The Big Book of Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  Clearly, Our Paddy Boy was the best credentialled runner. In fact, a month earlier he was officially recognised as the number one two-year-old on the Australasian Free Handicap, racing’s equivalent to tennis or golf rankings.

  He looked a certainty in the Guineas, and won like one should. All was in readiness for the lucrative spring carnival, culminating, they hoped, in the $150,000 Victoria Derby at the end of October.

  The next step was the Mooney Valley Stakes, a Group 3 race run over 1600 metres in September. As Pat was preparing his colt for the event he received a couple of extremely tempting offers. Epsom trainer Ian Saunders had a client who was prepared to pay $200,000 to buy the horse and Perth millionaire Robert Holmes à Court offered a similar sum.

  Pat discussed at length the tantalising propositions with Peter Moran but eventually they agreed the colt was worth more than $200,000.

  A week after they knocked back the substantial offer, Our Paddy Boy took his place in the Mooney Valley Stakes. Mick Mallyon, a rider for the powerful Hayes stable, took the mount but, after being stuck for room on the fence and then running into the back of other horses as he tried to force his way clear, Our Paddy Boy finished a luckless sixth.

  Even though it was a case of misfortune, the result was disappointing. It blemished the horse’s record, and gave Pat plenty of time to agonise over whether or not he had done the right thing in knocking back that $200,000.

  Well, obviously Mick Mallyon thought he had. The horse had caught the attention of trainer Peter Hayes, who confronted the jockey after the Mooney Valley Stakes for his opinion. Mallyon’s response was positive and Hayes immediately set about procuring the colt for his biggest client, Robert Sangster.

  He asked long-time friend and former Wright Stevenson bloodstock manager Bill Stutt to look after negotiations. Stutt was a committeeman and later Chairman of Mooney Valley Racing Club and a man Hayes knew he could trust to handle such a task competently. Three weeks after his failure in the Mooney Valley Stakes, Pat received a remarkable offer of $300,000 for Our Paddy Boy.

  There was no need for long discussion between the owners this time. Much as they were sad to lose the champ, the proposal was too good to decline. Pat and Mary were to receive $150,000 for a horse which cost $1300 ($650 for their half), and this cash windfall arrived after the colt had won nearly $50,000 in prizemoney, paid for the holiday and had given them their one and only Group 1 trophy. It was a dream finish to a tremendous success story for them.

  For Our Paddy Boy, though, hard work lay ahead under the guidance of his new boss. Hayes grew extremely concerned when Our Paddy Boy immediately started becoming unruly in his new environment. For three consecutive mornings at training, his main race rider, Brent Thomson, was tossed from the colt, who wanted nothing to do with him, or his new home for that matter.

  Hayes couldn’t understand the newcomer’s problem. He was confused about why the country’s premier jockey could not control the horse when an eleven-year-old girl (Brigid) had been completing the same task with ease and enjoyment. Hayes’s first decision was to replace riders, swapping Thompson for Mick Mallyon in the hope that a different rider would please Our Paddy Boy. That worked, but the colt was still acting unsociably and getting himself into such a bad state that he was not going to save his best for race days.

  In desperation Hayes consulted Pat Payne for advice. He was on to the problem immediately. Our Paddy Boy was missing his mate, Gentle Joker. They had been together a long time.

  Gentle Joker was a handy horse at best, and his quality didn’t come up to the rigid standards maintained by the Hayes operation. But there was little choice. Obviously, a place had to be found for him or Our Paddy Boy would continue to fret.

  Pat Payne informed Hayes that he could take Gentle Joker for $12,000. Hayes accepted, knowing it would be up to Our Paddy Boy to recover that cost.

  To his credit, though, Gentle Joker tried hard and did manage to win one race and collect a couple of city placings. More importantly, his presence at the new stable had an immediate calming influence on the good horse and Robert Sangster didn’t have to wait long to start recovering his money.

  Our Paddy Boy’s first major assignment was the W.S. Cox Plate, in which he would be tested over his longest journey to date, 2040 metres. Competing against the very best of all ages, he turned in a mighty performance to claim third prizemoney behind Kingston Town and Prince Ruling. The minor placing, worth $39,300 to connections, confirmed the general feeling that this three-year-old would make an even greater impression on the racing scene the following autumn, allowing for natural improvement through maturity. And that’s how it unfolded.

