A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  Clearly, this was a matter of principle for him. Like Red Mills, he’d seen his good name suffer by innuendo. I detected an Irish home pride, too, along with a distaste for the English way of doing things, strictly by the rules, where the Irish are inclined toward sympathy and forgiveness.

  “You’re still pretty pissed off,” I said.

  He brushed aside the comment. “Ah, let the solicitors handle it.”

  Better to consider Florida Pearl’s chances in the Hennessy, as we did when Willie walked me to my car. Could Florida win it a record fourth time? Mullins didn’t see why not. He pointed toward the sculpture on his lawn. “Do you recognize that horse? That is Florida Pearl.” He’d met Rupert Till, the sculptor, at an exhibition of Till’s work. “We got to talking over a few beers, and I mentioned that I’d always wanted a horse sculpture, and Rupert just showed up with this one day.” He patted the jockey. “It’s supposed to be Ruby, but Ruby never won on Florida Pearl. Notice anything wrong?”

  I checked the piece, touching it here and there, but it looked pretty accurate to me. The jockey was even wearing goggles. “Can’t say that I do.”

  “Rupert took Ruby’s measurements, but he also relied on a photo of Paul Carberry. Ruby doesn’t have the same body type as Paul, or the same style of riding. So the jockey comes out in-between.” There it was, that precision again. “Anyway, it’s something different,” Willie mused. He made a half-hearted attempt to remove the Christmas lights, but the strings kept catching in the wire mesh, so he did what most men would do under the circumstances and postponed the chore to go back to a job he knew he could handle. “See you racing!” he yelled as I departed.

  IN THOSE EARLY DAYS of February, the Irish were under a black cloud, with nothing at all going right. The rain fell and then fell some more, flooding the courses at Fairyhouse and Clonmel, and canceling the races. Edward O’Grady, his Cheltenham squad already whittled to the bone, faced another potential loss when Back In Front developed an irregular heartbeat. After working ineffectively, the horse was shipped to the Veterinary Hospital in Dublin for more tests.

  In Limerick, Michael Hourigan came clean about Beef Or Salmon’s iffy season. The horse had a sore muscle in a rear hindquarter, he said, probably as a result of his tumble in the Gold Cup last year. His jumping hadn’t been the same since then, so he was receiving some physiotherapy, and though he was ninety-five percent right, he would skip the Hennessy and go straight to Cheltenham.

  In Kilkenny, Connolly’s Red Mills threw in the towel and mailed checks for any forfeited prize money to the connections of all forty-six horses in England and Ireland who’d tested positive for morphine. The payout amounted to almost a million dollars when legal and specialist fees were included. The company accused the Jockey Club of being inflexible and insisting on a technical interpretation of its rules at the expense of fairness.

  Only Paddy Power Bookmakers were unaffected by the tides of misfortune. If a customer brought his wife or his girlfriend into any shop on Valentine’s Day, she would be given a free box of Butler’s chocolates and a chance to win a trip for two to Paris with no strings attached.

  THE HENNESSY GOLD CUP, held at Leopardstown, drew nearly as large a crowd as the Ericsson Chase with Best Mate. Anticipating a juicy handle, the bookies were more active than usual, humming and whistling at the prospect of all those euros landing in their laps. Among them was Francis Hyland, who heads up the Irish National Bookmakers Association. If anyone doesn’t fit the raffish image of a turf accountant, it’s Hyland. Formerly a dealer on the London Stock Exchange, he was dressed as if for a bullish round of trading in a topcoat, a tie, and a pinstripe suit. Only his worn-looking shoes, scuffed and muddy from tramping from course to course, hinted at his profession.

  Though I was not unfamiliar with the bookmaker’s art by now, having met the Old Bookie, talked with the weather-beaten gents on the Thurles train, and lost money to the likes of Paddy Sharkey, I hadn’t yet filled out the big picture, and Hyland was the ideal person to help me, since he takes a scholarly approach to his work. An authority on Irish racing, he has written histories of both the Irish Derby and the Grand National. He began by showing me the essentials of his trade, known collectively as “a joint.” Bookies have been using them for centuries, with no need to change a thing.

