by Bill Barich
Somewhere in deepest, darkest Manchester, the spirit of Ho Chi Minh must be alive and well, I thought, although desperately perverted. There was a way out for the Cheltenham officials, of course. They just had to permit United4Action to hold a peaceful demonstration on Gold Cup Day. If that smacked of blackmail, so be it. I sympathized with Edward Gillespie and his staff, who already had a pile of contingencies on their plate. In all the planning for the Festival, the computer models and the preparations for incidental disasters—a pregnant woman going into labor, say, or a dustup between patrons—nobody in his right mind would be gearing up for a possible attack by … football guerrillas!
TOM COSTELLO, the legendary horse trader, has such a reputation for being reclusive that I thought I might have to fast-talk my way past his gate, maybe even posing as a buyer, but Tom Jr., his next in command, had no objection to a visit. On the phone we worked out a time for me to see his father, and soon I was driving by the farms of the midlands, around Lough Derg, and along the Shannon River near Limerick, sensing that I was about to enter a part of Ireland where tourists seldom go, and the local traditions and rituals are still intact—tranquil, isolated, misty country ideal for Costello’s cloaked style of doing business.
Horse country, too, it has always been. Not far from Newmarket-on-Fergus lies Turret Hill, across from Dromoland Castle. The turret dates from the 1740s, built so that Sir Edward O’Brien could watch his horses gallop. Sir Edward also gambled on them and fell into such dire straits that his son, a Dublin attorney, tried to curtail his spending. In a furious letter of reply, Sir Edward stated that “I neither play cards or dice, keep neither whores or hounds … and I should have been in my grave long since, choked with fat and eaten up with infirmities and disorders, had it not been for the exercise and amusement my horses afforded me.”
Tiny Newmarket-on-Fergus was drowsy, still asleep centuries after Sir Edward had departed from this earth. The only souls about were some workmen banging around in a gutted structure adjacent to the Hunters Lodge. I saw nowhere else in town to stay for the night, but the lodge’s front door was locked, and the desk in the lobby was vacant. Fortunately, the owner was one of the workers, pitching in to renovate his restaurant, and he was delighted to rent me a room, although he warned I’d be his only guest. How could he be so sure? Strange, I thought. Even a bit creepy. Alone inside, I felt the musty staleness of a place long unoccupied, sure that Sir Edward’s ghost was afoot.
After bolting my door against the spirit world, I called Tom Jr. to confirm my appointment. He had suggested I meet with his father in the late afternoon, but he gave me directions to his own home rather than to the famous Fenloe House I’d seen photos of in Henrietta Knight’s book. That made me slightly uneasy because of Costello’s distrust of outsiders, particularly writers. “No, I don’t let the press in,” he once told Michael Clower of the Post, conveniently ignoring the fact that Clower was the press. “I’m only a small farmer and lead a quiet life,” Costello insisted, raising the Irish art of self-deprecation to a masterly high.
Still, I’d been able to find out a fair bit about Costello before the trip by consulting the public record. His story was again typical of the rural Irish. As a boy, he rode and raced ponies, a common pastime for a lad “on the other side of Ennis.” In those days, every farmer had a mare he mated to a local stallion, selling the foal for whatever price and glad for the extra income. Costello’s father dealt in half-breeds in large quantities, so horse-trading was in Tom’s blood from early childhood, as familiar to him as breathing the air.
As a young man in the late 1940s, when racing was banned in Ireland because of the war, he “flapped” horses in the north—flapping was a bush league form of the sport that the authorities ignored—where lots of American soldiers were stationed and waiting for their orders. With little else to spend their money on, the GIs gambled like crazy—craps, poker, horses, anything. Often Costello left for Ulster in May and didn’t return until August. The prize money was excellent up there, too, and though the racing did have handicappers, the scene was very scrappy. A horse might compete under one name this week and a new one the next, moving from town to town. Later, Costello held a proper trainer’s license in the Republic. His strike rate was high, and he even won the Irish Grand National with Tartan Ace in 1973. His ability to lay out a horse for a race and score a betting coup was supposedly unrivaled.
