A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  With Al Eile’s victory, the fans had bought back a measure of good cheer, so they were excited about the Paddy Power Gold Cup now. Risk Accessor, the only Irish-trained horse in the race, was bound to improve after his run at Thurles, too—a prep to sharpen him up, really, plus he had Timmy Murphy, the comeback kid, in the saddle. It’s a fair bet that Murphy is the only jockey to ever do time at Wormwood Scrubs, a dump of a London prison. Not long ago, he had succumbed to the pressures of the rider’s life, a hectic one that barely allows for a half-second of contemplation. If a rider is in demand, he spends the morning on the gallops. The racing day goes by in a blur, and the evening is merely about getting ready for tomorrow. It’s a difficult balancing act, especially for the young.

  Like most Irish jockeys, Murphy was almost born on a horse. His dad was a groom in Kildare, and Timmy started riding at seven or eight. He was an apprentice to Michael Halford first, and next to Michael Hourigan, a hard taskmaster who doesn’t tolerate any monkey business. Being ambitious, Murphy left Hourigan to accept a job as stable jockey to Kim Bailey in England, but already the stress was affecting him. He was impatient and wanted to ride fifty winners his first season, so he tended to punish his horses, heavy on the whip. He asked too much of them and landed a number of suspensions.

  By all accounts, Murphy is the politest of men, but also quite shy, and he slipped into the shy person’s trap of drinking to help him relax and communicate. After a losing ride on Cenkos in the Nakayama Gold Cup in Japan in 2002, he began pounding down screwdrivers before his flight and got drunker on the plane, bothering the other passengers, groping a woman flight attendant, and peeing in the aisle—totally blasted, and totally out of character. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport and sentenced that July, his six months at Wormwood Scrubs ultimately reduced to three. Not everyone would hire him after his release, but Hourigan gave him a second chance, and Murphy was back on top again, with Beef Or Salmon one of his plum rides.

  In the betting ring, Risk Accessor was available at very tempting odds. As I squeezed through the crush, I saw that most bookies narrowly favored Fondmort, whose trainer Nicky Henderson is one of England’s best, over Poliantis (Paul Nicholls) and It Takes Time (Martin Pipe), because the handicapper had treated Fondmort well. He would carry thirteen pounds less than the top weight Cyfor Malta (Pipe again), but Poliantis had beaten Fondmort at Cheltenham in April. Poliantis had a nine-pound advantage then, while today Fondmort was two pounds lighter. That was more math than I could handle, so I closed my eyes and bet fifty to win on Fondmort.

  The race lived up to its billing. Ei Ei, a relentless front-runner, led the field away from the stands and through the first circuit of the track—the horses would go around twice—while Cyfor Malta sunk under all those pounds. Poliantis breezed past Ei Ei four fences out and seemed poised to pounce under Ruby Walsh. Risk Accessor, initially held up, was tracking the leaders as they came to the second-last, a tricky fence on a downhill slope. Horses accelerate as they approach it, and often misjudge the jump. Risk Accessor did just that, as did It Takes Time. They jumped the fence in tandem and collided, and down went Murphy and Tony McCoy.

  At the same fence, Fondmort made his move. His springy leap shot him ahead of Poliantis, and there were five lengths between him and the other horses at the last fence. The result was never in doubt, but the drama wasn’t over. After being pulled up past the finish, Poliantis staggered a little, as if his legs were jelly and couldn’t support him. He was wobbly and dizzy looking. Walsh figured the horse must be feeling the effect of his strenuous effort, so he dismounted. The vets were called, and while they were administering some oxygen, Poliantis keeled over and collapsed, dead of a heart attack at the age of six. It was another blow for Nicholls, who’d had a devastating season so far. “I didn’t think it could get any worse,” he told the press, a gloomy statement that said it all.

  LUCK IS A FREE-FLOATING THING, landing randomly and then departing, and Ruby Walsh wasn’t having any at the Open. Every jockey understands the syndrome because it reflects the quicksilver nature of the trade. Despite their competitive nature, the Irish riders remain a close-knit fraternity wherever they’re based. It isn’t uncommon to see Walsh, Geraghty, and Carberry sharing a meal when they’re camped at the same hotel for a festival. They may play golf or go on holidays together in the Caribbean. Walsh even bunks at Tony McCoy’s house in Oxfordshire, a palatial spread with a framed flag from the eighteenth hole at St. Andrews pinned up over the fireplace. The flag is signed by Tiger Woods, an idol of McCoy’s.

