A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  I chose the smaller bar as my sanctuary, assuming it would generate more body heat. The track draws about two thousand stouthearted folks on an average Thursday, and I prayed they’d all show up at once. I tried reading the program, but I was distracted by an ad for the bookies that played on a flickering TV. A jingle suggested how easy, and how much fun, it would be to bet with them. That would motivate anybody, I thought wryly, as I surveyed the regulars around me, whose ruddy cheeks and broken capillaries were the result of braving the elements, or maybe avoiding them at any handy pub. This was desolate territory. I started on the hot whiskeys myself—Jameson, sugar, hot water, and a lemon slice stuck with cloves.

  To be fair, there are people who love Thurles. Built on rich farmland, the track is naturally free-draining and permits racing when other courses are waterlogged. Willie Mullins, among the game’s best trainers, told me once how much he enjoys Thurles for the good galloping ground and the dedicated, informed patrons. Possibly Jessie Harrington felt the same way. She was in high spirits before the first race. “Don’t complain about the weather,” she scolded a grumbler in the parade ring, soaked to the skin like the rest of us. “We need this rain!” The race was for maidens on the flat, and Jessie had two horses in it, but she was up against Shangri La, a classy filly from Aidan O’Brien’s yard, and had no real chance. It’s unusual for O’Brien to lose a maiden race in Ireland, so classy are his colts and fillies.

  “Things can only digress from here,” said a man at the bar after the race, tearing up his losing ticket. “I mean, regress.” Strangely, I understood him. The program had alerted me to what we had in store. Among the dicey performers competing in the Munster Handicap, for instance, were A C Azure (no wins in twenty-seven starts), Callas (zero for twenty-five), Camillas Estate (zero for thirty-one), and the comparatively gifted Hamlyn (one for thirty-eight). The fifteen horses, a full field, ranged in age from four to ten. They had a combined total of 409 starts and had won just fourteen of them, or 3.4 percent. In every flat race that day, there were fifteen runners plus reserves—the average field in an Irish race of any kind is fourteen—and that led to the inescapable conclusion that Ireland produces a lot of racehorses, and not all of them useful ones.

  Whenever I asked about the boom, I was directed to the imposing figure of Charles Haughey, a former prime minister. (Haughey is Eachaidhe in Gaelic, meaning “horseman.”) Like Richard Croker, he was called the Boss, carried himself with the swashbuckling authority of a high chieftain, and shared Croker’s ability to reap questionable benefits from his position—a rogue, in other words, despised in some quarters and admired in others. But politics aside, Haughey’s affection for horses was undoubtedly genuine. He bought his first in 1962 while he served as minister of justice, and gradually built up his stable by sending his mares to a stud farm in County Dublin presided over by Captain Tim Rogers, once an aide to Winston Churchill.

  In 1968, Haughey acquired his own stud in County Meath, often a perk among the newly affluent Irish. A year later, as minister of finance, he introduced a tax exemption for the breeding industry at an opportune moment, just as similar exemptions were being scrapped in Britain. (In this case, “tax exemption” translated as no taxes whatsoever on a stud farm’s profits from breeding.) Haughey’s finest hour as an owner came in 1985, when his Flashing Steel won the Irish Grand National under top weight.

  Toward the end of his political life, in 1999, the Boss spelled out his views on the breeding industry in a message to The Irish Thoroughbred.

  “Natural advantages in climate and soil and favorable taxation treatment have contributed to our excellent reputation for horse breeding,” he wrote. “However, it is the skill and innate love of horses in our breeders that have been the decisive factors…. In more recent times we have seen the development of large specialized stud farms. I consider this a positive development and complementary to the work of the small breeder.”

  Though Haughey survived many scandals, his tendency to confuse the national interest with his own caught up with him at last. Dragged into court, he was accused of accepting lavish gifts from businessmen, and he also owed the government millions in back taxes and undeclared income, although this hardly made him bankrupt—he still owns one of the Blasket Islands off the Kerry coast, for example. In some respects, his support for big-time breeders smacked of the same cronyism that brought him down. The tax loophole he opened allowed the “large specialized” stud farms to dominate the market, a nuisance rather than a complement to the little guys struggling to get by.

