A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  Twice more Hatton’s Grace would collect the Champion Hurdle trophy, while Knock Hard won another Gold Cup for O’Brien in 1953. Through the decade that ended in 1959, he had twenty-three Festival winners, a record without parallel, and he tossed in three Grand Nationals for good measure. It was probably inevitable that he’d switch to the more lucrative field of flat racing, where again he set new benchmarks—six Epsom Derbys, four 2000 Guineas, three St. Legers, and so on—with such great horses as Nijinsky, Roberto, and The Minstrel. Ultimately, he transferred his operation from Cork to Tipperary, where he still lives on the Ballydoyle compound, well into his eighty-eighth year.

  Others helped to forge a link between the Irish and Cheltenham, of course, with Tom Dreaper and Arkle vitally important. Dreaper tallied twenty-six Festival winners, a total yet to be matched—his success began when Prince Regent won the Gold Cup in 1946—but it was the flair and bravado of Vincent O’Brien that captured Ireland’s fancy, invoked its sense of pride, and demonstrated a home truth that might have been written into the constitution: the Irish will travel many a mile to watch one of their own get a leg up on the English.

  THE CASUALTY LIST for the Festival continued to grow, with Florida Pearl the most recent addition. He was observed walking oddly around Willie Mullins’s yard, as if he weren’t sound, and a vet diagnosed a ligament injury and prescribed some rest as the cure. Grainne Ni Chaba had checked on her old friend with Tracy Gilmour, and she assured me the Pearl was in good spirits. “He doesn’t know he’s hurt,” Grainne said. “He isn’t in any pain.” She wished his owners would retire him, though, before he came to a bad end like Dorans Pride, and the O’Learys soon complied. Florida Pearl went on parade at the Galway Festival in July, looking very satisfied, indeed.

  As for Best Mate, he’d yet to hit a snag. He kept sailing along at Henrietta Knight’s yard near Oxford, but the tension was taking its toll on his trainer. An intruder had wandered onto her property not long ago, just a drunk sleeping it off in a stall, but the incident was scary enough for her to hire some security guards. Her superstitions were also reeling out of control. To placate any malign forces, she ordered a load of hay, not straw, for delivery on Gold Cup day, and put bets on all Best Mate’s rivals. Late into the night, she sat up writing replies to Matey’s fan mail, and that caused her husband, Biddlecombe, to grumble and urge her to come to bed.

  Meanwhile, organizations all over Ireland were holding Cheltenham preview evenings where, for the price of a ticket, the fans could hear trainers, jockeys, and pundits of varying stripes and worth analyze the races. I boycotted those in Dublin because I had no use for hot tips or inside information anymore, particularly when they were bandied about in public and devalued at the source. Instead, I invited Noel O’Brien, the country’s senior National Hunt handicapper, to lunch at the Stand House Hotel to see if I could pick his brain. He’s no relation to Vincent or Aidan O’Brien, and was such an indifferent rider as a boy in rural Kildare he never shared the common Irish dream of becoming a jockey.

  “Talking is not a problem with me,” Noel said, when he breezed in. He does leap right into a conversation with both feet. Spirited and witty, he has the elfin, red-haired look that naïve tourists expect of the Emerald Isle. He’s always loved racing, if not riding, and could remember when Kildare kids were let out of school every April to attend the Punchestown Festival. He was so enthralled with the National Hunt that he invented a game to simulate the races, cutting out paper horses and “jumping” them over obstacles like his shoes. Some horses were better than others, so Noel designed a staggered start as a handicap, an early indicator of his future career.

  Even before he finished high school, O’Brien had landed a job in the accounts department at the Turf Club. Only seventeen, he was starstruck at first, in awe of the notable racetrack people he met. Four years later, he applied for a new post as an assistant National Hunt handicapper, although not with any confidence because he was so young. “I was still riding my bike to the office, and the other candidates drove up in cars,” he said. “One fella owned a Mercedes!” During his interview, he developed a case of stage fright and could only speak in monosyllables. He thought he was sunk, but he got lucky—luck again!—when a board member asked what he knew about Adirondack, a horse of trainer Dermot Weld’s. Strictly by chance, he knew everything and recited it chapter and verse, and that led the board to take him seriously.

