by Bill Barich
Television is a deceptive medium, but I thought Best Mate looked even bigger and more rugged than Moscow Flyer, unsurpassable, with an attitude of utter authority. He met the criteria Irish folkore once held to be essential in a prize horse: three traits of a bull (a bold walk, strong neck, and hard forehead); three of a hare (a bright eye, lively ear, and swift run); and three of a woman (a broad breast, slender waist, and short back). Only two of his five opponents had honest claims, Valley Henry and Jair du Cochet, a French horse. I’d lost money on Valley Henry before, though, so I gave him a wide berth.
Jair du Cochet was more appealing. He might be the Big Bad Wolf to Best Mate’s Little Red Riding Hood, I believed. Guillaume Macaire, his trainer, swore that his horse had no chance in the Gold Cup—not at Cheltenham, a course Best Mate owned—but at Huntingdon in the mud anything was possible. In an act of Gallic solidarity, Macaire chose to retain Jacques Ricou as his jockey, even though Ricou had been mocked in the English press last spring when he appeared to move too slowly on Jair du Cochet in a big race at the Festival, probably costing him the win.
The start of the Peterborough was very curious. As the tapes went up, the horses hesitated, as if they were stuck in a bog. When they did take off, they resembled infantry soldiers on a forced march. The pace was extraordinarily slow, but Ricou kept Jair du Cochet close to it rather than letting the horse lag behind, as he’d done at Cheltenham. Best Mate simply didn’t respond. True, the ground wasn’t to his liking, but his jumping, always precise, was very rusty. He blundered four fences out and never got on terms with Jair du Cochet. It was as though he were being deliberately cantankerous, upset with the difficult circumstances and unwilling to rise above them. It occurred to me that maybe Knight had babied him too much.
As usual, Henrietta hid her eyes during the race, but her husband later described it to her as “messy.” Being a good sport, she didn’t bother with excuses for Best Mate, although she could have. The bottomless ground was a horror; the distance of two and a half miles was short of the horse’s ideal trip; and the pace was a full seventeen seconds slower than last year’s race. Instead, Knight congratulated Macaire and confessed she had $150 to win on Jair du Cochet. She always backs the horses who might beat Best Mate, as if to put a hex on them, but the trick had failed her this time. As for the emotional Ricou, he shed a few tears of joy, his dignity restored before the dastardly English.
What did the future hold for Best Mate? Those at O’Herlihy’s were of two minds. It would be silly to judge a great horse by a single dull run, T.P. Reilly felt. He cited some past champions who’d recovered after a lackluster debut, but it was also a fact that Best Mate had always won the first time out before. Moreover, he’d won on soft ground, too—not as mucky as Huntingdon, perhaps, but still testing. What concerned me most was his jumping, not nearly as fluid as usual. I wondered about his attitude, too. Had he been overly pampered, spoiled in the way of an egotistical movie star? When I recalled Beef Or Salmon’s turn-of-foot at Clonmel, I thought it might still be possible for Hourigan and the Irish to steal the Gold Cup.
RAIN, GLORIOUS RAIN. All the trainers I knew were dancing around like Gene Kelly, able to implement their plans at last. Toward the end of November, the Irish sent six horses to the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury in England, where the chief attraction was Strong Flow, Paul Nicholls’s six-year-old novice chaser. “One of the best I’ve ever trained,” said Nicholls, although Strong Flow was prone to mistakes. He fell in his first race of the season, but he recovered in a low-grade chase at the equally low-grade Newton Abbot track. I had watched the race at Boylesports and marveled at his ability. His entire being went into his jumps, every fiber of his body stretched to its elastic limit when he got it right.
He didn’t get it right at Newbury, not immediately. He belted the ninth fence so hard his tail nearly sailed over his head. The fearless Ruby Walsh held on for dear life and later said the blunder was actually a help. Strong Flow calmed down and began to focus. From then on, the horse was in command and became the first novice to win the Hennessy in its forty-seven-year history, posing a question for Nicholls. Should he try Strong Flow in the Gold Cup, or wait for him to mature? Mill House, a similarly gifted six-year-old, had won the Gold Cup in 1963, but the next year he ran smack into a wall called Arkle, giving Nicholls some food for thought.