Yet he seems always to have been more attracted to the speculative aspects of the game, to the buying and selling of stock. He has no interest in breeding horses, because a breeder gets stuck with what nature delivers. Instead, he thrives on the liberty of swapping and the thrill of discovering a special foal or yearling and snapping it up, a most inexact science. It’s said that he pays more attention to the look of a horse than to its pedigree, and that he owns about twelve hundred acres in Newmarket-on-Fergus, most of it on good limestone, where his 120 horses have plenty of space to roam.
Tom Jr.’s place was a big yellow house on a high hill with a stable and a pretty expanse of land around it. Like his four brothers, he has an operation similar to his father’s, although on a smaller scale. The other boys wanted to be horse traders since they were kids, he said, but he inched into it a toe at a time, considering his options until he took the dive. There was nothing of the cowboy about him. He was gracious, clean-cut, and softspoken, and could easily have passed for an accountant. For a while, we stood outside and made small talk in the mist. I kept expecting Tom to invite me to Fenloe House, but I realized as the minutes ticked by that I wouldn’t be meeting the Old Lion as arranged.
I was disappointed after the long drive, of course, and Tom was apologetic and offered a plausible excuse. His father, now seventy-two, had been suffering from kidney problems, and after a period on dialysis, he’d just undergone a transplant. He was still in charge of the empire—no change there—but he hadn’t fully recovered from his surgery yet, and his energy flagged at times, as it had that afternoon. Although Ted Walsh had alluded to Costello’s poor health, I couldn’t shake a feeling the Old Lion was being true to form in dodging a writer and protecting his seclusion.
Tom Jr. was an adequate stand-in, though. He works closely with his dad and knows all the angles. He told me the business isn’t as ragged as Walsh had portrayed it, not anymore. That satchel full of cash was history. “Farmers want the money wired to their banks now,” he laughed. But his father does still stoke the rumor mill before he runs a horse for sale in a point-to-point, and he’s also adept at playing down the merits of a horse somebody covets to kite the price. Ancient tricks, I thought, that were practiced at bazaars and flea markets around the world.
Tom Jr. described the rigorous Costello training program for me. His father buys up to thirty foals and a few yearlings annually in private deals and turns them into racehorses as quickly as possible, before they become set in their ways. The males are gelded when their testicles are small and their sexuality is undeveloped. As two-year-olds, the colts and fillies are broken and learn to jump over low poles without a rider on their back. They do this in a big indoor arena that resembles a circus tent, completing twenty rounds and forty jumps on an average day. The routine makes jumping fun and second nature to them, while it also burns off fat and builds muscle.
In the spring, as three-year-olds, the horses are very quietly ridden, cantering for six to eight weeks. Costello has a school of fences, three all-weather gallops, and grass gallops everywhere, each presenting a different option for his sons, who do the training. At four, the graduates of the program are ready to be shown off and sold unless they’re lemons. The point-to-point season around Clare divides in two with a short autumn season from October to November, and a longer one from January until June. The British trainers who are repeat customers (Paul Nicholls, Martin Pipe, Robert Alner, Henrietta Knight) concentrate on the second season, because the form book says more winners come out of it.
As I’d heard, the Costellos won’t sell to just anybody. T
heir name stands for quality, and they cherish that, but turnover matters to them, too, so they never hang on to a horse for long, regardless of how tempting it might be. “If there’s a good horse here, he’s for sale,” Tom said. The part of the job he likes best is scouting for foals. It’s a treasure hunt, really. There are no guarantees, so even a clever buyer can get stung. “Gambling runs deep in the Irish,” he suggested. “I have a feeling we might die without a bet, even when we’re losing.”
Tom confirmed that the Old Lion has a gift for spotting a racehorse in the rough, and he tries to copy it. He couldn’t explain the process in detail, as if to put it into words would rob it of its mystery, but when he shops for a foal, he might take in twenty different aspects of its being, although not consciously. He’ll check the conformation, say, and watch how it moves, and notice whether or not it has a bold outlook. It sounded to me like a meditative state, almost a trance, that facilitates the exchange of information between species—an act of surrender any poet courting the muse would understand.
In the gathering dusk, I recalled Tom’s history with Best Mate. “Will he win the Gold Cup again?” I asked.
“He should. Cheltenham brings out the best in him. It’s a unique course with those big fences, so jumping is very important—and Best Mate has always been a beautiful jumper. You pay for every mistake, though. A horse has to put in a flawless round to win.”