  “A joint is designed to be cheap and portable,” he lectured, “so you can set up anywhere they’re racing, in a field or on a farm.” The kit included a long, hollow, telescopic pole that Francis extended to its full length and tied to a fence with some twine. Next, he attached a cash tray for coins up top, then the slate on which he chalks his odds, and finally a holder for his umbrella. The single modern touch was a laptop that Francis’s only employee uses to record bets and issue receipts for them.

  Hyland’s leap from being a broker to a bookie sounded dramatic, but he told me racing had always intrigued him. When the stock market hit a slump in 1974, he took a year off to write his history of the Derby and also have a fling at making book. He did well enough (“Meaning I survived,” he said) to go at it full-time. His experience as a dealer gave him a slight edge, since he’d sharpened his math skills under pressure. “There isn’t any finish at the stock exchange,” he laughed, “and the betting is all ‘in-running.’” (An in-running bet occurs during a race; bookies will offer odds, say, on whether the horse in front will win or lose.) Yet he didn’t want to create an impression that his job was simple. “The punters in Ireland aren’t mugs,” he claimed. “They’re very well informed. This is the only business where insider trading is legal.”

  By insider trading, he was referring to tips. “But tips …,” I said, my voice trailing off as I recalled the worthless ones I’d heeded.

  Hyland addressed the ambiguities. Real inside information does exist, he believes, and he guards against it by being a shrewd student of faces. “In this game, faces are very, very important,” he explained, and I could feel him inspecting mine for nervous tics of a devious nature. If he finds somebody regularly winning on horses of Noel Meade’s, for example, he assumes the bettor has a line to Meade’s yard. He’ll memorize the person’s face and decline any bets in the future. But it’s equally true that the Irish tend to accept any tip as valid, a grave mistake since most trainers are wary and seldom tout a horse to win, because if the horse loses they’ll never hear the last of it. “Do you know what the English bookmaker William Hill once said?” Francis asked cheekily. “People with inside information have made a rich man out of me.”

  I was enjoying Hyland’s sprightliness. His pitch is about two hundred yards from the rails, a preferred and central position. A rails bookie straddles the divide between the reserved enclosure, where the tickets are more expensive, and the ordinary one, and he can take bets from either side, thereby increasing the pool of possible suckers.

  “A pitch on the rails here might cost about three hundred thousand dollars,” Hyland said, and maybe a little more for an absolutely premium spot, but the price drops drastically as you move away, because lazy punters won’t do any walking. For a pitch just five yards beyond Hyland’s, a bookie might pay ten grand less, and so on to the outer reaches of the betting ring, a region as isolated as the Skellig Islands off the Kerry coast. On an average day, the bookies at Leopardstown handle about six hundred thousand dollars, Francis estimated, with about eighty percent of the total going to those on the rails.

  To compensate for his distance from the hot spot, Hyland delivers service. “It’s what I sell,” he said, with a theatrical flair. “I’m their bank, I’m their cloakroom attendant. They leave their coats and bags with me. They ask to use my mobile phone. I cash checks for them, and if they argue about the odds, I’ll adjust them ever so slightly. In essence, I am their servant.” Some customers have credit with him and can bet “on the nod,” but he doesn’t like to grant the privilege. It goes to people’s heads, and they wager too much and often get into financial trouble. Bad debts are bad for business, so Francis kee
ps his patrons afloat rather than letting them drown.

  Thinking about Nosey Flynn and T. P. Reilly, I wondered if English racing truly was more honest than the Irish version. Hyland gave me a withering stare, as though he couldn’t believe how innocent I was. “All racing is bent!” he shouted. “Everyone knows that! Racing’s bent, football’s bent, darts is bent, any sport with betting is bent!” He wasn’t alluding to fixed races so much as to the shifty ways a trainer can manipulate the handicap system and still stay within the rules.

  “How often have you seen it?” he asked. “A trainer has a horse who loses time after time. The horse runs in races he’s not good enough for—or at the wrong distance, or at a racecourse that doesn’t suit his style—with J. T. Unknown riding. And after every loss, the handicapper [he’s employed by the Irish Turf Club] who assigns the weights takes pity and deducts a few more pounds. Pretty soon, the horse is at the bottom of the weights, carrying ten or even fifteen pounds less than he ought to be. And then, surprise! J. T. Unknown has been fired, Ruby Walsh is the new jockey, and the horse goes on to win.”

