A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  On Sunday morning I hit the road right after breakfast (an egg, sausages, bacon, country butter in thick slabs, exactly what the doctor didn’t order), eager to put the past behind me. By noon I was in Navan, a bustling town where the Blackwater and Boyne Rivers meet. It hadn’t rained as heavily in Navan, so the going was still the dread “good to firm,” and that was unfortunate because trainers would skip the Fortria, just as they’d skipped the Nicholson. Again only four horses were entered, including Glenelly Gale, who’d come over by van from Down Royal after a night’s rest. He couldn’t beat Moscow Flyer, especially after running the day before, but the cunning Arthur Moore reckoned he could place, which the horse did, adding another ten grand to his haul.

  Well, Moscow, here we go, I thought as I waited by the parade ring. He was the first horse into it, doing his star turn and nodding to the fans. The other horses joined him soon after, but they were composed on a lesser scale, carved out of inferior material. “He’s good enough if he’s lucky enough,” Eamonn said as they circled, tossing out an old racetrack cliché. Moscow still carried a few extra pounds, because he’d been out to pasture on his summer holiday longer than usual—and the grass was very good, full of juice—but he had already cut back on his feed voluntarily as he always did when he sensed a race approaching, mentally on edge.

  In the Fortria, Barry Geraghty adopted a slight change of tactics. Instead of keeping a tight hold, he let Moscow go to the lead—a risky move since Moscow, unchallenged, might become dreamy—but it helped the horse to settle. “More relaxed,” the jockey said later. “Not so jazzed up.” He could have been heeding the advice of Frederico Caprilli, an Italian trainer of jumpers, who urged riders to interfere with their mounts as little as possible. “The rider should be at pains to allow the horse to jump with his natural movements,” Caprilli wrote. In other words, the horse knows best, a principle Geraghty was applying. Only at the last fence did he shake up Moscow, who sprouted wings and was gone in a flash.

  For Jessie, the Fortria was a relief. “Now I’ll be able to sleep at night,” she confessed. She’d been restless about Moscow. After his win at the Festival, he unseated Geraghty at Punchestown in April. (Horses “unseat” their jockeys when they jump awkwardly, and the jockey can’t stay in the saddle.) That was Moscow’s first race after the Queen Mother, so the accident had wiped the slate clean after three straight wins. Now he had a win and two more to go before it would be crisis time. But he couldn’t repeat the pattern, could he? Three wins and then a loss? Jessie didn’t think so. He’d run twice more before the Festival, she said. Frankly, I was worried—and superstitious, big-time. Moscow reminded me of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, who often came so close to winning the World Series, and then …

  THE OPEN MEETING would go ahead as scheduled, I heard when I got home. John Nicholson’s watering program had done the trick. I had a few days to recuperate before taking off for Cheltenham and needed them. After my dark night of the racing soul, in that coffinlike room with the Evil Gun mowing ’em down, I almost lost my faith in the jumps, but the afternoon at Navan had restored it with the inspiring spectacle of Moscow Flyer sailing over fences. I felt as if I’d been treated to a Bach sonata after many dreary hours of Salieri and had remembered that music truly does have the power to move us. That was the thrill of watching a great horse put on a show.

  The Irish would send about twenty horses to the Open. Tony Martin was the trainer to watch, I decided after looking at the stats. His record at the meeting was superb, even better than Martin Pipe’s—and Pipe had twenty-three winners from ninety runners in the past five years, a strike rate of twenty-six percent. The tally for Tony Martin was nine out of thirty in the same period for a thirty percent rate. Last spring, his Xenophon had pulled off an upset in the Coral Cup, one of the Festival’s toughest handicaps. He didn’t do nearly as well in Ireland, but he knew how to produce a big run on the day.

  Pipe was fond of the Open because of the money, a hefty purse for every race. He was pictured on the Post’s front page, grinning like a man about to devour a T-bone with his bare hands. The bookies would profit, too, none more so than Paddy Power Bookmakers, the sponsor of four races, including the Paddy Power Gold Cup Steeplechase. (There are probably more gold cups on mantles in England and Ireland than anywhere in the world, I’d come to believe.) The capital outlay was significant for the firm, but so was the publicity, another wedge in the Power group’s attempt to crack the British market, virtually closed to the Irish for decades.