  As much as he coveted the position, it had a single drawback. He couldn’t gamble anymore, because it was against Turf Club rules—not that he was a dedicated plunger, but he still felt deprived and said to himself, “Oh, God, this is going to be awful!” At the Stand House he gripped his head between his hands and made an agonized face to demonstrate the extent of his pain, but he later discovered that being a handicapper generated the same rush as betting, since it involved the same element of comparison. Tutored by Captain Louis Magee, his boss, he was taught to rate a horse on its best form—on what the horse beats, and not on what beats it—and soon realized the job was wholly subjective.

  “Logic goes out the window,” he said in a chipper way, as if the absence of logic increased his fun. “Too many anomalies. It’s always a judgment call, regardless of the data.”

  For Noel, the challenge is to make each handicap as evenly balanced as possible. He works at home, where he has a huge bank of statistics in his computer. He also depends on videos of past races from the Turf Club’s file. In theory, a 20–1 long shot should have the same chance of winning as a 2–1 favorite, but that’s easier said than done. When a 2–1 favorite wins by ten lengths, Noel has to figure out what went wrong and adjust the weights as necessary. The result always displeases some trainers, so he’s usually unpopular in one quarter or another for piling on too many pounds, or too few. It’s all about fairness and balance, though, and he believes that Irish handicaps are more competitive because of it. In general, Irish racing is better than ever, he feels, for reasons I’d heard before—better prize money, good horses staying at home rather than sold abroad, and superior jockeys. “Ruby Walsh, Barry Geraghty, and Paul Carberry, it’s a golden age,” O’Brien said.

  As tactfully as possible, I nudged our conversation toward Cheltenham. Did O’Brien have any special favorites among the Irish runners? Yes, he did. His two top choices were Sadlers Wings and Kicking King. I wrote down the names, but the pen trembled in my hand when he said next, “I doubt Moscow Flyer is a shoo-in.” Could he be referring to the Pattern? No, it was just that Azertyuiop was honestly to be respected, a noble adversary with every opportunity to steal Moscow’s fire. He praised the Queen Mother as the most exciting race on the card, being the best test of both speed and stamina, and reminded me that the Festival always uncorks a number of shockers.

  “It’s often an unfancied horse who wins,” Noel said. Some horses collapse under the pressure, while others, touched by the heroic, soar to unimagined heights.

  Our lunch failed to have the desired effect. Why did O’Brien have to plug Azertyuiop? It bugged me through the night. Among the coterie of self-styled experts plying their trade, Noel was a real one, somebody who actually earned a living at it. I might be ahead for the season, but was I up to the complications of Cheltenham? Insofar as I had a method, it was to drink my mystical Guinness, cross out the inferior horses as Francis Hyland did, focus on the best trainers and jockeys, and take a shot. That was all right for the majority of Irish races, but at the Festival I’d be hard-pressed to find a single horse to discard and felt the way a lazy student does when he hasn’t cracked the books before an exam.

  So off to O’Herlihy’s I went for a cram session with Reilly. He was in rare form, envious that I was going to the Festival, while at the same time taunting me about being a swell. “Must be nice to have that kind of money,” he said, as if he hadn’t gone himself two years ago. He brought a mountain of study materials with him—the results of key races clipped from the Post (like past performance charts), his special notes and c
omments, and some feature articles culled from tabloids and magazines. Knowing that Tony McCoy ate Jaffa Cakes with his tea lacked significance for me, but Reilly embraced every factoid, no matter how trivial, as a tile in the grand mosaic.

  What Imelda made of this frenzy I can’t say for certain. Wisely, she let it swirl around her, no more than a minor distraction. She knew better than to judge me by my obsessive behavior, aware that it wouldn’t last. Not a critical word did she say about the papers scattered over the dining room table, nor did she tune out completely when I discussed my betting strategy with her, even faking some interest. I would imitate Father Breen, I told her, and confine myself to three bets a day rather than spread myself thin over the entire card, although that didn’t happen, of course.