The following day, I went to Fairyhouse Racecourse to see Solerina, everybody’s fancy in the Hatton’s Grace Hurdle. Even I had a crush on the game little mare. She was a fluke, a case of lightning striking twice for the Bowes of Tipperary. They really were humble farmers, a father and sons who bred their own horses, often from cheap stock, and raced them under a permit held by James Bowe, the patriarch. He was primarily responsible for Limestone Lad, a heroic stayer, who had won the Hatton’s Grace three times and could lay claim to beating Istabraq fair and square.
Solerina had a storybook background. Michael Bowe bought Deep Peace, her dam, for a pittance, but he still had high hopes because he’d long admired the bloodline. Her second foal was Solerina—a runty thing, a terrible disappointment. “I don’t know what she is, but she’s not a racehorse,” Michael complained to his brother John. Her sire, Toulon, had won the St. Leger, a classic English flat race, so with that as bait, Michael tried to sell her by placing an ad in The Irish Field. There were no takers until John, who liked Toulon, made an offer. His mother had encouraged him to bid, yet another example of the intricacies of family life in the Irish countryside.
Even if Solerina never won a race, John thought she’d be a decent broodmare. At home, she was bored and showed nothing, but when Michael (now her trainer) brought her to the track, she blossomed and quickly ascended from bumpers to Grade One contests. She had a stall next to Limestone Lad, who was laid up with a bad tendon, and John told the Field that the old guy must be coaching the little mare, a trope to warm Henrietta Knight’s heart. At Fairyhouse, Solerina swept the Hatton’s Grace with her usual panache, bowling along in front and moving a step closer to a trip to the Cheltenham Festival for the Stayers’ Hurdle.
THE TEMPTATION TO PLACE an ante-post bet on the Gold Cup was growing in me. Often at night, in the drifty moments before sleep, I went over the key races I’d seen and picked holes in the contenders. I agreed with Reilly that you couldn’t write off Best Mate yet, but his jumping still bugged me, as did his light schedule—he’d have only one more race before Cheltenham. Strong Flow could be scary good, but also scary bad. As for Kingscliff, who was sneaking into the picture after winning a big chase at Ascot, I needed to know more before I could commit, but Beef Or Salmon … well, he had looked like the winged god Mercury at Clonmel, so I figured I should visit Michael Hourigan in Limerick and sound him out, never once giving a thought to Harbour Pilot, the darkest of dark horses.
DECEMBER
Glory Days
The perfection of a late-autumn morning at Lisaleen Stables in Patrickswell, County Limerick—trees blown free of their leaves except for a last few still clinging to the branches, the golds gone to umber now, a light frost on the grass, magpies squawking and sparrows chirping, and the clip-clop of horses returning to the barns after a gallop. I took a bracing belt of fresh air and felt the cottony dullness in my brain begin to lift. Creeping along a lane came Michael Hourigan in his SUV, fresh (or semifresh) from a tour of his yard. His window was open despite the cold, and his eyes were less bright and engaged than usual as he jumped down from the driver’s seat in his rubber boots.
“What time did you get home last night, Michael?” I asked him.
A dour look. “A quarter past,” he said.
“Past what?”
“I don’t know.”
Hourigan and I had attended a public forum at the Dunraven Arms Hotel in nearby Adare the evening before. I went out of curiosity, while Michael was dispatching a duty. The event, sponsored by Horse Racing Ireland (HRI), a government body that funds and administers the sport, was an attempt to get some feedback from the fans
, and it drew a large, vocal, opinionated group. To orchestrate their comments, HRI had enlisted Brian Gleeson, a racing analyst on Irish TV, who has the earnest, pink-cheeked face of a choirboy. Gleeson performed the job with an Oprah-like aplomb and passed a cordless mike to a senior citizen, who fired the opening salvo and griped about having to pay so much to go to the races at Listowel. “And I’m Listowel born and bred!” he said bitterly, yearning for a discount he’d never get, not in a million years.
His contribution set the tone. Ticket prices were too high (about twenty dollars on an average race day, more for major festivals); the food was bad and the drinks expensive; and the amenities were few. “There isn’t even a seat to sit on if you bring a lady or a girlfriend,” another man said, implying that a girlfriend couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be a lady. All this amounted to pie-in-the-skyism, I thought, since it was an unwritten law of the universe that every racetrack, like every airport and ballpark, screws the patron. You might as well bitch about having a nose.
