A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  THE GOLD CUP, all but ceded to Best Mate in October, was up for grabs by mid-December. Insidious reports in the papers spoke of the champ’s “slipping crown,” an insult Henrietta Knight didn’t take lightly. Young Kingscliff, only six and being promoted as a legitimate challenger, had moved onto center stage after winning two more chases in England—one at Wincanton by seventeen lengths, followed by a victory at Cheltenham in the Tripleprint Handicap, proving he could handle those stiff fences. “I didn’t know how good he was before today, but today I got the answer,” said Robert Alner, his trainer, whose garbled syntax betrayed his excitement. Alner had won the Gold Cup with Cool Dawn in 1998.

  Cheltenham, Cheltenham. The word cropped up twenty-six times in the first ten pages of a recent Post, causing a reader to file a letter of protest. A few diehards were still ranting about Knight’s possible avoidance of the King George VI, too, while Knight, who wasn’t used to such criticism, had started making belated excuses about the Peterborough, blaming the bottomless ground, as treacherous as quicksand by now, and its disastrous effect on her horse. Fortunately, Matey had recovered from his trauma and was quite well again, thank you, although busy shooting a TV documentary with Jim Culloty in a supporting role. “Best Mate has an audience most days,” Henrietta sniffed. “He enjoys being a star.”

  Across the ocean in France, Guillaume Macaire was biding his time. Scarcely the type to compare his horses to fairy-tale characters, he worked them hard and steadily, as tough-talking as Jean Gabin in an old gangster flick—none of that three-races-a-year crap for him. He could be cutting and disdainful, even of his stable star. “Jair du Cochet is the most stupid horse in the world,” he told a British reporter. “The slightest change in his program, and he flips! He has done some very silly things, and I am on edge worrying about him. Best Mate scares me in the paddock. He walks around with the command of a lion. He is not an ordinary horse.”

  Was this an honest assessment, or merely Gallic subterfuge? Macaire kept his Gold Cup intentions hidden. And where did that leave Beef Or Salmon? A week after the Durkan, Hourigan ran him in a chase at Cork as tune-up for the Ericsson, and his horse fiddled a win despite more sloppy jumping. My urge to place an ante-post bet was dribbling away, as were my hopes for the Beefster. That same weekend, pretty Solerina added to her string of pearls with the Tara Hurdle at Navan, while at Fairyhouse Barry Connell let a professional ride The Posh Paddy in a maiden hurdle, but Paddy must have missed his master, because he finished a well-beaten fifth.

  Wheels within wheels. The clarity I expected to have after almost three months of study and travel still eluded me. There was a pie cooling on the windowsill—apple, blueberry, seriously rich and tasty—but whenever I grabbed for a slice, the window slammed shut on my fingers. Was Kingscliff the real deal? Could Best Mate turn it around? Picking a Kentucky Derby winner looked simple by comparison. These were horses, not colts, and they’d been racing for years through many ups and downs, plus they trained at private yards essentially in secret. What to do? I needed some help before going to Leopardstown at Christmas, so I checked in with Ted Walsh, Ruby’s dad, who’s the ultimate insider.

  WALSH’S FARM IS IN KILL, in County Kildare. I arranged to meet him there at noon, but he was on the Curragh exercising some horses when I arrived. “Why do racing people make appointments?” his wife, Helen, asked. “It never works out.” She invited me to wait, but rather than sit like a lump on the couch, I went to town—killing time in Kill, as it were—reflexively bought a Post, ordered a sandwich and a pint at the cozy Dew Drop Inn, and listened to Shane Magowan singing “Fairytale of New York” on the radio. An hour later, I returned to the farm, but Ted was still missing in action, so I became the lump I had tried to avoid becoming, seated before a TV tuned to the races at Folkestone, in Kent.

  Ruby had three rides there that afternoon, all for Paul Nicholls. He won the first race on Lord Lington, and as he was going to post for the second, Ted popped through the front door. He’s a compact ball of fire, outgoing and outspoken, and he wasted no time on introductions, flopping into an armchair and asking for my paper. “What number is Ruby on?”

  “Three,” I said. “Harapour.”

  He ran a finger down the page. “Black and white,” he said, noting his son’s colors. Helen came in from the kitchen for the race, as did Ruby’s sister Jennifer, who acts as his agent. Sometimes when the Walshes can’t get a race via their satellite service, they dash down to Kill’s only bookie joint to see it, and that causes a feeding frenzy among the neighborhood punters, who figure the family’s there to bet on the kid and plunge accordingly.