  The famous Coolmore Stud in Tipperary, a global power with branches in Australia and Kentucky, has benefited most from Haughey’s gambit. Coolmore owns many of the world’s most desirable stallions, and its racing arm at Ballydoyle, where Aidan O’Brien presides, is intended to showcase the elegantly bred colts who’ll stand at stud someday. The business is so profitable that John Magnier, its managing director, lives abroad to avoid paying taxes on his compensation and investments, although he has a home in Ireland and spends as much time there as the law permits. Nobody blames Magnier and his associates for taking advantage of the loophole, but Coolmore has been criticized for overbooking its stallions. Sadler’s Wells, who is always in demand, covers up to two hundred mares a year, doing double duty in Australia and earning a reported $70 million or so.

  It’s fair to say that Haughey’s legacy has been a double-edged sword. If it has allowed operations such as Coolmore to improve the breed and put Irish racehorses on the international map, it has also fostered a glut of inferior stock. The number of horses in training continues to rise, as does the number of owners, even though the “hobby” (that’s what it is for most people) isn’t cheap. Syndicates of six, ten, or even twenty owners are gaining in popularity, too, with 1,141 on record at present. Almost all male chasers and hurdlers are geldings and worthless at stud, while broodmares are only a little more valuable, so an owner’s initial fantasies revolve around the prize money to be won and, more distantly and less reliably, on the glittery pleasure dome of Cheltenham.

  That’s not so foolish, really, because the average purse in Ireland is the highest in Europe—about $25,000 compared to $18,000 for the U.K. Although it’s true that almost half the horses in training do win a purse (or a piece of one) sooner or later, the payday usually isn’t big enough to fuel any more fantasies. As the bills mount up, many owners become hard-nosed, and they sell or retire their horses, a pet for the kids to ride, or they hang on to it for the craic—the fun, the good times—if they can afford to, enjoying drinks and a day out at a humble, homey track like Thurles. The overall attendance at 303 fixtures was up by eight and a half percent in 2004, another mark of how much the Irish love racing and are willing to embrace a horse of any kind.

  THE RAIN HAD LET UP by the fifth race. I was very grateful for that, but my comrades seemed not to notice. They were determined to savor their fabled craic regardless of the weather. Why let a deluge dampen your pleasure? In fact, I never saw anyone with an umbrella all afternoon. (Dublin tough guys consider umbrellas unmanly; they’d rather catch pneumonia.) When the clouds parted, I could see Devil’s Bit Mountain, the track’s logo, on the horizon, a humped shape missing its tip—the bit torn off by the devil in “a fit of anger.” It was still quite cold, but the hot whiskeys helped, three and counting, and I felt ready for the card’s big race, a steeplechase with a fat pot of more than twenty thousand dollars.

  Originally, fourteen trainers had entered horses, but because the going was still firm on Wednesday before the storm, all but two of them had dropped out, so we had a match race on our hands. The contestants were Splendour, a winner on good ground earlier in the month, and Risk Accessor, who’d last run (and lost) at Galway in July. After such a long absence, Risk Accessor’s level of fitness was in question, but I still couldn’t rule him out, not when he belonged to John P. McManus, Ireland’s largest owner of jumpers. Enormously wealthy and influential, McManus acquired the nickname Sundance Ki
d for his brave raids on the betting ring in his younger days, when he “robbed” the bookies repeatedly.

  Even at my neighborhood betting shops, the locals knew the tale of McManus’s rise to the top, and I’d heard it many times myself. Born in County Limerick, J.P. began gambling as a child, although he was small for his age and had to rely on indulgent adults to place his bets. When he was nine, he cashed a dandy one on Merryman II in the 1960 Grand National at odds of 13–2. After leaving school, he worked on his father’s dairy farm, but he quit to be a bookmaker on the greyhounds and went broke twice. The second time, his mother slipped him some money on the sly, vowing not to tell her husband, who disapproved of his son’s occupation. “I suppose I had more respect for it than any money I’ve had before or since,” McManus once said, perhaps because it carried a mother’s blessing, no small thing in Ireland.