Toward the end of the evening, Gleeson nailed Hourigan, who was trying to sneak out a little early. “Don’t you go anywhere, Michael Hourigan!” he cried. “Not until I ask you about Beef Or Salmon.”
“The horse is grand,” Hourigan said, as noncommital as ever.
“Were you satisfied with his run at Clonmel?”
Hourigan confessed some unease. “I kept wondering, ‘Who’s asleep? Timmy or the horse?’” But he assured Gleeson that Beef Or Salmon was fit and healthy, although he noted that his horse would have to jump “quicker” to win the John Durkan Chase at Punchestown, his next big engagement.
After Gleeson’s closing remarks, we joined a mad stampede for the hotel bar. Such formal proceedings foster a terrible thirst in people, and everyone was delighted to ditch the constructive criticism and talk about races and gambling. The Irish hate to say good night, so when I heard the first few bars of off-key singing, a sign that the session was gathering steam, I went to bed. It was about one o’clock, but Michael was going strong and kept at it until the last revelers straggled out, just before dawn. Now his nose was snuffly, and his stomach was grumbling. “I’m still fairly full of drink,” he muttered, leading me into his kitchen so we could warm ourselves by the stove.
Hourigan has the self-made man’s outsized and justifiable pride. His yard, just shy of a hundred acres, was raw land with only a rundown cottage on it when he bought it in 1985. “Nobody had lived in that cottage for fourteen years. Two rooms up and two rooms down, go bump your head! Anything you see here, we’ve done,” he said of his spacious, commodious home. “The price was about a hundred thousand dollars. I had the ten thousand for a down payment, but no idea where I’d get the rest. For a time, I thought about backing out of the deal. I had cold feet, like a fella about to be married. Jaysus, where am I going to find a hundred grand? That’s what I kept asking myself. I hadn’t a clue!
“You know who saved me? Jerry O’Connell!” He slapped the kitchen table for emphasis. “He’s a bank manager and my best friend. He saw to the loan, all right. He gave me a chance and authorized my overdrafts. Let me tell you something, I’m a big spender! If I make five thousand selling a horse, I’ll spend twenty. If you come to me to buy a horse and decide against it, I’ll spend your money anyway!” His eyes were merry again, the previous night’s pints burning off like fog. “My overdraft never drops below fifty grand. I was laid up in bed one time with a bad back, and Jerry called to ask after me and said to my wife, ‘Nothing wrong with his hand, though, is there, Anne? He’s still writing those feckin’ checks!’”
Soon to be fifty-six, Hourigan was on a roll and began reflecting on his past. He is the last of four children; two others had died at birth. He rued the loss of his father, a cattle dealer and notorious carouser, who dropped dead suddenly at sixty-seven. “It was like the end of the world,” he said sadly. “So unexpected! He never saw me train a winner. I still regret it. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I was a thick fucker and thought my father was stupid. But he wasn’t. Ah, well, every kid thinks his father’s stupid at that age.” He cut thick slices of brown bread, slathered them with butter and strawberry jam, and ate hungrily, the crumbs cascading down his chin. “I was small as a child and a young man,” he said, meaning slight, “and I was not very good at school. Would you believe I couldn’t read or write when I was thirteen?”
“Amazing,” I said. I was on the edge of my seat, in the grip of his tale.
“My parents sent me to Rockwell College, to the holy fathers, and when I completed my schooling on the seventeenth of June 1962, I joined Charlie Weld as a stable lad on the Curragh on the seventeenth of August. I was fourteen years and eight months old, and the ideal size for a jockey. I could do a hundred pounds easily, but I was just terrible. Terrible! Why? Because I was a big coward. In all my time as a jockey, I rode just nine winners on the flat and four over jumps. The last was Ballybar at Cork in a novice chase, and the crowd cheered for me. They must have been in shock!” He buttered another slice of bread, his fourth, and sent more crumbs to flying. I got a kick out of this Hourigan, who gobbled up life in appreciative bites.