  Ruby is a corruption of Rupert, Walsh’s grandfather’s name. It suits him, since there is a jewel-like quality to his riding. He has an exquisite sense of pace, knowing exactly how much energy his horse has left at any point. Preferring to take his time and creep through the field, he’ll hook the leaders over the last few furlongs. His father, Ted, tutored him well, having been a good amateur jockey himself. I once asked Willie Mullins why Ruby stood out, and he replied, “Good racing brain,” meaning the skill to read a race and predict how it will develop. He also raved about Ruby’s physical strength and his determination. Add to that a bright smile and a distinctive patch of graying hair, and you had the makings of a star.

  On Sunday, it looked as if Walsh would stay unlucky. He lost his first ride on Mr. Ed, producing the horse too late, a rare mistake. Probably Ruby kicked himself all the way to the weighing room, but in the next race he guided Thisthatandtother, a name to plague any race caller, to an easy win for the beleaguered Nicholls, his boss. Yet he truly earned his keep in the Greatwood Hurdle on Rigmarole, the top weight. The pundits in the Post roundly dismissed the horse, all but handing the race to Hasty Prince. Once more Walsh played a stalking game, only releasing the brakes four out and swiftly advancing. The pace was too much for Hasty Prince, and Rigmarole won in a driving finish.

  Along with meals and holidays, jockeys share information, and Ruby Walsh gave Barry Connell a tip that helped Connell guide The Posh Paddy to victory in the Open Bumper, the meeting’s last race. Of all the Irish amateurs on earth, Connell is the most unlikely, being a wealthy Dublin hedge-fund manager in real life. He has an awkward style, mainly because he didn’t learn to ride as a child but rather in his mid-thirties when he began to buy horses. (He’s forty-four now.) That’s why he was on The Posh Paddy—he owned the horse and called the shots. “It’s a disease,” he once said to me about riding, although not one he hoped to be cured of any time soon.

  From Walsh, Connell heard that the track was poached dry inside, watering or no watering. Ruby’s advice was to keep wide for the better going down the back of the course, then swing over to the stand rail when he hit the stretch. Connell did exactly that and forced Richard Johnson, an old pro, to the outside on Alpine Fox, a move that surely won him the race. Barry’s adrenaline high was memorable. “I was just delighted,” he told me, still enthusiastic days afterward. “I kept thinking, ‘What a bloody good horse!’ And the cheering along the rail, the way they applauded me!” Here was every amateur’s dream fulfilled.

  Driving back to Birmingham for my flight home, I felt worn out from the intensity and the action of the Open. As much as I had enjoyed the wonderful racing, I missed the intimacy of the Irish scene. On the taxi ride to Dublin, I stared out at the city, so understated and village-like, and realized how attached I’d become to certain aspects of Irish life that had seemed curious at first, from the scurrying mail carriers to the gently indirect pattern of speech (“Could you not? Do you not? Would you not?”) to the Irish School of Motoring with its claim that ninety percent of its clients pass the state exam, a statistic any American firm would bump up to ninety-nine percent, whether or not it was accurate.

  I asked the taxi driver to drop me at the Merrion Hotel, a grand Georgian town house, where I was meeting Imelda for a late drink. This was our favorite place for an interlude away from the family, its public rooms hung with paintings by the Irish masters and peat fires burning in all the fireplaces
at the slightest hint of a chill. With its old-fashioned charm, the hotel allowed us to imagine we were swells stopping for a spot of something before rounding the corner to visit Yeats or George Russell, who both had lived on Merrion Square for a time, possibly for a session at the Ouija board or a fevered discussion of the role of fairies in the Celtic Twilight. In other words, it felt good to be back. For a moment, the horses seemed far away, but only for a moment.

  THE GREAT UNVEILING CONTINUED. Beef Or Salmon and Best Mate were finally coming out from under wraps, the first in the Oil Chase at Clonmel and the second in the Peterborough Chase at Huntingdon Racecourse, in East Anglia. To add some spice to the mix, Henrietta Knight was sending Edredon Bleu to Clonmel, an intriguing gambit since she rarely ran her horses in Ireland. The Oil Chase, at two and a half miles, might prove a trifle short for Beef Or Salmon, who was best at the Gold Cup distance of three-plus miles—although he had won the race once before—but the trip was ideal for Edredon Bleu and the pot was a good one, worth about forty-five thousand dollars.