  The first time I saw a distinctive, emerald green Paddy Power sign, I assumed the name was invented, a bit of clever wordplay. That would suit the company’s outrageous way of operating, always tweaking the public about such touchy subjects as religion and sex. Power had recently raised a storm with a pair of controversial ads offensive to certain constituencies—the aim of the campaign, no doubt. One featured a pair of old women about to cross a busy street, and quoted the odds for and against their success. The other showed a teenage couple on a park bench. Would the boy get his hand under her sweater (2–1) or under her skirt (5–1)? Such exemplary bad taste had the clerics and do-gooders screaming.

  But I discovered there is a real Paddy Power, the son of a company founder and now its public relations chief, who has the gift of gab and chatted amiably with me before I left for Cheltenham. That he had a sense of humor was hardly a revelation. Bookies are inclined to be sober fellows on the pitch, but fun is a key element in the Power agenda, even though they’re the first bookmakers to be listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange. “We’re about entertainment,” Paddy said. “We want to enhance the experience of watching a sporting event,” hence the ultraclean shops and plasma TVs. “Our ads push it to the limit without going over it.” That was the in-house opinion, anyway.

  In effect, the creation of Paddy Power (the company) represents another act of Irish bravado in the face of an English threat. In the mid-1980s, when the tax on betting in Ireland, a source of government revenue—bettors pay three percent on every bet now—was cut roughly in half, such major British bookmakers as Ladbrokes, Coral, and Mecca saw it as an opportunity to expand their market abroad, using “supershops” as a draw. “You’d take those places for a kip these days,” Paddy laughed, “but a lot of Irish bookies were still working out of a front room at home. They wouldn’t give you a glass of water for free, much less a cup of tea.”

  Caught napping, the local bookies fought back, led by David Power, Paddy’s father, who worked on-course, and his partners Stewart Kenny and John Corcoran. All three men owned betting shops and sold off a few for the cash to compete against the invaders, although they hung on to their most profitable offices. They incorporated as Paddy Power in 1988, with Kenny, a promotional genius, assigned to run the company. “Stewart wanted to be Mr. Bookmaking,” Paddy said. “He’d take action on anything.” A bold innovator, Kenny instituted the ploy of special and novelty bets. On a special, say, a punter might get his money back if his horse is second to a winner, while the novelties concentrate on politics and pop culture. Not long ago, Kenny retired from the company to study psychotherapy, his interest in the subtleties of the human brain apparently undiminished.

  “The novelties don’t generate much income,” Paddy went on, “but they attract attention. We still try to be innovative. That’s an edge we have over Ladbrokes, the only English competitor left in Ireland. They’re too big and unwieldy to make quick adjustments.” As if in proof, Paddy Power’s turnover was up forty-six percent in 2004, with a profit of about $25 million despite heavy losses at the Festival (too many favorites won) and on the Grand National when Monty’s Pass took the race, backed by every patriotic granny and child from Munster to Leinster. Anything at Cheltenham is huge for the firm, including the Open. “The Irish bet with the heart, not the head,” Paddy said, “and they love to beat the English.”

  AT THE BIRMINGHAM AIRPORT, I picked up a rental car and drove to the Cotswolds, described in my guidebook as “preposterously
photogenic.” The area had the same prim neatness I’d seen in County Down, though even more refined. I passed apple orchards, dairy farms, chubby Old Spot pigs, and lots of sheep, of course, because the hills were once the hub of the British wool trade. The surrounding towns, picturesque but dowdy, bore names from a Monty Python skit—Stow-on-the-Wold, Moreton-in-Marsh, Chipping Norton. Tourists mob the Cotswolds in summer to admire the thatched cottages and Norman churches, basking in a quaintly reductive version of English country life. It’s where you send your visiting auntie when you need a break, an arch London friend had explained to me once.