  Today, it was clear that Harapour had no chance in the Mr. & Miss Kelly Regan Birthday Novices’ Hurdle, a Grade E contest (or nagathon), so Ted hit the mute button. “Fire away,” he said. As Irish TV’s most respected commentator, as well as a trainer and a former jockey, he is used to such attention. He told me he’s from Fermoy in County Cork, where his father owned a pub, did some farming, dealt in horses, and raced them in point-to-points. Ted had worked with him and took over the present yard when his dad died in 1990. He doesn’t regard training as a precious or esoteric art, just a job like any other.

  “If you get a decent horse, the trick is not to mess it up,” he claimed. “Ninety percent of our trainers are equals. Only ten percent are lacking. But this life isn’t simple. Don’t do it if you don’t like it. If an owner wants to go to Thurles on a rainy Thursday and watch his horse finish feckin’ ninth, you’ve got no choice but to agree.”

  The phone rang. It was Ruby calling from Folkestone. He still relies on his father for criticism and advice. Ted apologized for missing the first race. “I didn’t see it, but you won. Good man, good man!” After hanging up, he said, “Ruby’s at the top of the game, and he enjoys the buzz, but it’s risky at the top. Some jockeys prefer to stay in the comfort zone, and they can last for years at the second or third level. It’s safer. But if a top jockey slips, he falls all the way to the floor, and he won’t get up again.” In fact, Walsh believes the National Hunt itself is in trouble, too dependent on government support for its survival. To build a bigger audience and attract a younger, increasingly sophisticated crowd, the tracks have to improve their facilities.

  “We’re on slippery ground,” he warned. “Nobody wants to eat bad food and drink overpriced beer when their feet are all wet,” an argument I could support from personal experience. “Not long ago in Ireland, when you checked into a hotel, you asked if the bathroom was on the landing, so you wouldn’t have to deal with the stairs. Now you wouldn’t stay in a room that doesn’t have a bathroom. What the National Hunt needs is a Paschal Taggart, someone with a business head and the common touch. He’s the most innovative, down-to-earth entrepreneur I’ve met!”

  Taggart is Ireland’s greyhound chief, lauded for taking a mug’s game and turning it into a lucrative enterprise by offering more bang for the buck at dog tracks—great meals, terrific service, casino-style glitz, and so on. Ever in search of low-rent kicks, I once tried to reserve a table for a fixed-price dinner at Shelbourne Park, Dublin’s upscale venue for hounds, and wound up on a three-month waiting list.

  Tossing out Taggart as a role model is the kind of loaded remark that gets Walsh in hot water on TV He started about thirty years ago, while he was still riding as an amateur, and beat out a half-dozen other candidates after a series of auditions. He thinks his honesty helped, as did his inside knowledge of the sport. “Before it was like the news,” Ted said, waving a hand dismissively. “Actors read the script, but they didn’t know fuck-all about racing and couldn’t answer a simple question.” He was a little too direct at first, though, and had to acquire a knack for diplomacy. He gave me an example. “If a jockey screws up, you don’t say, ‘What an awful ride!’ You put it this way instead, ‘I believe he’s had better days.’”

  Walsh credits Tim O’Connor, his old boss, with teaching him how to be a better broadcaster. “Four trainers are in the parade ring,
okay?” he asked, recalling one such lesson. “It does no good to say, And there’s Paddy Mullins, the trainer.’ It could be any of them! You have to say, And there’s Paddy Mullins in a trilby!’” O’Connor also prompted him to tailor his remarks to the image on-screen. “Say there’s a picture of a Mercedes, and the camera shifts to a red schoolbus. Tim told me, ‘That’s when you stop talking about the Mercedes.’ I didn’t understand, I said, ‘But I didn’t finish with the Mercedes, Tim.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care, Ted.’ And a producer added, ‘Just talk about the feckin’ schoolbus, Ted.’”

  “So you’re comfortable with it now?”