  So I was on the road again before I knew it, driving south past Carlow and Kilkenny to Clonmel, a lovely town at the foot of the Comeragh Mountains, in the valley of the River Suir. The streets were alive with people going to the races, because in Ireland a meeting is a special event—a carnival, a break from routine. Nowhere did I witness the air of drudgery that hovers over most American tracks, where the regular customers could be punching a clock at a factory they hated. Gambling makes the wheels go round in the land of the free, and though the Irish like a flutter, too, the horse is still at the center of things. Many folks would attend today simply for a chance to see (and later brag that they’d seen) Beef Or Salmon in the flesh.

  Clonmel was really hopping. I felt sorry for the poor schoolkids in uniform lingering on the main street, who’d be faced with an uncool session of math or science after lunch instead of a trip to the track. They plucked at bags of potato chips and looked forlorn, denied a chance to join the record crowd of more than five thousand at Powerstown Park, the site of the course, where one Villiers Morton Jackson, an entrepreneur of the first order, built a grandstand in 1913, roped off the bookies in a special area, hired detectives to foil the pickpockets, and charged an admission fee of two shillings.

  Despite Edredon Bleu’s glorious campaign that autumn, the loyal Irish fans made Beef Or Salmon their choice. The two horses were in sharp contrast on parade, with Beef Or Salmon still gawky and adolescent, laid-back and pleasantly distracted by all the attention, while Edredon Bleu had the razor-sharp aura of a Realtor about to close a deal on a dynamite piece of property. And what a strange history the old fellow had! Only recently had I discovered that he’d won five times as a four-year-old novice in France, where a butcher was his trainer. It was awful to imagine what might have happened to him if he hadn’t done so well.

  Edredon Bleu was accustomed to the lead, but he didn’t get it at Clonmel. The Premier Cat, a course specialist, stuck his head in front. That frustrated Knight’s horse, who began pulling so hard that Jim Culloty had to rein him in. Beef Or Salmon, on the other hand, appeared to be daydreaming. He sauntered along at his own dawdling pace and jumped indifferently, without any verve. Timmy Murphy didn’t push him, either, content to let the horse idle. His backers groaned and cursed as they pictured their money going up in smoke, but Beef Or Salmon fooled us by hitting his stride with three fences left. He seemed to find a purchase on the ground and gained momentum as rapidly as a ball rolling down a steep hill, and he might even have defeated Edredon Bleu if he hadn’t botched the last fence and stumbled on landing, third in the end behind Arctic Copper.

  After the race, Michael Hourigan was his usual peppy self and declared that he wasn’t the least bit unhappy with the performance. Sure, Beef Or Salmon’s jumping was a little “sticky,” but this was the horse’s first outing of the season. That shotgun burst of speed down the stretch hadn’t escaped the bookies’ notice, though, and they lowered Beef Or Salmon’s ante-post odds for the Gold Cup to 8–1. (Antepost wagers can be made weeks and even months before a race. The odds are usually far more generous than you’ll get on the day, but if your horse is scratched or injured and doesn’t run, you lose your bet. In effect, you’re dealing in futures.) For Knight, the journey across the water was sheer bliss. Edredon Bleu was her first-ever winner in Ireland. He would be given a long break after his three courageous wins and would return to the track in the spring, she said—a plan she soon altered when a new opportunity presented itself.

  In my room at the Fennessy Hotel in Clonmel, after a session of traditional music at Kitty O’Donnell’s, I stayed up late reading Knight’s Best Mate: Chasing Gold, a book that revealed as much about the author as it did about her famous horse. In some respects, Knight’s childhood echoed Jessie Harrington’s. Her father was a military man, too, and finished his career as a major in the Coldstream Guards, after which he turned to farming like Brigadier Fowler and kept horses, although he wasn’t crazy about them and discouraged his daughter’s fascination with ponies. Henrietta’s favorite was a Shetland called Florian, who was “almost human” and had a bit part in the 1960 British film Follow That Horse.