  As it happened, he would never be skint, or broke, again. Instead, his fortunes improved dramatically. He had an agile brain for higher math and playing the percentages, and it paid off when he diversified into currency trading, the initial source of his fortune. Ahead of the game, he bought property, leisure assets in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and racehorses, of course, often pricey ones, with an eye toward winning the Gold Cup at Cheltenham, maybe the only goal he’s yet to achieve. His legitimate ventures did not stop him from gambling, though. He fell into high-stakes backgammon for a while, but the bookies bore the brunt of his assaults. In 1982, he beat them out of nearly a half million dollars at the Festival by backing Mr. Donovan, a hurdler he owned, who won a major race. Edward O’Grady was the trainer.

  McManus wasn’t always a consummate pro. He shed some blood in the betting ring, particularly as a young man, when he scratched his itch too feverishly. Lacking the discipline to hold off when his luck ran cold, he once advised some English bookmaking firms that if they extended any more credit, they did so “at their peril.” But as the years passed he gained an icy control over himself, never chasing his losses or trying to get even on the last race. He developed a complex set of guiding principles and could lay them out as precisely as any textbook. The going is the most important thing. Set out to make a point or two over the odds and go in with two fists. And above all, Beware of certainties.

  When McManus’s offshore corporation Cubic Expression sailed into the financial stratosphere, he moved to Switzerland as a tax exile in the 1990s. His office in Geneva is rumored to have a stunning view of Mont Blanc and a bank of TVs tuned alternately to the currency markets and the races. An avid golfer, he sponsors a charity tournament in Limerick on occasion and has a locker next to Tiger Woods’s at the exclusive Islesworth Club in Orlando. With John Magnier, his fellow exile, he owns a large share of Manchester United, the most valuable English football franchise. His collection of jumpers, more than a hundred, is parceled out among several trainers in Ireland, England, and France.

  In the manner of folk heroes, McManus likes to drop out of the sky and land at a racecourse in his green-and-gold helicopter, the colors of Limerick’s South Liberties hurling club. (Hurling is Ireland’s oldest sport, played with sticks and a ball at warp speed.) As the two horses went to post, I scanned the heavens for a sign of him, but he didn’t show up that afternoon. Avoiding Thurles in stormy weather was another tribute to his cleverness, I thought. Still, he missed the match race (unless he watched it in his Geneva office), a much more intricate affair than I anticipated. It began as a tactical stalemate, with neither Conor O’Dwyer on Risk Accessor nor Barry Geraghty on Splendour eager to make the running. About halfway through the two-plus miles, the rain-soaked turf worked against Splendour, who prefers good ground—the going is the most important thing!—and when O’Dwyer let Risk Accessor go, the horse never looked back.

  RIDING HOME ON THE TRAIN, with my clothes drying out in the warm compartment, I set aside the Racing Post for Patrick Kavanagh’s The Green Fool, an autobiographical account of the poet’s formative years in County Monaghan on a farm not unlike those around Thurles. I had come across Kavanagh in anthologies before, back in California, but I didn’t know his writing well and felt a marvelous sense of discovery when I began reading his poems closely, so different in tone and subject matter from those of Yeats, who had laid claim to Irish poetry in America in his time, just as Joyce had done with fiction.

  Kavanagh had a farmer’s directness, along with a raw and ribald wit. He loved horses and racing, of course, a logical consequence of growing up in rural Ireland and possibly of being Irish, and he was often observed in Dublin pubs raptly attending to the sports page. But as a youth, while practicing his craft more or less in secret—poets were rare in the hamlet of Mucker—he was a servant of the land, of his crops and cattle. He painted a fascinating portrait of his “clay-heavy mind” bursting into flames after he read the modernists, especially Gertrude Stein. In his work, he was truthful to his roots, painfully so, writing about pinched country lives and the travail of trapped and aging bachelors, counting himself among them.

  Those ties to the land held back Kavanagh when Ploughman and Other Poems, his first book, came out in England in 1936, but only for a while. He was ambitious and so hungry for culture that he once walked fifty miles from Mucker to Dublin just for a taste of it. Still, he had to wrestle with his predicament, torn between moving on and staying behind. “The land is jealous of literature,” he said, “and in its final effort to hold a poet offers him, like a despairing lover, everything, everything.” Yet after much soul-searching, and almost thirty-five years on the farm, he chose to break with the land and pursue his literary future in London, where he was commissioned to write The Green Fool. He left home with about ten dollars in his pocket.