  After the Cox Plate, Our Paddy Boy backed up a week later in the 2500-metre Victoria Derby and, although giving an indication that he was due for a spell, he showed his usual determination to finish third behind Sovereign Red and Real Force. The bold performance was enough to convince his trainer that distances beyond 2000 metres would be the target through 1981. He sent the horse straight to a spelling paddock in South Australia after the derby and then prepared him for the Sydney Autumn Carnival.

  It was a wise and profitable move. Our Paddy Boy stole the show in Sydney. He capped a sensational campaign with dual Group 1 victories, both coming within a week. First was the AJC Derby, in which he defeated Ring The Bell and Deck The Halls, and then, with the lightweight of just 51.5 kilograms, he took on and beat the older horses in the 3200-metre Sydney Cup. My Blue Denim, a New Zealander who had finished runner-up in the previous year’s Melbourne Cup, chased him home, but was no match for the three-year-old.

  Hayes’s attention turned to the upcoming Melbourne Cup after a spell but Our Paddy Boy developed minor leg problems and struggled through his spring campaign, although he did manage to win the Group 3 Coongy Handicap over 2000 metres at Caulfield. He made it to the start for the Cup and, while it was obvious he was not the same gifted horse because of leg woes, Hayes remained hopeful, because the horse gave so much, he could still, perhaps, pull off a fantastic victory.

  It was not to be but as usual he was brave in defeat, finishing fourth to Just A Dash.

  Worsening leg problems forced Hayes to retire the grand stayer and he went to stud in Queensland with total prizemoney earnings of $396,000. He failed to reach the same great heights as a stallion, siring moderately performed animals over many years.

  Incidentally, his dad, Blarney Kiss, an unknown quantity in the southern hemisphere before the arrival of Our Paddy Boy, had one more burst of fame in Australia, in 1983, when another of his sons, Kiwi, produced an astonishing last-to-first run to take the Melbourne Cup. He was trained by Snowy Lupton.

  WHY WE CAME TO LOVE SCHILLACI

  LES CARLYON

  I am waiting for the bus after the last race at Sha Tin when the urger glides up on a rumour and a prayer. In the sultry heat of late-afternoon Hong Kong, he thinks he is Peter Lorre. Dragging on a fag, he first looks around for hidden cameras, then leans forward and intones: ‘I think I’ve got a really good horse back home.’

  Yep, it is the big one. And me thinking it would merely be some tittle-tattle about Macau acquiring a nuclear arsenal.

  He looks again and takes another drag. Before I can suggest we use the shoe phone, he goes on.

  ‘They say he could be something special.’

  Why do they always say these things?

  Still, rituals must be followed. As with the other thousand times I have been told this fairytale, I affect deep interest and do a little Peter Lorre stuff myself. After all, the inference is that one loose word could see me being placed in quicklime by certain parties who do not wish me well.

  This, remember, is racing. Idiots will tell you it’s an ‘industry’. Well, it may be, but before that it’s a romantic comedy with a subtext of intrigue. Damon Runyon and Lewis Carroll write the scripts.

  Most of these ‘really good horses’ are last seen at Manangatang wearing pacifiers and toupées, and attended by chiropractors a
nd remedial farriers.

  Anyway, this beast I hear about in Hong Kong has won but two races, a Kyneton maiden, worth $2925, and a mid-week at Sandown.

  All this happened in 1991. The horse was Schillaci, the big grey who ended up a folk hero and now will never race again, which means we are all losers.

  They were Lee Freedman, Schillaci’s trainer, and his brothers Richard, Anthony, and Michael.

  The ‘urger’ was Schillaci’s co-owner, David Christensen, a company director and accountant, a committeeman at Flemington and Caulfield, and a very upright gent. Only as an owner does he take on his Peter Lorre persona, although this has paled now that he has given up smoking.

  As it turned out, he had something better than a ‘really good horse’, and this had nothing to do with Schillaci winning eight group ones and two million bucks. Plenty of horses have won more races and more money.

  Jeune is a really good horse. So is Danewin. But these and others merely inspire admiration. Schillaci belongs to another order, the guild that takes in Vo Rogue, Kingston Town, Manikato and Old Super. No, I’m not lining these five up on ability; what links them is more mysterious than that.