  As a girl, Henrietta showed an early interest in training. She entered her huge black donkey, Sheba, in the East Hendred Donkey Derby, riding him bareback across the fields in preparation. After high school, she bought Borderline, her first Thoroughbred, in 1964 for about a thousand dollars, plucking him from the advertising pages of Horse & Hound. She became a skilled eventer, but her parents wanted to introduce her to a broader social scene, so she was sent to London to meet eligible young men and join the debutante world. “Many of the parties were held in beautiful places,” she wrote, sounding a Jane Austen note, “and even though I didn’t enjoy them all, it was most educational, and I loved the food.” Only years later did she meet her Prince Charming in the person of Terry Biddlecombe.

  Subsequently, she enrolled in college to be a teacher of history and biology, and did her practice work in the rowdier districts of Oxford, where her pupils once locked her in a book cupboard for nearly an hour (“It was a claustrophobic experience …”) and set booby traps to give her electric shocks. But horses were still her passion, and she opened a livery business in 1974 and progressed from there, taking out a National Hunt trainer’s license in 1989. When Best Mate reached her ten years later, she was well established and had made many scouting trips to Ireland to look for racing stock, frequently in County Cork.

  Yet it was in Kildare that she and Biddlecombe first saw Un Desperado, Best Mate’s sire, a French-bred standing at Old Meadow Stud. That was in 1997, and they were infatuated with the stallion—big, proud, powerful, with superb conformation—and with his excellent record on the flat, agreeing that they’d love to have a horse he’d sired. Here Tom Costello entered her tale, and my ears perked up. Costello had bought Best Mate as a foal at a Fairyhouse sale in 1995, because he liked Best Mate’s breeding—by Un Desperado out of Katday, a broodmare who later produced three other top-notch horses—and his “loose, easy walk.” He paid about five thousand dollars after a brief but spirited round of bidding and turned over the foal to his son Tom Jr. to be broken.

  Best Mate’s life had been tough until then. He was only a month old when Jacques Van’t Hart, the Dutchman who bred him, dispatched him and Katday to Old Meadow Stud for a stay, while Van’t Hart was in Holland on business. The foal was so skinny and weird looking, having lost most of its hair from lying on wet ground, the stable lads nicknamed him Gonzo. They wondered if Gonzo would live or die, but as they nursed him on buckets of milk, his health improved. He was still undersized when he arrived at Costello’s yard, so small and light most people could lift him up with one arm, but Tom Jr. approved of his stride, his sound front legs, and “the nice head on him.”

  He was fit and in good health when the Costellos dropped him into a point-to-point steeplechase at Lismore in County Waterford, in February 1999. (Point-to-points
are races for amateur riders, conducted on an improvised or temporary circuit in open country, from one point to another.) Often owners use such races as a showcase when they’re ready to sell. Best Mate didn’t win, but Knight, who was present, thought he jumped well and asked about buying him. Costello put her off until Best Mate had won, then let Knight and Biddlecombe examine the horse more closely. When they were satisfied, they suggested to Jim Lewis, who owns Edredon Bleu, that he make a purchase. Lewis negotiated with Costello, but the price he paid has never been disclosed because Costello, ever private, would never disclose it.

  THE SATURDAY OF THE PETERBOROUGH CHASE began auspiciously, when the heavens opened and delivered a storm of biblical proportions. Most of Ireland was soaked and flooded, as were East Anglia and Huntingdon Racecourse. The rain came down hard and fast and foreclosed any lingering concerns about firm ground. At O’Herlihy’s, the lads were clustered around the two gas fires, warming their hands and feet and shouting for hot port and brandy. Some customers had arrived early for the World Cup rugby final between England and Australia, and though they’d already endured a nail-biting match, they wouldn’t budge till they’d watched Best Mate’s first run in 254 days.

  Knight had coddled her horse with infinite care, even dishing out his evening oats herself. After the Gold Cup, Best Mate had a two-month vacation on the grass, but in August he resumed the long, steady canters that build up the muscles needed for galloping and jumping. He also received a regular tutorial in dressage for variety’s sake. A week before the Peterborough, he worked a mile or so up a hill and later spent time with Jim Culloty, who schooled him over fences. In between, he and Edredon Bleu, his bosom pal, grazed together in a field, wearing their horse blankets and looking like “two Little Red Riding Hoods,” according to Ms. Knight. Her mother, I remembered, had written cute children’s stories about animals.