A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  “I once broke my back twice in twelve months,” he said with a smirk, as if in the presence of the blackly comic. He had to wear a full body cast for ten weeks the first time and twelve the second. The situation would’ve been much hairier if the surgeon, who’d once patched up a knee for him, hadn’t designed the cast with a zipper, so he could bathe. He never truly believes it when he’s injured and has even ridden with crushed vertebrae, denying the pain. If a bone or a bruise does feel wrong after a fall, he tells himself it’s nothing, postponing a visit to the doctor until it becomes inevitable. He doesn’t dwell on the damage, nor does he like to think about getting older. “I’ll always be the kid,” he said, but he knew better.

  When the Hennessy came up in our conversation, I carried on about how terrific Florida Pearl had looked, forgetting that Barry had been on Le Coudray. His affable manner changed in a flash as he reacted to the slight. His eyes grew cold, and I saw the steely resolve that separates a great jockey from an ordinary one.

  “You want to win them all, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do,” he admitted. But he was aware that talent and hustle alone weren’t enough to do the trick. “Do you remember Richard Pitman, the jockey? He wrote a book called Good Horses Make Good Jockeys. And that’s the truth, too. If you don’t have the horse beneath you, it doesn’t matter how good you are. You have to be lucky.”

  Barry seemed obsessed with luck. When I kidded him about it, he was adamant. “But so much of it is luck!” As an example, he cited a steeplechase he’d lost at Leopardstown on Tom Taaffe’s Kicking King, a celebrated gelding. “A sixty-five grand race, right?” he said, sounding wounded. “Taaffe had Kicking King at the top of game, better on the day than he’s been since then, and the horse just clipped the very edge of a fence and fell—not even a bad mistake, just an inexperienced one!” In a second or two, his gloom lifted. “Ah, well, you can’t live in the past. There’d be no craic if things went right the whole time, would there?”

  Speaking of luck, Geraghty was hoping for another blast of it at the Festival. His agent had four solid rides lined up in Kicking King, Pizarro, Back In Front, and Moscow Flyer, but two key mounts had dropped into his lap unexpectedly last year, and he’d be delighted if that happened again.

  “Moscow’s the ace in my pack,” he confided. That was music to my ears. Maybe I should forget all the nonsense about the Pattern and quit being a superstitious throwback to the caveman era. “He’s the best I’ve ever ridden.” But Barry also touted Pizarro’s chances after the horse’s run on Hennessy Day. Though Pizarro had won, his tremendous stamina didn’t come into play as it would at Cheltenham. “That uphill finish is very tough,” he said. “If you stand there and take a look, you wouldn’t want to walk up it. It’s an honest test.”

  “What about Back In Front?” I hadn’t heard anything since the horse’s trip to the Dublin Veterinary Hospital.

  “The vibes are good. He’s much better. He’s had the heart problem before.”

  A jockey has to be a skilled diplomat to secure a place as the primary rider for such expert trainers as Harrington, O’Grady, and Taaffe, performing a balancing act as he chooses among their horses without causing offense, and Geraghty brings it off admirably. He’s mature beyond his years, but his boyish side popped out again when he spoke of a pub in Kells, where he’s a part-owner. We were thinking about going there for a drink, but it was getting too late.

  “Maybe you could put a photo of the pub in your book?” he asked, as any ambitious young man might. I doubted I could do that, I said, but I did promise to mention the Arches Bar, where Barry sometimes can be found pulling pints on a Saturday night.

  Though Geraghty knows his stuff, he was wrong about Back In Front. The vibes were not so good, alas. Shortly after the scare with his heart, the horse turned up lame in his near-foreleg. Vets, physios, chiropractors, and even a farrier had examined him, but nobody could fix him, so he wouldn’t be going to Cheltenham. Edward O’Grady described himself as “hugely disappointed.” He might have seventeen Festival victories, but he’d never won the Champion Hurdle, Back In Front’s intended race. With all the twists of fortune O’Grady had gone through, you’d need somebody other than a Pierce Brosnan smoothie to play him in a movie, I thought. You’d have to cast an actor with a spooky, shell-shocked look, such as Christopher Walken.