  All could inspire affection. They came to be loved rather than admired. Because of the way they did things, they made people feel good and the sport seem grander than it is.

  Schillaci was a great sprinting three-year-old, up there close behind Ajax, Vain and Manikato. He won fancy races and rewrote time records and humped big weights. This isn’t why he came to be loved.

  What endeared was the way he kept walking up, so honest, season after season. And the way, like Manikato, he stared down pain. In the end, his grey coat had faded to near-white, his galloping action had lost its fluency, and his walk had become a shuffle. Yet he tried as hard, ran as fast, and won as many good races as in his carefree youth. When he was entitled to cheat, he didn’t.

  As a six-year-old, Schillaci had punters standing around mounting yards clapping until their hands ached. When he won his last race, the Futurity at Caulfield last Autumn, Lee Freedman briefly turned away from the media scrum and said aloud but entirely to himself: ‘What a magnificent horse.’

  Rebecca Newman, Schillaci’s strapper, took the gelding to one corner of the yard and they clapped him there. She took him to the opposite corner and they clapped him there. This went on for ten minutes. And the glory of his win was grander than most of the crowd knew.

  Some of us had seen Schillaci at trackwork the day before. Hurting everywhere, he was. As he shuffled out of the stripping shed for two easy laps on the sand, one word exploded in your mind. Lame.

  Schillaci stumbled, lurched, slouched, and several times stood stock still, a ghostly statue, grand but worn. Lesser beasts, full of oats and bravado, pranced and danced; Schillaci just looked tired. When he came off the track, they lifted his forelegs into tubs of ice. As Rebecca Newman recalled: ‘You could almost hear him say: Here I go again.’ At the races next day, a famous trainer told Christensen: ‘I saw your horse this morning and he’s bloody near a cripple.’

  Some cripple. Near the finishing post in the Futurity, Schillaci laid his long ears back, much like a heeler about to nip a bullock, and beat Jeune and Mahogany.

  A few weeks ago, Schillaci was back at Flemington for another campaign. ‘He was going really well,’ Michael Freedman says. ‘He looked great.’

  In the dark, with Damien Oliver up and going only a little faster than even time, the grey hurdled a white bandage lying on the wood-fibre track near the 600-metre mark, landed awkwardly, and in less than a second, blew away a large part of his off tendon and all of his career.

  ‘At first, I didn’t notice much wrong with him,’ says Oliver. ‘But coming off the track, I knew he was lame. I felt sick.’

  Rebecca Newman was waiting for them. ‘Damien said, “I don’t think Schillaci’s very well.” I looked down at his leg and thought, “Oh . . . oh, dear.”’

  John Van Veenendaal, the veterinarian who treated Schillaci, says the grey wrecked about 40 per cent of the tendon. The irony was that Schillaci had never had tendon problems. His trouble for two years was degenerative arthritis in the coffin bones of both front hoofs. Spurs had formed on the bones near the top of the hoof line. The gelding was also plagued by corns. Schillaci had grown into a massive horse, weighing 560 kilos, maybe more, and in the end his hoofs were just too small for his body.

  Early morning at Brackley Park, the Freedman property at Avenel, north of Seymour. The sky is a cloudless blue dome and the new grass sags under the dew. You feel cold and old Schillaci is warm to touch. He crunches on lucerne hay and flicks his ears to the slightest sound, be it a tractor or swallows nesting in the stables. He nuzzles you, looking for a carrot, then lays his ears back in disdain when you come up empty handed.

  Schillaci will live the rest of his life here because the Freedmans asked to keep him. Christensen was touched. ‘I’m delighted that Lee and his family think so much of the horse they want to give him a happy home. Knowing that makes me even more proud of him.’

  Dave Hitchin, the farm manager, leaves a filly to remove Schillaci’s rug. The grey nuzzles Hitchin’s pullover, smells the filly on it, and squeals like the stallion he isn’t. Kylie Baines takes him out to have his photo taken. At first, he is tender on his bad leg. Then he sees the colts in the day yards and starts to swagger. He wants to plunge and rear and let them know he’s better than they’ll ever be. As on race days, all pain is forgotten. Schillaci is some character.