Tom walked me to his stables and introduced me to Bannow Strand, the current talk of Ireland, who was reported to be as good as (if not better than) Best Mate at the same stage. The horse was a very creature of myth at seventeen-plus hands high, so broad and solid he looked able to carry twelve stone, or 168 pounds—the standard weight in a point-to-point—along with three or four jockeys. He had an intimidating aura of strength, superiority, and dominion. Only a four-year-old, he had trounced a maiden field of pointers at Tallow on his debut, registering the day’s fastest time, and became the subject of intense transatlantic bidding before David Johnson, a prominent British owner associated with Martin Pipe, bought him. For how much? My question went unanswered.
We had some tea in Tom’s kitchen. When I took mine black, he teased me. “Jockeys’ drink,” he said. No milk or sugar, hence no calories. He was such a friendly, accommodating man, and yet I was sure I’d seen only the tip of the operation, but that was okay. I’d decided the Old Lion’s secrets probably weren’t all that secret, anyway. I knew how the Irish treat their horses, with love and respect, and assumed those qualities were just raised to a higher power in Costello. There is a poetic side to searching out a special foal—the ability to make an imaginative leap that even those who’ve never read Yeats or Kavanagh would comprehend—and Costello has it to an extraordinary degree. When you couple that with a caring, sensitive environment, the chances are that any foal will develop into the best possible version of itself.
ON VALENTINE’S DAY, I stopped at our neighborhood Paddy Power shop to enter the drawing for the free trip to Paris. It didn’t fall my way, but I couldn’t complain since Imelda and I had been to Paris not long after we met, holed up in a borrowed flat in the Marais and seldom leaving it, except to dart across the street to a row of shops for more provisions, stocking up on cheese, bread, sausage, and wine. On those sweet spring nights, with our picnic (dry and warm unlike Tinahely) spread out on the sheets, we talked for hours, listened to music, swapped stories, and had no need for any world beyond our own.
One evening, feeling guilty about not exploring the city, we finally roused ourselves from bed. We ventured out for dinner, only to be caught in a massive downpour without an umbrella, so we ducked into the first bistro we passed. Through a steamy window, it looked to be a perfect spot for lovers, small and intimately lit with candles, but once we were inside, it was as if we’d stumbled into an inn somewhere in the Black Forest. A wrinkled old woman with the air of a neglected servant seated us at a plank table, ordering us to share it with a robust glutton who was well into his second (or maybe third) bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône. He held the last of his steak in his hands and chewed the meat off the bone, simultaneously picking at the pommes frites scattered around his plate. His napkin was stuffed into the neck of his shirt. Once white, it now suggested an improvised work of Abstract Expressionism.
He gave us a wave and mumbled a few words, maybe a greeting but more likely a curse. We waved back and took in the décor. The walls were covered with crayon drawings, the work of someone’s grandchildren. Toward the rear of the room was the pièce de résistance, a big brick oven where the proprietor (and probably the grandfather), daringly dressed in a lime-green shirt open almost to his navel, cooked meat over a blazing wood fire. Resting on a butcher block by his side was a haunch of raw beef, and he carved it up as necessary when the orders came in, slicing off T-bones and entrecotes. The scraps of fat and gristle he tossed on the floor, where the dog—there would be a dog—made a meal of them.
We had a marvelous time, of course, and drank only one bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône, but in the morning, Imelda had to return to Dublin. Her Ryanair bus to the airport left from the James Joyce Pub, where copies of Joyce’s books, and not even first editions, were kept in a locked case to block anyone from reading them, an irony the author would have enjoyed. The bus departed in a plume of exhaust fumes, and all at once I was alone and looking at another week in Paris before I flew home to California (and that hermit’s cabin) on the round-trip ticket I’d bought at the start of my wandering.
In an instant, the city lost its appeal, so I turned to the horses for solace. At Longchamp, I cashed three of my first four bets, but I still had the blues, unable to think about anything but Imelda. Now I was just another lonely American guy in a sea of hand-holding couples, pitiful somehow and an item of gossip at the neighborhood pâtisserie, where the young woman behind the counter, who used to greet me with a conspiratorial wink, frowned when she saw me. The clerk at the wine shop, also formerly chatty, regarded me with pity, as if I were drinking too much of his product, and that was true. As I moped around the flat with the lights out, I listened to “our” music and poured glass after glass of red, every inch the forlorn romantic.