  “Do jockeys really matter that much?” I was playing devil’s advocate.

  “Ruby is a stone [fourteen pounds] better than an average professional jockey, I can tell you that,” Francis said. “Ruby, and also Carberry and Geraghty. And in a bumper, a top amateur rider is worth three stone more than the average amateur.”

  In the past, before bookmaking was tightly regulated, high-street bookies paid jockeys to throw a race when they were on the favorite. A jockey’s life could be miserable back then. Heavy drinking was the norm, and a rider often died broke. Sometimes a poor Irish family sent off a small, skinny boy to be an apprentice, just so they’d have one less mouth to feed. Though race fixing isn’t so blatant anymore, and doesn’t exist at the highest levels, the stable staff at any yard can supposedly inhibit a horse’s performance. They can deny the horse any water the day before a race, for instance, then bring it to the track and allow it to drink its fill, or they can let a horse gorge on hay the morning of a run. According to a recent magazine article I’d read, they can also dose a horse with ACP, an animal tranquilizer hard to detect in a urine sample.

  When Francis began checking the card for the first race, I was astonished at how little time he spent. He didn’t even consult a Post, merely a list of entries torn from a newspaper. In a minute or two, he had the competition reduced to three horses. That wasn’t an exceptional talent, he felt. He just searches for the good jockeys and trainers, and there aren’t very many. The quality of Irish racing has declined in recent years, he said, except at the top of the game.

  “We used to have about three thousand horses in training, and five hundred were okay, five hundred were moderate, and the rest couldn’t keep themselves warm. Now we have almost six thousand in training, and five hundred are okay.” Besides, as he pointed out, a bookie isn’t looking for the form horse. All that concerns him is the public’s choice. If he doesn’t get the odds right on the favorite, he’ll blow his margins completely.

  My session with Hyland had been very productive. I’d gained the straightest picture yet of what an on-course bookie needs—a decent head for numbers, some psychological insight into his clientele, ample operating capital, the balls to take a risk, and the smarts to know when to take it. But what makes for a successful gambler? When I put the question to Francis, he reiterated a key factor from J. P. McManus’s bible—impulse control. A gambler has to be patient enough to recognize good value.

  “Show me someone who only bets three or four times a year,” he said, “and I’ll guarantee that person will be a winner. The more you play, the harder it is to come out ahead. In effect, you pay me a commission on every bet.” Most of us are doomed, though, and lose control in stressful situations, particularly on the last race—pure gravy for a bookie. If we’re ahead, we try to double the money, and if we’re in the hole, we dig down deeper in a fruitless attempt to break even.

  How well I knew the syndrome! As the races began, I looked at the crowd milling about and saw it the way Francis might, as a horde of impulses barely held in check, fish about to be fried, and I vowed to avoid my usual mistakes (reading tea leaves, probing bird entrails, and so on) and sit tight until the Hennessy, when I planned to jump off the bridge and bet big-time on Florida Pearl. At a pleasant remove, I watched Brave Inca win a Grade One hurdle, and Pizarro (whose poor sire was called Broken Hearted) squeak out a victory in a Grade One chase, both stamping their Cheltenham credentials. Up next was a handicap with nineteen runners—a surefire invitation to confusion—so I confined myself to the Jodami Bar for a pint.

  The choice was appropriate, really. Jodami had won the Irish Hennessy three times between 1993 and 1995, a feat Florida Pearl would soon try to surpass. With Beef Or Salmon on the shelf, I was invested in the Pearl. The opposition looked weak. Cloudy Bays and Be My Belle were stepping up in class, and Rince Ri was an aging graybeard. Harbour Pilot hadn’t tackled fences since the Festival last year, while McManus’s Le Coudray was wildly overvalued because he’d been second to Best Mate in the Ericsson—but by how many lengths? No, Florida Pearl was my only option, and a very appealing one at 5–1, so I descended into the ring and placed my wager, although not with Francis Hyland, who is too intelligent for his own good.