  SNOW WAS ON THE WICKLOW MOUNTAINS when I traveled to Moone for a last visit to Jessie Harrington’s farm before the Festival. I could feel the tension in the air and almost hear a whispered prayer that trouble would stay outside the door. Jessie had already lost Imazulutoo and would soon lose Spirit Leader, too, who lacked her ordinary sparkle and was only ninety percent right. Her Cheltenham squad had been whittled down to four: Green Belt Flyer, Colca Canyon, Macs Joy, and Moscow Flyer.

  Horses were on the move as usual, with the morning’s second lot headed for the gallops. In an open field down below, where four sturdy birch fences were set up, Jessie and Eamonn, both on horseback, were supervising a schooling session. As I watched, a pair of horses approached the first fence at a fair clip. This was just for practice, so I was unprepared for an accident, but one horse clobbered the fence and unseated his jockey, poor Andrew Leigh, who left the saddle upside-down, a foot caught in a stirrup. The horse shook him off after dragging him along for a few yards, and he hit the ground with a thump and smashed his left wrist against it.

  I had seen dozens of falls by now, but they still terrified me. Andrew appeared to be okay, though, grinning as he brushed the grass and dirt from his clothes. It was a sheepish grin, to be sure, but he carried it off with grace and pretended his wrist, purple and swollen, belonged to another person. After Eamonn conducted an inspection, he sent the lad to Jessie’s house to pack the wrist in ice prior to a trip to Naas for an X-ray. Meanwhile, riders were chasing the loose horse around the yard, joined by a bunch of grooms on foot. It looked like a roundup in Texas.

  Eamonn isn’t a man to sigh in public, but I guessed he must be sighing inwardly as parents do. When the schooling session ended, I walked to Jessie’s house with him to see how Andrew was feeling. Two men I’d never met before were hanging around the kitchen. They were shy and tentative, as if they’d arrived by chance and were waiting for instructions on what to do next. Pat Abbey and Brian Willis turned out to be part-owners of a horse, new to the role and still wet behind the ears. They were members of a twenty-person syndicate, all employed at a pharmaceuticals company in Kildare. Their horse—La Dearg, or Red Dawn—was a four-year-old gelding who hadn’t raced yet.

  “We interviewed other trainers, but Mrs. Harrington’s one of the best,” Abbey said, in his sober way. He was the more talkative guy and the most infected with racing fever. He’d even had a fling at being a jockey, but he quit to take a job at a meat factory, as he called it, and later switched over to pharmaceuticals. Willis kept quiet, mostly, and looked a bit puzzled, as people do when they decide to try something unique and different and can’t tell whether or not they like it yet. But he was definitely a fan and had been at Leopardstown when the stewards screwed Andrew Leigh over his ride on Macs Joy—or such was the spin he and Abbey put on the incident.

  “Ah, Andrew wasn’t cheeky enough in the stewards’ room.” Eamonn agreed with Geraghty’s take on the inquiry. “He needs to fight his corner better.”

  “It’s your man Timmy Murphy,” Abbey said suspiciously. “He’s been around for centuries. An old pro like Murphy, how could you trust him? He’d lie and tell the stewards what they want to hear.”

  Andrew walked in just then, still acting sheepish. He had a damp towel wrapped around his battered wrist and a slash of blood across the bridge of his nose. I assumed he must be upset and maybe a little embarrassed, so I tried to cheer him. “You’re having a pretty good season for an apprentice, aren’t you?” I said.

  “A pretty good season?” he asked, laughing. “At times!” His memory of every fall and suspension was vivid, but he had no intention of givin
g up. He’d be riding at Limerick later that week for the trainer Gerald Cully, he told us. It’s a cliché to say that racing is about dreams, but I did feel surrounded by dreamers in the kitchen, each with his own vision of transcendence.

  We snapped to attention when Jessie came in, like schoolboys caught fooling around by the teacher. The new owners were desperate for a word about their horse, any word, but Jessie didn’t know enough about La Dearg yet to advise them, so she suggested we go up to the gallops for a look at him. He was in the third lot of the morning. While the horses circled in a sand ring, Abbey grabbed a spot by a fence, and Willis fetched his infant son, Gary, snuggled in cute winter clothing, from a car seat. Babysitting was probably the price he had to pay for investing in a horse, such forfeits being common in most marriages.