  The worst of it was the trilby episode. I’d noticed the hats in a window at Coyles on Aungier Street, fanned out in a display marked with a sign that said CHELTENHAM, but they’d vanished by the time I decided I had to have one—snapped up by other pilgrims, I assumed. Inside the shop, amid the bare and dusty shelves, the aged proprietor was huddled by a gas fire, and he wearily recounted how his next shipment of trilbys was stranded on the Naas Road. “I could have sold six this week alone!” he groaned, as if that might equal a record. I had to settle for a waterproof hat that resembled a trilby. How this would affect my luck I couldn’t guess.

  As for luck, Guillaume Macaire had none. Only hours before the Festival, Jair du Cochet fractured a cannon bone while doing a final piece of work in France. The fracture couldn’t be repaired, so the horse was put down, and the Gold Cup lost some more of its allure. Macaire sounded inconsolable. “He was like a member of my family,” he said, perhaps regretting the harsh words he’d spoken earlier about Jair du Cochet. “Before the end of the gallop, I was dreaming of Cheltenham. A few seconds later, I was looking at a horse on three legs.” If the fates truly had a darling, Best Mate appeared to be it.

  ON THE MONDAY of Festival week, I joined a host of Irish fans on a charter flight to Birmingham, stunned to be on a plane where almost every passenger carried a Racing Post. The paper might have been issued with our tickets, then assigned as essential reading, so many noses were buried in it. That was fine with us, though. Nobody wanted to talk about politics or current events, only about horses. Strangers fell easily into conversations, sure they’d be neither intrusive nor boring if they stuck to topic A.

  A bus was waiting for our tour group on arrival, and as we rode through the Cotswolds, dreary looking at the tattered end of winter, my heart sank as we progressed toward Twigworth. In my fantasies, I’d pictured a jolly English village with some shops and pubs, where large-bellied gents with faces like Toby mugs played darts and poured from flagons, but our hotel was Twigworth, an island unto itself in the midst of farm country, with only a gas station nearby to keep it company.

  The hotel was plain but acceptable, at least, rather like an American motel, clean and neat, with a friendly staff. The management understood the needs of its guests quite well. In my room, I found a complimentary packet from William Hill, the bookie, with a free pen, some betting slips, and a booklet instructing an innocent person, should any exist in the vicinity, how to place a bet. (Hill’s flagship shop in Cheltenham opened at eight every morning, so that the disadvantaged people with steady jobs could wager on the way to work.) The inescapable Post was outside my door before breakfast, and the morning-line odds were chalked on a board in the lobby. We were as isolated as shepherds on the Isle of Man, and as distant from the world’s concerns.

  That evening, I joined the gang at the bar after dinner, my choices for entertainment in Twigworth being severely limited. They were a lively bunch of lads, with a few wives and girlfriends in the mix. The lads were so versed in the sport’s history and fine points they outdid T. P. Reilly, something I would have thought impossible. I was glad I’d studied up on Vincent O’Brien and could contribute an anecdote or two, but again the talk was primarily of horses—Istabraq and Dawn Run, Desert Orchid and Arkle. Even those who were too young to have seen Arkle run, except on film or video, could recite his life story and the tale of his rivalry with Mill House, an English giant of seventeen hands.

  The two met first in November 1963 at the English Hennessy, I learned, after Mill House had won his only Gold Cup at Cheltenham that spring. It wasn’t Arkle’s day at Newbury. Despite a five-pound advantage, he slipped after jumping the last open ditch and finished third, beaten by eight lengths. Little wonder, then, that Mill House was favored to win a second Gold Cup the following year, but the Irish horse was foot-perfect this time and reversed the decision by five lengths, while shaving four seconds off the track record—sobering news for Mill House, who had turned in a career-best performance himself and still lost.

  In their next engagement, the 1964 Hennessy at Newbury, Arkle conceded three pounds to his opponent. Under Willie Robinson, Mill House dashed to the lead as he’d done before, but Pat Taaffe on Arkle was soon with him, the pair locked together until the fourth-last, when Arkle picked up and flew home ten lengths to the good, a margin he extended to twenty lengths in the 1965 Gold Cup. With Mill House injured in 1966, Arkle won his third Gold Cup by thirty lengths, a shamrock threaded through his bridle, but he hit a fence and almost fell. He had no competition, so he didn’t concentrate—shades of Moscow Flyer.

