like a normal human.”

He summed up his career with this quote in the International Thoroughbred Digest: “The easy part was the riding. The hard part was just getting there. Riding was just so much fun but getting there wasn’t. I’ve won the Eclipse, Sovereigns, the Plate and Oaks and practically every other stake here. My greatest accomplishment was just lasting as long as I did.”