  All the hotels in central Cheltenham were booked, as expected. Scouting around for a place to stay, I noticed some signs nailed to trees and telephone poles, way up high where nobody could tear them down. 59% OF THE PUBLIC SAY KEEP HUNTING, the signs read, not what I’d. call an overwhelming majority and good news for the foxes. After an hour or so, I found a room at the Beckford Inn—a real room, too, and not another coffin. The Inn even had a skittles alley, where Falstaffian good times could be enjoyed on a summer evening. The Fenns, late of Birmingham, operated en famille and served a Racing Post with breakfast. Down the road, in the hamlet of Beckford, burly farmers in rubber boots carried in boxes of fresh vegetables, carrots and leeks with dirt still clinging to their scraggly roots.

  The Open Meeting ran for three days over a long weekend, and when I entered the racecourse on Friday, I felt a silly sense of accomplishment, as a small-town art lover does on reaching the Louvre at last. My arrival franked my credentials as a punter and a fan, I believed. The size of the complex was a revelation. From watching the races on TV, with shots of sheep grazing on the hillsides, I’d formed a bucolic image of Cheltenham, but tons of concrete covered the track’s five hundred acres, and the place was as urban looking as Yankee Stadium. Inside, the atmosphere was commercial, too, with many little gift shops, restaurants, bars, and even a pharmacy, should your losses make you sick to your stomach.

  Though it was only noon, with the first race two hours away, the track was already humming. The crowd was unlike any I’d seen before. So many people were wearing tweed outfits that I wondered if those grazing sheep were being sheared on an assembly line nearby to feed an insatiable desire for the stuff. The folks were dressed almost identically, with a degree of conformity I hadn’t observed since the 1950s, when the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (not tweed) typified such conservative behavior. The silver-haired gents and fur-hatted ladies were genteel and sociable and gave off a distinct whiff of Old Money. Exquisite air kisses floated around like butterflies. Only when I learned that it was Countryside Alliance Day did I understand the House of Windsor fashion show.

  The group had a booth on the grounds, where members were distributing literature in support of the hunt and a “rural way of life.” As protection against the drizzly cold, I bought a baseball cap with LIBERTY & LIVELIHOOD stitched across the crown, apparently the Alliance’s rallying cry. After trying but failing to be entertained by the Worcestershire Gun Dogs, who were dashing around in the paddock, I heard some distant music filtering up from the Cavern Bar, a dark, subterranean space, where a five-piece combo was coaxing the audience to sing along on “The Wild Rover.” The Cavern, it seemed, was an unofficial meeting point for the Irish. Lads from Cavan or Mayo descended into the pit, blinked until their eyes adjusted, and lit up when they found the person they were seeking. “Finally! Finally!” cried one overjoyed fellow, hugging his long-lost pal. For an Irishman in England, there’s no more comforting sight than another Irishman, especially from the home county.

  I had no urgent need to sing along, either, so I went to the rail to check the going, designated as “good to firm (good in places),” rather deceptive as it happened. The jockeys later reported that the watered ground was slippery, and it got worse when the drizzle turned to rain. A stiff headwind was also blowing, and that sapped the horses’ energy and nearly blew away my new cap. In fact, I blamed the wind for the poor showing of Dermot Weld’s Lowlander, my bet in the second race. Though Lowlander was unbeaten in three starts over hurdles in Ireland, the horse came in next to last and cost me thirty dollars. Well, no matter, I thought. The Tony Martin factor was about to kick in.

  The third race was a marathon four-mile chase. Martin’s Royal County Buck had never gone that far, but neither had the other entries, so I put a hundred on him at 2–1. At the start, Uncle Mick and Rufius, two lesser lights, sprinted to a twenty-length lead, but four-mile chases do not reward such speed, and they both ran out of gas. Soon we had a duel between Ceanannas Mor and my Bucko, who smacked a fence two out and never recovered. Martin was dismayed and said he wished it hadn’t rained, because Royal County Buck liked fast ground, a point I’d missed while studying the percentages. The going is the most important thing. I remembered J. P. McManus’s advice, too late to do any good.

  ON SATURDAY, Paddy Power was everywhere. His corporeal self was up in a sky box with the high rollers, while down below, in the modest territory I patrolled, the company’s logo and banners were a splash of Ireland’s green impossible to miss. Inside the race program were some prominent ads that posed a question I’d never thought to ask, “How does Paddy Power keep its customers so happy?” After a close reading of the text, I had my answer: Paddy Power takes risks, just as its customers do, so Paddy Power understands what it’s like to be a customer! The logic was so irrefutable I suspected Paddy had a few former Jesuits on the payroll.