  “Ah, yeah, I enjoy it. Racing’s been good to me, and I wouldn’t knock it, but I don’t give a shite about the establishment. I’m a friend of the real National Hunt enthusiasts,” he continued, loosening up. “I don’t have much interest in the gambling side. Even when I rode, it was never about the money. I was as thrilled to win a maiden race as a big handicap—bar Cheltenham, of course. That’s the be-all and end-all of the jumps. The winner’s enclosure is like an amphitheater, and you don’t have hundreds of fans, you have thousands. They’re the most appreciative on earth, too, that mixture of the Irish and the English. When you head for the enclosure, the crowd parts like the Red Sea. Isn’t that the one Moses parted?”

  “It is.”

  Ted could barely contain his exuberance now and reached for a more vivid comparison. “It’s like walking into this huge cauldron of cheering people! There’s no greater atmosphere anywhere. Nothing else in the world compares to it!”

  With the mention of Cheltenham, my thoughts turned to the Gold Cup. “Can Best Mate win there again this year?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, without hesitation. “He has all the attributes. He jumps, he stays, and he has a turn-of-foot. And he loves Cheltenham.”

  “Any idea what Jim Lewis paid for him?”

  “Around a hundred grand, I’d guess, but it’s only a guess. Tom Costello doesn’t boast about those things. Costello is the king of dealers. He’s produced more top-class racehorses than anyone else in Ireland. Did you know Kingscliff and Strong Flow both came out of Costello’s nursery? Two more Gold Cup winners, maybe. Tom’s a lovely fellow, but he’s not in good health at the moment.”

  Kingscliff and Strong Flow. Every horse this mysterious man touched was a potential champion, it seemed. Walsh has been a friend of Costello’s for ages, and he described how Costello operates. “There are breeders, you see—small farmers—who don’t go to the sales, because they hate all the claptrap,” he said. “Tom knows them all, and he knows from the stallion masters in the area the pedigrees of their foals. Take Un Desperado, say. Tom will know Un Desperado has covered a mare over at Mike Smith’s farm, so he’ll arrange a meeting. And maybe Smith will have some other nice foals, as well—a Be My Native, or a Supreme Leader.

  “Mike Smith will have a price in mind, maybe thirty-eight thousand for the lot. Tom will dwell on that and write a check for twenty-five thousand. Probably Mike won’t accept, so they’ll have a pot of tea, and Tom will write a check for twenty-eight thousand. Sooner or later, he’ll close the deal at a price he likes. In the old days, Tom paid cash to the farmers who didn’t trust banks. He’d have a wad of bills in a satchel. And he’s a master of psychology, too. If a buyer suspects he has a special horse, Tom might say, ‘I do, but I don’t want to sell it,’ and that drives up the price. Or he’ll play off one of his sons. ‘Tom Junior believes that horse jumps like Best Mate,’ he’ll say, ‘but I don’t think so.’ His horses are always beautiful jumpers. When the Costellos put a horse through its paces, it takes the sight right out of your eyes.”

  I wanted to know more about Costello, but it was almost three o’clock, and Ted still hadn’t eaten lunch, so I joined his family in the dining room. I reckoned I’d never lived in such a hospitable country. On a wall, I saw a framed photo of Ruby on Papillon, Walsh’s Grand National winner in 2000, but that was the only racing-related item around. Some trainers are workaholics and don’t have a life beyond the horses, but others develop outside interests, as Ted has done with travel.

  “I love America!” he bellowed, when I told him where I was from. He spent two years there in the mid-1950s, when his parents immigrated to the States. His father worked with Mickey Walsh, his brother, who trained jumpers and entered them in shows at Madison Square Garden. The Walshes passed their summers in Queens Village in New York, then moved to North Carolina during the winter, a peripatetic existence that didn’t suit them in the end.

  As I was shoveling in some ice cream, I realized we hadn’t gotten around to the Christmas meeting at Leopardstown at all, but Ted assured me I didn’t need any special instructions.

  “You’ll have a grand time. They take a horse to heart there,” he said, clearly a high accolade. “They clap to the horse. The horse is the hero.”

  “And the horse knows it?”

  “And the horse knows it,” Walsh repeated.

  THE SKY OVER DUBLIN BAY was a flinty gray on the afternoon I visited Leopardstown, a week before the Christmas festival. The temperature was in the low thirties, and the Dublin Mountains, looming up behind the grandstand, were almost black in the stormy light—brooding, foreboding, the stuff of bad romantic poetry. Tom Burke, the track’s racing manager, was in his office, a cubbyhole piled so high with cardboard boxes I had to sidle this way and that to reach him at his desk. The desk, too, was buried under papers, so that the overall effect was of a place under siege, although Burke had the calm look of a veteran used to surviving in the trenches.