  Kavanagh’s book echoed in me as I walked to our home from Heuston Station, along the Liffey in the early dark and through the city center, then up Baggot Street until it turned into Pembroke Road, where the poet had rented an apartment for many years. The night air was cool but rain-freshened, and as I followed the Grand Canal, an old commercial waterway that linked the River Barrow to the Irish Sea, I sat for a few minutes on a bench next to a statue of Kavanagh, who wanted no “hero-Courageous tomb—just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.” I let the peace of the moment wash over me, recalling another sentence from The Green Fool. “Ireland is a fine place to daydream,” the author wrote, and that’s how it seemed to me just then, a realm apart from ordinary cares, where the horses would be running again tomorrow.

  NOVEMBER

  The Great Unveiling

  That blustery afternoon at Thurles, stored forever in my bank of soggy memories, proved to be a cheat. It didn’t signal a change in the weather. Instead, the dull dry days returned, and the English courses were in such jeopardy they had to water the turf almost daily in order to hold their meetings. There was even talk that the Open Meeting at Cheltenham in mid-November, the early season’s high point, might have to be scrapped. Trainers were more frazzled than ever. With the important National Hunt races soon to come in bunches, they had to decide what they were willing to risk. The tracks, ever watchful of the bottom line, would be hungry to make those races happen, regardless of the going.

  According to Jessie, Moscow Flyer was still penciled in for the Fortria Chase, but I hadn’t heard anything about Beef Or Salmon’s plans, so I went looking for Michael Hourigan to see what he had in mind. I caught up with him at the Tattersalls National Hunt Sale on the company’s lavish auction grounds in County Meath. Hourigan had driven over from Limerick to check out and maybe bid on some of the eight hundred or so lots for sale—unbroken stock, yearlings, and horses in training. At a desk outside the auction ring, I picked up a fat doorstop of a catalog, free to anyone. On the front cover was a painting of a red fox, and on the back photos of Best Mate, Moscow Flyer, and Monty’s Pass, a Grand National winner, each purchased at Tattersalls.

  Horses were everywhere on the grounds, in all shapes and sizes, constantly on the move. Grooms were busy combing and buffing them, polishing them up
for their moment in the spotlight. They led the horses from a row of barns to a holding ring outside the auction building, where buyers gathered to inspect them, and when a horse’s number was called, it went through an archway and into the sales ring, a little oval surrounded by theater seats in tiers. An electronic screen flashed the bids in sterling, dollars, and euros. The bidding seldom lasted more than two or three minutes, and the selling price rarely exceeded ten grand. Even I could afford an Irish racehorse, so large was the supply.

  From an upper tier, I watched the auction for a while. The horses each reacted differently in the sales ring, revealing aspects of their character. Some appeared to be oblivious of the noise, the badgering auctioneer, and the crowd, an attitude you could interpret as a plus (superior, above it all) or a minus (plain ignorant)—your choice, and buyer beware. Others blinked and nickered in distress, shocked to be on the market and glaring at their grooms as the very source of their betrayal. Here came a furry little yearling so stunned and needy his entire being shouted, “I want to go back to the farm!” followed by a gangly, head-bobbing gelding who so resembled a cartoon animal I half-expected him to open his mouth and cough up a one-liner. The comedian was returned to his breeder unsold.

  I bumped into Hourigan by the holding ring. A short, sturdy, energetic ball of man, he looked the trainer’s part in a tweed cap, a shirt and a sweater, and corduroy trousers. He has a boxer’s nose, flattened as if by a solid right hook, and small bright eyes that don’t miss a trick. The Irish Field, a racing paper, once said of him that he “provides a great deal of entertainment to those who listen to him,” and I would agree, although with a caveat. Hourigan likes a joke and often pokes fun at himself, but his self-deprecatory style masks a keen intelligence, and he uses the mask to his advantage against any fool who underestimates him. He has risen from nothing, liberated from the poverty of old Limerick to create a yard that wins more prize money than almost any other in Ireland.