“My family owned a grocery store and bar,” he went on, “and when I took it over, I changed the name from Hourigan’s to the Horse and Jockey Pub. That’s when I started training, but I didn’t have a winner for six years. Six years! And when I did win, wouldn’t you know it was on St. Patrick’s Day? That was in 1979. The problem was, I was always selling off my horses. I used to pray I’d have a five-year-old someday, because the three-year-olds were gone before they were four. I had to make ends meet, you see.” The bar catered to travelers, an itinerant band formerly known as tinkers, or tinsmiths, and they were good customers, although boisterous. They sucked Michael into poker games and betting on horses and dogs. “Gambling!” he shouted, as if I’d stuck his hand in a flame. “I tried it, all right, but I was a bad man for it. Put your money where your mouth is, and you’ll lose your money.”
Over time, Hourigan began to have some winners, but his fortunes really improved when he bought Dorans Pride, known as Padjo around the stable, and sold the horse to Tom Doran. Dorans Pride won twenty-six of his sixty-one races, among them the Hatton’s Grace, the Irish Hennessy, and the Stayers’ Hurdle at Cheltenham, and also placed twice in the Gold Cup, but his life ended in tragedy when Hourigan brought him out of retirement at the age of fourteen, well into his fifties on the human scale of aging, to compete in the Festival again. In the Christie’s Foxhunter Chase, he fell at the second fence, broke a leg, and had to be destroyed. This was still a sore point for Michael, who was accused of neglect and worse in some quarters.
“Nobody knew Dorans Pride better than I did,” he asserted in his own defense. “He was restless at pasture and deserved one more chance. He wasn’t happy doing nothing, that’s for certain. Well, I’ve been lucky, anyway, haven’t I? Better trainers than me never had a horse like Dorans Pride.”
All the while we talked, I tried to steer Hourigan toward Beef Or Salmon, foolishly seeking the sort of inside information I distrusted, but when he wasn’t regaling me with stories, he was fielding calls on his cell phone. “No, no I got knocked off my pedestal,” he corrected one caller. “Noel Meade’s in front now.” Meade had just overtaken him to rank first among Irish trainers in terms of money earned. Actually, I was mystified that Michael did so well, since his strike rate hovers around ten percent and dips even lower at large tracks. At Punchestown, for instance, he’d had only three winners in 116 runs since 1999.
The reason for such discouraging figures, I learned, is that Hourigan uses races as a training tool. He knows a quality horse from day one, he said, but with most others it’s a matter of finding the right level, something he can only do by trial and error. That’s part of it, at least. The other part is that he still trains some nags, a job that requires tact. “You can’t say to an owner, ‘Your horse is no good,’ because he won’t believe it,” he explained. “You can say, ‘Your wife is
cheating on you, and he’ll believe that, but he won’t believe his horse stinks.” Hourigan enjoys winning with a cheap horse, but his ultimate thrill is to capture a big race on the flat. “I did it once with Discerning Air at the Curragh—a fifty-grand handicap!” he bragged. “A National Hunt trainer kicking them up the arse in their own backyard! I well and truly celebrated that day!”
Remembering our chat at Tattersalls, and how he had rejected that yearling after a cursory inspection, I asked how he goes about shopping for horses at a sale. He just flips through the catalog, he said, and turns down a page if he sees a horse who is related to a nice one in his yard, but he’d never buy a horse on that basis alone. He watches for a glimpse of possibility, even a “come hither” look. As I guessed he might, he compared it to falling in love and recounted how he fell for his wife the first time he saw her, when Anne was playing tennis in a short skirt on a summer night. She was just fifteen, and though he was a little older, he pursued her, and they’ve been married for thirty-two years now and have five children.
“Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy,” Hourigan recited, charmed by the symmetry. “Mark, the youngest, is ten and riding ponies now. I could be his grandfather! My friends call Anne ‘the Queen.’ When we go for drinks at the Woodlands House Hotel, they ask, ‘Will the Queen be along?’ We do everything together.”
“With Beef Or Salmon, what attracted you?” I asked. “It couldn’t have been his pedigree.”
“Pedigree isn’t everything,” Hourigan replied. “Buying a horse isn’t like buying a car. If you want a Ferrari, you can open the bonnet and look at the engine. You can take it apart and check it all over, and you’ll know it well and truly is a Ferrari and capable of doing what a Ferrari does. But a horse? You can’t take a horse apart. Sometimes a horse with a wonderful pedigree turns out to be a duck. Can’t even get out of its own way! But if they’re well-bred and trained properly, their pedigree comes out at some point.”