  Abbey and Willis were chomping at the bit, stymied as they tried to pick out La Dearg from the crowd. “Is that him?” Abbey asked, pointing. “I think that’s him.”

  “They all look the same,” Willis protested. He had his hands full with Gary, who was wriggling like a bug. “At least four or five of them do.”

  The rider on La Dearg caught on to their plight and signaled to them. “He’s a nice one!” she shouted, patting a robust chestnut with a white blaze. The owners waved at her appreciatively. They were beaming. There he was—their horse!

  The string left the sand ring for the gallops, where Jessie waited. She was on horseback again and resembled a general posing for an equestrian statue. She was riding Moscow Court, a hurdler with two wins and four places to his name. “He’ll make a grand chaser next year,” she predicted. She noticed Gary for the first time and smiled. “How old is the little fella?”

  “Nine months,” his dad replied, chucking him under the chin.

  “I became a grandmother for the second time nine days ago,” Jessie said, turning her horse to join the string.

  I didn’t stay for La Dearg’s workout. Instead, I went over to Moscow Flyer’s paddock, where he stood calmly watching the traffic. He’d have a last gallop at the Curragh to sharpen him, Eamonn had said, and then it was off to Cheltenham. What was going on in that eccentric brain of his? Tom Costello might know, but I didn’t. I tried to communicate with him, anyway, and asked if I should ignore the Pattern and bet on him in the Queen Mother, and I think he answered, “It’s up to you.” After that, I was left to ponder all the dreams afloat in the world, my own included, wondering if someday in the distant future Gary Willis would sit down with some friends over a pint at Punchestown, or even Thurles, and remember the time Jessie Harrington had smiled down on him from a very great height on a cold winter day.

  ANDREW LEIGH did not fare well at Limerick. His horse Batang, an import from Germany, was a long shot in a two-mile maiden hurdle. Early in the race, at the crest of a hill, Batang began to gurgle as if he had a virus, so Andrew eased up on him. That was the proper thing to do, but when the horse quit gurgling seconds later, Andrew went back to work and drove him to a decent sixth-place finish behind Rabble Run, who was ridden by Timmy Murphy, his old nemesis. Would Murphy always pop into the picture whenever a problem arose? The notion might have crossed young Andrew’s mind.

  Batang’s stop-and-go dance led to an inquiry. Gerald Cully told the stewards his horse often gurgled on soft ground, and that Leigh could have been closer to the pace halfway through, but otherwise Cully was satisfied with the ride. Yet the Turf Club vet couldn’t find anything wrong with Batang, so the stewards judged the trainer and jockey to be in violation of Rule 212, which states that “every horse shall run on its merits, and the rider shall take all reasonable measures to ensure his mount is given every opportunity.” Cully was fined a thousand bucks, Batang was banned from racing for forty-two days, and Andrew received another suspension, this for ten days, one more bump on the rocky road to experience.

  ON THE LAST SUNDAY of the month, there was a spectacular show after the races at Leopardstown. Standing by the rail at twilight, I watched about fifty horses bound for Cheltenham being put through their paces. As befuddled as Abbey and Willis, I couldn’t identify any of them in the near dark, except for Mouse Morris’s ghostly Rostropovich, all white from head-to-toe. The track failed to offer a commentary, but I knew from the banter that Florida Pearl was out there, and so were Solerina, Hardy Eustace, Hasanpour, and Sadlers Wings.

  Willie Mullins had the most horses working, around fifteen, many of them prospects for the Champion Bumper, his specialty. Rule Supreme, still an iffy jumper, was being schooled over fences, and again he crashed into one and banished Ruby Walsh from the saddle. Timmy Murphy, David Casey, Jim Culloty, and every other jockey on the course were focused on the Festival, sampling horses and experimenting with rides before they and their agents made a final commitment. Cheltenham was gradually taking over the available space in everybody’s head.

  My own Festival plans were fixed at last, after I’d consulted a travel agent in Kildare about package tours. The hotels in town were already full and frighteningly expensive, so I was left to decide between two inns in Stratford-upon-Avon, about twenty-eight miles from Cheltenham, and the Twigworth Hotel, billed as “popular with our clients” and under new management, not necessarily a recommendation in my view. But beggars can’t be choosers, so despite my affection for the Bard and Stratford’s literary cachet, I settled on the Twigworth at a cost of about nine hundred dollars for three nights, including breakfast, dinner, and airfare. My tickets to the races were extra, and I was down more than a grand before I ever reached the Promised Land.