  Sometimes after a bet I want to go back a minute later and beg the bookie for a refund, as people do when they send a nasty or unguarded e-mail, but at others I’m enveloped in a profound aura of well-being and entirely regret-free, as if the result of the race were preordained, and that was how I felt about the Hennessy. When Cloudy Bays took the early lead, I smiled because I knew he’d fade, as he did at the fourth-last fence, yielding to Florida Pearl and Harbour Pilot. Had I underestimated the Pilot? The notion didn’t cross my mind.

  Richard Johnson was on Florida Pearl again, while Paul Carberry rode Harbour Pilot. As a Leopardstown veteran, Carberry knew every twist and turn of the track and had an advantage, but I still remained steadfast, convinced the fates would intervene—and they did at the second-last when Harbour Pilot, who’d been jumping well, lost his bearings, barged into the fence, and sent Carberry bouncing to the ground. The race wasn’t over yet, though, because the riderless Harbour Pilot, an unpredictable free radical, veered toward Florida Pearl at the last fence. For a moment, it looked as if they’d smash into each other and go down in a heap, but the Pearl scraped by and denied the fast-closing Le Coudray by three lengths.

  Afterward, Richard Johnson said that the loose horse had helped rather than hindered his mount. It forced Florida Pearl to focus instead of slack off as he often does with an easy lead. For Willie Mullins, the race was emotional. “I’m over the moon,” he said. “I would have cried if he’d been caught in the stretch.” Now Florida Pearl was back with the big boys and might even go to Cheltenham for another crack at the Gold Cup. I was fairly emotional myself as I darted through the crowd to collect my cash. My hundred bucks had blossomed fivefold, so I stopped at the Jodami again, this time for a glass of champagne.

  HOWEVER DISAPPOINTED J. P. McManus might have been about Le Coudray’s near miss, he didn’t have time to dwell on it. He had a more serious controversy on another front, one that involved the 25.49 percent share of Manchester United he owned with John Magnier. The football club’s most rabid fans had distributed a leaflet, Just Say Neigh, to a capacity crowd during a home-field game at Old Trafford that same weekend, urging everyone to disrupt the pair’s racing interests in any way they could. The leaflet was a gesture of support for Sir Alex Ferguson, United’s beloved manager, who had engaged McManus and Magnier in a world-class pissing match.

  At the heart of the dispute was Rock of Gibraltar, a very special racehorse. As a three-year-old, the colt had reeled off a string of five straight Group One wins on the flat, making his value at stud enormous—a classic example of Coolmore’s strategy for nurturing and developing stallions. Sir Alex owned a piece of Rock of Gibraltar, at least in
theory, since Magnier had presented him with a half-share as a gift, and he felt entitled to a share in the stud fees, too. But Magnier reportedly argued that the stallion rights were separate—they were Coolmore’s property. The absence of any paperwork added to the mix-up, so Fergie had filed a lawsuit.

  Magnier and McManus, every bit as belligerent, put the club and Ferguson under the microscope. They ordered its board of directors to answer ninety-nine questions about United’s finances, business affairs, and player trades. That was too much for the Manchester U. loyalists, whose leaflet supplied Coolmore’s phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The nerve of those effin’ Irishmen! Some lout had already tagged a wall at Magnier’s home in Fermoy, scrawling “Fuck you, Magnier” in red letters four feet high. Moreover, the loyalists had dared to stage a protest at Hereford during the races, marching onto the track with banners that read QUIT THE HORSEPLAY, COOLMORE! and UNITED NOT FOR SALE!, delaying the action for a full twelve minutes.

  Bad enough, you might say, but now the zealots known as United4Action were threatening to infiltrate the Cheltenham Festival on Gold Cup Day. Heresy! Sacrilege! The outrage of the jumps fraternity cycled off the charts. Though the threat beggared belief, the zanies had to be taken seriously. They were buying up tickets as fast as they could and claimed to hold eighty-eight for the Tattersalls enclosure alone. (Cheltenham has three enclosures, with Tattersalls the midprice one.) The group’s messages to the media were becoming more volatile, too, military in their ardor. They spoke of “cells” being activated and dispatched on a mission to cause “immense embarrassment” to McManus.