  “Feels like snow,” I said, shivering as I unbuttoned my overcoat.

  Burke looked horrified. “Don’t say snow.”

  The fickle Irish weather was his enemy these days. The Christmas Meeting begins on Boxing Day and is the track’s biggest earner, but Burke needs the heavens to cooperate if he’s to bring it off. The heavens don’t always oblige. In 1995, he lost all but one of the meeting’s four days because the ground froze solid, and that could happen again. Anything could happen, really, so Burke’s sleep was restless. Whenever he felt in control of the situation, all systems go, Mother Nature knocked him off balance with some torrential rain, say, or a pounding of hailstones. If frogs dropped from the clouds, Burke probably wouldn’t bat an eye.

  “There’s always a new trauma waiting,” he said, a verity he’s mastered after sixteen years on the job. Leopardstown is insured to cover any weather-related losses, but the policy is expensive, and a canceled meeting is also costly in terms of goodwill. Grumpy patrons blame the track for depriving them of their holiday treat and consigning them to a dish of cold plum pudding with the in-laws.

  Burke had a phone call to make. To keep me occupied, he handed over a brief history of the racecourse, prepared for its centenary in 1988. The two-hundred-acre site, chosen for its scenic qualities and its access to a railroad line, once housed a leper colony, hence the devious permutation “Leopardstown.” In the 1860s, an order of Benedictine monks from England bought the land for a charitable model farm to introduce the latest agricultural technology to impoverished Irish farmers, but they went belly-up when the Father Superior spent too much money on machinery.

  After that, some Dublin businessmen acquired the property. Their idea was to build a track that would be a rough replica of Sandown Park. The gates opened in August 1888, on a date chosen to coincide with the Dublin Horse Show, to a crowd estimated at fifty thousand. People poured into Foxrock Station by train on the old Harcourt Line, but the bridge to the course was only three feet wide and almost collapsed under the crush. The roads were so jammed some fans never reached Leopardstown at all. The turnstiles couldn’t cope with the pressure, either, and malfunctioned. The main entrance was too small for horsedrawn carriages, while Mr. Street, the caterer, was singled out for abuse in the papers and trashed for serving such “execrable food.”

  His call completed, Burke asked for the book and flipped to a favorite page. “‘
Disgraceful bungling,’” he read aloud, with a fair degree of drama. “‘That a number of lives were not lost must be ascribed to a miracle rather than to any precautions on the part of the management.’”

  “The press was a lot harsher in those days,” I volunteered.

  “Obviously.” Burke, it seems, has a dry sense of humor, but I could see how he might lose it in the run-up to Christmas, while he was putting in sixteen hours a day. His duties were manifold. He was responsible not only for the state of the ground, but also for the printing of race programs and the posting of sponsors’ signs. He had to liaise with the police over traffic control, still a problem, and massage the egos of corporate honchos with private boxes. All the fences and hurdles had to be checked and repaired if necessary. The course does have very good drainage, so the principal threat to the meeting was a severe frost, such as the one Burke experienced in 1995.

  Maybe it was the paragraph I read about the Benedictines, but I thought Burke had a monkish aspect as he bent to the work on his desk. His office had the feel of a cell, and no doubt he muttered a prayer or two about the weather. The stress was most intense on Christmas morning, he said. One of his younger children—he has eleven, and they range in age from four to twenty-five—would wake him early, just after dawn, and if Willie Gibbons, his track foreman, reported any trouble, he’d hurry over for an inspection. But if the day was benign, he’d attend Mass, enjoy his Christmas dinner, entertain some guests, and retire around ten o’clock, surely counting his blessings.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Henrietta Knight put a lump of coal in British stockings and added to Tom Burke’s stress by announcing that Best Mate would forgo the King George VI and compete in the Ericsson Chase at Leopardstown. The Irish ground was softer and safer, she said. Furthermore, Matey had never liked Kempton, because it was too quick and had once given him sore shins and shoulders. Michael Hourigan welcomed the challenge on Beef Or Salmon’s behalf, while the wily Guillaume Macaire, whose Jair du Cochet was in the King George—and whose chances were now much improved—remarked slyly, “Well, it isn’t bad news, is it?” although Macaire was in for a surprise.