  And, even, with that leg swaddled in bandages, some sight: tall, better than 16.2 hands, and long, incredibly long. He is power without coarseness, refinement without prettiness. A big eye: kind, intelligent and dark. A great sweep of shoulder and a length of rein to match. Bulging forearms and, behind, swelling bunches of muscles from hip to hock, the rear end of a quarter horse on the legs of a thoroughbred.

  That powerful body is half the reason Alan Bell, a Rosehill veterinarian and trainer, bought him for $70,000 as a yearling; the other half is Schillaci’s blood. He descends from mares bred by the legendary Stanley Wootton, who imported Star Kingdom and, with that one stallion, changed the pattern of Australian breeding. Bell figured he was buying generations of Wootton’s genius. He offered Christensen a piece of the horse a few months later. Christensen recalls Bell said something like: ‘I think this horse could be exceptional.’

  Schillaci didn’t race at two. He was gelded and given time to grow up. Early on, he was with Richard Freedman at Epsom. Richard, as is his way, tended to undersell the horse. But brother Anthony says, ‘He’d declared him a champion before he’d even raced.’ Schillaci had been sitting eight-wide in trials—and winning. Which may explain why he was odds-on for that first start at Kyneton.

  At his fourth start, he won the Lightning Stakes. At his next two, he won the other legs of sprinting’s triple crown: the Oakleigh Plate at Caulfield, in track record time, and the Newmarket at Flemington. Then, in perhaps the best win of his career, he took the Galaxy at Randwick, his fourth group one for the season. He was young; he could fly, and he didn’t hurt anywhere.

  After the grey’s first win in the Lightning, Lee Freedman told the mounting-yard throng: ‘This horse is another Manikato.’ At trackwork last week, Freedman recalled the reaction. ‘They all said to me, “Well, you’ve just gone straight off your head. You’ve gone stone mad.”’

  Some madness. After his three-year-old season, and despite aching hoofs, Schillaci won another four group ones, including two Futuritys. When he won a sprint on Caulfield Cup Day last year, he received a longer and rowdier ovation than Paris Lane, the Cup winner.

  Lee Freedman isn’t given to mushy sentimentality. Asked how he saw Schillaci, he thought long before replying.

  ‘You get lovely racehorses,’ he said softly. ‘You know, they win good races for you, but this one . . .?’ He sighs and his voice rises. ‘Ah, he was something more: he was a lovely animal. There was no enigma with him: what you saw was
what you got.’

  After the accident, Freedman was drinking with friends at a Toorak hotel. The friends began toasting Schillaci and Freedman began to feel teary. He left and went shopping.

  Rebecca Newman, tiny and vivacious, is sipping iced coffee and walking back to the Freedman stables at Flemington after trackwork. It doesn’t seem right: Schillaci, the carrot addict, doesn’t live there anymore.

  ‘I’ve lost my best friend,’ she says. ‘There’ll never be another like him. Such a character: you’d just stand there feeding him carrots and he’d do anything.

  ‘He was so kind. On the track, you’d have to hunt him up all through his work. But when you turned him to come home, he’d turn on like an electric light and want to canter all the way home.

  ‘Oh, he’d do things wrong. Going out sometimes, he’d stand as still as a statue, refusing to move. Occasionally, he’d whip around and dump you. Then he’d stop and stare down, as if to say: What are you doing down there?

  ‘To strap him at the races . . . well, that was just indescribable. The crowd would follow you everywhere. People would ask me for one of his shoes. When he was retired we got fan mail. A father wrote on behalf of his son. He wanted to thank us for the pleasure the horse gave his boy.’

  Long before the grey ruined his tendon, Rebecca had become proprietorial. Schillaci would annoy her when he did his ‘statue act’. What she resented much more, however, were well-meaning people getting behind the grey to hunt him forward. She could scold him, but not outsiders.

  ‘I’m going to miss him terribly,’ she says.

  Aren’t we all.

  6 October 1995

  O FOR OCTAGONAL

  JIM HAYNES

  You hear blokes talk of champions, you see ’em come and go,

  A real champ maybe comes along each twenty years or so.

  I’ve read of Phar Lap and Carbine, those legends of the past,