I flew home as intended, but I stayed only two weeks. Instead, I raided my storage locker, where the artifacts of my life are still filed (fifty cartons of books, five hundred albums on vinyl, and some truly grotesque furniture and kitchenware I couldn’t imagine unpacking if I ever did settle in California again), fished out a few essentials, and booked a one-way flight to Dublin. I had no idea what to expect and trusted only the depth of my emotions, believing that even if I fell flat on my face, I’d suffer a harmless embarrassment no worse than any other I’d visited on myself. It was a gambler’s play, and I got lucky. Such were my thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
FOR BARRY GERAGHTY, the approach of the Festival meant even more work than usual. As last year’s Miracle Man, he had to hustle at double-time to meet the demands of everyone who wanted his services. When I pulled up at his family’s farm near Batterstown, in Meath, to hear about his riding arrangements for Cheltenham, he was out doing an errand in his Jeep, so his mother, Bea, showed me into a bright living room where Barry’s younger sisters, just home from school, were curled up by the fire watching a teen sitcom on TV.
“You can talk to those two while you’re waiting,” Bea joked. That didn’t seem like a bad idea at all, really. The girls might have an insight or two into what made their brother tick, but I didn’t want to commit the colossal adult error of interrupting their viewing pleasure, so I waited for the credits to roll before I said a word.
“Barry’s doing well, isn’t he?” I asked Holly, breaking the ice. Holly is fourteen and was still in her school uniform, maroon-colored.
“He’s flying!” she replied, her voice soaring appropriately. She was at Leopardstown for the Hennessy and saw Barry win on Pizarro, only to finish second to Florida Pearl in the big race. “I wish he could have got a little more out of Le Coudray, though.”
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The talk drifted to Macs Joy from Jessie Harrington’s yard, who had lost a good purse that same day, disqualified for interfering with Timmy Murphy on Kilbeggan Lad down the stretch. The unfortunate Andrew Leigh was the jockey at fault, and he was later suspended for careless riding. Did Andrew deserve it? Holly shook her head. She didn’t think so. Neither did Jessie, who’d lodged an appeal.
Then Barry swept in, his car keys jingling in his hand. He’s a restless sort, the type who has trouble sitting still and taps a foot on the floor in frustration. When I repeated Holly’s praise to him, he shrugged and said, “They’re not always so nice. They criticize me, too.” For a little privacy, we moved to the dining room, where some of Barry’s trophies were stacked on a sideboard. There were trophies all around the house, crystal bowls from Waterford and sterling silver cups, enough to stock a small museum.
The Macs Joy incident was still on my mind, so I asked Barry’s opinion. “Well, you know how it is with the stewards,” he said. “Andrew’s never been to court before, has he?” Timmy Murphy, an old pro, had done a much better job of pleading his case, he implied.
Bea brought me some coffee and wondered if Barry would like a Coke, but he declined. “I might eat something later,” he told her, a sentence he’s uttered countless times. The calories had him at their mercy. He used to be able to drop eight or ten pounds in a single day without any fuss, but the best he can do now is six pounds, and that requires effort. In fact, I noticed a world-weary quality in his eyes at times, even a trace of sadness, as if he’d seen too much too soon, but then the weariness would vanish, and he was engaged and enthusiastic again. I recalled Michael Hourigan’s formula for what a jockey needs, an old head on a young body.
Geraghty left school at fifteen and began riding shortly after that. Too tall and heavy for the flat, he signed on with Noel Meade as an apprentice and had his first winner in January 1997, making such steady progress that he had sixteen wins by the end of May. There was nothing magical about it, he felt. He put it down to hard, hard work. He rode out in miserable weather, mastered the game’s political intrigues, and learned how to keep his trainers happy, so he was mildly offended whenever someone suggested he was an “overnight success” because of his five winners at the Festival last year. Yet he also conceded that he’d been lucky lately. He’s blessed with a strong constitution and hasn’t been seriously hurt for a while, but that hasn’t always been the case.