  Yesterday’s rain had softened the turf. The going was now “good (good to firm in places),” a plus for the Irish. I took out my betting book, a nifty little journal from Smythson of Bond Street, to check my accounts. The book (BETTING BOOK is stamped in gilt on the red leather cover) has five columns for recording wagers, labeled “horse,” “bet with” (for the bookie’s name), “odds,” “win,” and “lose.” Even after the Bucko fiasco, I’d dragged myself up from the pit and was only down fifty dollars, so I believed I could do much better today, optimism being a disease easily contracted at the track. I avoided the first race, though, a steeplechase for four horses that shaped up as a rematch between Martin Pipe’s Puntal and Brother Joe, stabled with the English trainer Phillip Hobbs.

  The pair had met the week before at Chepstow, in Wales, where Brother Joe won by about thirty lengths. They would both carry the same amount of weight at Cheltenham, so I couldn’t imagine a different result, nor could the fans, who sent off Brother Joe at even money. He and Puntal were locked together from the start and soon left the other horses far behind. While Puntal was traveling nicely, Brother Joe labored to stay close. It was like watching a man lift bags of cement. Each stride was another bag and extracted a further price. Toward home, Brother Joe hit four straight fences before falling, and that left Puntal in the clear. The fall was a very bad one. With a fractured shoulder, and in grave distress, Brother Joe had to be put down.

  Whenever a horse dies in action, a chorus of naysayers can be counted on to criticize the “brutality” of the jumps game. This time it was Laura Thompson in the Observer. “Hideous cold thud to the heart when yet another beautiful horse crashes to the turf in a heap,” wrote Thompson, “and the green screens go up to shield us from the sight—but not the fact—of death. That, in essence, is National Hunt racing.” In essence? I found this hard to swallow. Never had I been around people who cared so much about their horses, and yet when I looked more closely at Brother Joe’s record, I did see a cause for concern.

  The horse had run an unlucky thirteen times that year, a huge number of races for a quality jumper. After finishing eighth in the Stayers’ Hurdle at the Festival, he moved on to fences and won seven of eight chases from May through October. He never had more than a month off, although the year before he’d been allowed a five-month summer break. Unlike most chasers, though, Brother Joe was at his best on relatively fast ground, and the dry spell was a gift to him. He thrived on the conditions other horses hated, so he kept competing. But Cheltenham’s fences are
notoriously stiff, and a horse who isn’t a handy jumper—Brother Joe wasn’t—is liable to falter. If a horse is tired, the test becomes harder, and Brother Joe had every right to be tired. Had Hobbs and his connections made a bad decision? Or was it just bad luck? No one could say for certain.

  A death at the track takes your breath away, but the Irish regained some color in their cheeks when they finally had a winner in the next race—Al Eile from John Queally’s small, ten-stall yard in County Waterford. Al Eile had almost missed his appointment with destiny. The horse was supposed to leave Ireland by ferry on Thursday, but the sea was too rough, so he went home to Coolagh, a round-trip of almost three hundred miles, and returned to the ferry dock on Friday, only reaching Cheltenham at five in the morning on the day of his run. The win was a feather in Queally’s cap, but his horse’s cover was blown, and he worried that Al Eile’s owner might sell now. Small trainers have that problem. “All I can do is hope,” he said.

  Still, what a miracle! That an Irish horse should overcome adversity to bag a win against the English! Wasn’t it grand? To judge by the celebrating, you’d guess that every Irishman had backed Al Eile, and maybe they did for all I knew. How else to account for the commotion? They spilled from the grandstand, wrestled free of the betting ring, and even surfaced from the dank recesses of the Cavern Bar to cluster around Jim Culloty, the jockey, and fondly pat Al Eile, whooping and thrusting their fists into the air, bursting into bizarre little jigs and booze-fueled arias, all invested in a wildly overstimulated group mania that might have been frightening if so much happiness weren’t at its core.