  Arkle ran just two more races (and won just one) before his legs began to hurt. Tom Dreaper reported that his horse was lame, but some vets disagreed, saying Arkle was only “pottery,” or shaky. As with Back In Front, nobody could pinpoint the source of his problem. He improved during a summer at his owner’s farm in Bryanstown and received 160 cards on his birthday, but when autumn came he was stiff in his hindquarters. Diagnosed with arthritis, he was retired in October 1968.

  Yet Arkle responded fairly well to treatment, and he was healthy enough to go to England for Wembly’s Horse of the Year Show, where he was the star attraction. He paraded twice daily, let himself be petted, and ate whatever he pleased—a bouquet of hydrangeas and all the apples and pears off a vendor’s cart. His theme song, selected by the Duchess of Westminster, was “There’ll Never Be Another You,” but his reprieve did not last long. Once he was home again, his arthritis grew more severe. Often he lay idly in his stall and had trouble standing up. Crippled and failing, he was put down in May 1970 and buried in a field at the Bryanstown farm, where his gravestone bears only a single word—Arkle—as if to consecrate his uniqueness.

  TILL PAST MIDNIGHT I listened to Arkle’s story, more dramatic with each new pint, and woke at gray dawn to realize I’d gone to bed without a glance at Tuesday’s card, so I sat at my Twigworth minidesk to make amends. I had allotted myself a budget of five hundred dollars for the Festival, a pittance by Cheltenham standards (although not by mine), and I intended not to lose it—no, more, I wanted to go home a winner, bragging all the way to Dublin and loaded with gifts for the family. I was so hopped up I couldn’t wait for the tour bus to leave for the track and ordered a gypsy cab. It had no meter, and the driver gouged me for twice the normal fare.

  Well, it’s the way of the world, I counseled myself. Everybody gets screwed at the Kentucky Derby and the Breeders’ Cup, too. Anyway, I was delighted to be at Cheltenham ahead of the crunch. The traffic was already snarled on the main road, and race-goers were risking life and limb to dart across it. In the ceaseless stream of cars, I saw some fancy horse vans, the expensive air-conditioned kind, and also some humble one-and two-horse trailers from smaller yards, pulled along behind a trainer’s SUV. Familiar names were painted in big letters on the sleekest, flashiest vans—Martin Pipe, Jonjo O’Neill, Paul Nicholls, and Phillip Hobbs, the elite of British-based jump racing.

  With a mild flourish, the attendants threw open the gates at ten-thirty. The press of flesh was immediate and substantial, a reflection of pent-up desire. I squeezed through a door and was carried unwillingly into the Centaur, new since my last visit—a noisy, overbright, Vegas-style room with six b
ars, food stands, bookies, and slot machines for the terminally addicted. On stage beneath a gigantic screen for showing the races, a lounge lizard band was churning out the sort of brassy, pseudo-jazz you don’t really want to hear in the morning, if ever. The Centaur was a universe apart, and some fans occupied it as cozily as a couch in front of the TV, avoiding the fresh air and the sight of a horse all day.

  Though the Centaur’s bars were already busy, I chose not to compound last night’s folly and instead went to an HRI press conference, held in a suite in the Tented Village. On the panel were Jessie Harrington, who looked tired, Noel Meade (relaxed), Edward O’Grady (amused), Barry Geraghty (intense), and Noel O’Brien (elfin). The atmosphere was more formal than in Ireland, and it had a distancing effect. The intimacy I so cherished on the Irish circuit—that sensation of being inside rather than outside the races—was gone, replaced by the contradictions of the major leagues, with all the usual hoopla.

  The session opened with a question for O’Grady. Did he have many commitments? “A lot,” he replied, his wit still sharp, “but not many runners.” How would his horse John Oliver do in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, the day’s first race? “He’s like the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead,” O’Grady said. “When he’s good, he’s very, very good, but when he’s bad …” A reporter ostensibly interested in gender issues addressed himself to Jessie. “We’re always hearing about Henrietta Knight’s feelings. You must have feelings, too?” he blurted out.