  MARCH

  Festival

  So my long winter’s education was coming to an end. The many miles I’d clocked around Ireland by road and rail amounted to a diploma of sorts and qualified me as a graduate of the jumps academy, hardly an authority but still entitled to attend the Festival and offer an opinion freely, whether or not anybody listened. I had paid my dues, as they say, cold and wet for days at a time, had won and lost money—I was ahead by the paltry sum of $183—and had drunk pints in pubs both quaint and unruly, and that, I believed, stood as my own peculiar badge of honor, on a par with Andrew Leigh’s bruised wrist and bloodstained nose.

  With a week to go, my thoughts were all of Cheltenham, and I was not alone. The Irish, more than five thousand strong, were preparing for their annual pilgrimage, one that started in earnest after World War II. The catalyst was Vincent O’Brien, arguably the finest trainer of racehorses ever, whose assault on the English and their big prizes enlisted an army of followers. In those lean times of postwar shortages in England, O’Brien’s countrymen did not depart for the Festival empty-handed. They packed the fixings of a full Irish breakfast—bacon, eggs, and the mealy blood sausages known as puddings, black and white—as well as bottles of whiskey and even jugs of bootleg poteen, Ireland’s moonshine, to fortify themselves at crucial moments.

  Even before I opened a biography of O’Brien, I could have guessed at the story of his childhood, so familiar were its elements. Born in Churchtown, County Cork, in 1917, he learned to ride as a boy, and later schooled point-to-pointers and hunted with the Dashing Duhallows, the oldest club in the country. He had no interest in formal education and dropped out at fifteen to work at Leopardstown. His father, Dan, held a permit to train his own horses, loved a game of cards, and feared ginger-haired women because they brought bad luck. Vincent became his amateur jockey and assistant, taking over the yard when Dan died in 1943.

  The yard operated on a shoestring. The prize money in Ireland was still ridiculously low, so most trainers supplemented their income, or tried to, by gambling. In contrast, the purses at Cheltenham were worth a fortune, plus the stakes in the betting ring were high. England was awash in black-market currency after the war, and a bookmaker’s check was one way to launder it. Those incentives weren’t lost on O’Brien, who was anonymous and secluded in rural Cork, where his privacy could be guaranteed. Beyond the scope of rumors and far from prying eyes, he set in motion a plan to sting the bookies wit
h antepost wagers on his little-known horses, the only means to survive.

  He conducted his first foray in 1948 with Cottage Rake, delivered to him three years earlier as a six-year-old. O’Brien was always patient with his stock, never hurrying the horses along. Cottage Rake jumped well, and had some class in his pedigree and enough speed to have won good races on the flat, and that allowed him to beat Happy Home in the Gold Cup—an astonishing feat for a young Irish trainer on his first trip to the Cotswolds, and a huge gamble landed in the bargain. (O’Brien had even put down some money for his parish priest.) Barrels of stout lined the streets of Churchtown on his return, fuel for an all-night party where the bonfires blazed.

  The next year, as an experiment, O’Brien sent his horses to the Festival by plane. Trainers usually relied on the ferry, as they do today, although the route went from Rosslare to Fishguard then. For the flight from Shannon to Bristol, O’Brien requisitioned a converted bomber for Castledermot, Hatton’s Grace, and Cottage Rake, who was a feisty traveler even over land and kept his handlers occupied by almost fainting. However ill at ease in transit, the Rake won the Gold Cup again, and once more in 1950, while Castledermot triumphed, too, but it was Hatton’s Grace, a horse with a big heart, who was the major surprise.

  Small and furry, with a pronounced dislike for cold weather, Hatton’s Grace had bounced from yard to yard until O’Brien took him in when he was eight in 1948—too old for a Festival bid over hurdles, most trainers would agree. In fact, he had run at Cheltenham that spring and hadn’t placed, another strike against him. As patient as ever, O’Brien coaxed Hatton’s Grace out of his doldrums and entered him in the Champion Hurdle two years later. The horse won at odds of 100–7, but O’Brien had the foresight to back him at ante-post odds as high as 33–1 and made another killing.