by Jim Haynes
While her statistics don’t measure up to Sunline’s, we are often told that Flight had to race against one of the greatest horses of all time in Bernborough, who she only managed to beat the day he broke down in the Mackinnon Stakes in 1946. She did, however, race into her sixth year and managed to emulate Sunline with two wins in the Cox Plate, in 1945 and 1946. She also won two Craven Plates, and the Mackinnon, CF Orr, Adrian Knox and Colin Stephen Stakes.
Like Sunline, Flight produced only four foals before passing away. The only filly foal was Flight’s Daughter, who became the mother of champion Golden Slipper winners, Skyline and Sky High. Sky High stood at stud in the USA and sired Autobiography, best handicapper in the USA in 1972.
Flight won only six Group 1 races, less than half of Sunline’s total. Her claim to fame is based as much on her impact as a broodmare as it is on her two Cox Plate wins. So any real comparison to Sunline may take years to assess.
Emancipation had many characteristics in common with Sunline. She was a great middle-distance mare and won many of the same races Sunline won: the Doncaster, All-Aged Stakes and George Main Stakes among them. In her three-year-old season she won ten from 13 starts and her record overall was nine from 15; and as a four-year-old, her Group 1 tally was seven.
Emancipation failed when she travelled away from Sydney and she also failed to run out 2000 metres. She was unplaced behind Strawberry Road in the Cox Plate.
As a broodmare Emancipation, like Flight and Wakeful, made her mark. Her son Royal Pardon was placed in the AJC Derby and won good races; her daughters, Suffragette and Virage, produced champions in Railings and Virage De Fortune.
We may have to wait a generation or two before we see if Sunline’s blood will resurface into champions, as did the blood of Flight, Wakeful and Emancipation. With only four living foals before her untimely death, it may be hard for Sunline to match the broodmare record of her predecessors. However, with the miraculous Sunline, who knows?
It is a strange fact that the brilliance of great race mares appears to skip a generation and reappear in the foals of their daughters, and sons to a lesser extent.
There is ample proof, as we have seen, of the daughters of great race mares being poor performers but great producers. There are also examples of sons and grandsons being great sires. Wakeful’s son Baverstock only managed to win one race, but became a hugely successful sire, as did Flight’s grandson Sky High.
We will have to wait to see what influence Sunline has on future generations. And that is also true of one other great mare to whom she is often compared.
Nine days before Sunline scored her last race win in the Group 2 Mudgeway Stakes at Hasting in New Zealand, a mare having her second race start and bred to northern hemisphere seasons won her maiden at Wangaratta. The mighty staying mare Makybe Diva had arrived.
There is an account of her career and place in racing history later in this collection, so I will make her comparison to Sunline quite brief.
We are possibly comparing the greatest middle-distance mare that ever lived to the greatest staying mare Australia has ever seen.
However, we can go through the process of comparing records, just for the sake of it.
As a stayer, Makybe Diva obviously ran in more ‘lead-up’ races towards her major goals, so her record of 15 wins, four seconds and three thirds from 36 starts looks quite poor against Sunline’s 33 wins, nine seconds and three thirds from 48.
The figures give Makybe Diva a win rate of 42 per cent and a place rate of 61 per cent, well below Sunline’s remarkable 69 per cent and 94 per cent. But we are doing no more with such statistics than comparing oranges to apples.
Group 1 wins? Well, it’s no contest. Sunline won almost twice as many times at Group 1, with 13 victories at the elite level to Makybe Diva’s seven. And when we look at overall wins at group level, it’s ten to Makybe Diva and 27 to Sunline.
It’s tempting to do what many have done, including the Melbourne Herald-Sun in an article comparing contemporary champions in December 2009, and say ‘Sunline was simply a one-off freak’.
That’s hardly good enough though—you can’t dismiss a champion because he or she was ‘freakishly talented’. After all, that’s what being a champion often amounts to!
When she died her regular jockey Greg Childs, who had taken his family to visit her after her retirement, described her as ‘a freak of nature’ who took all New Zealand on a great journey.
‘She was a big influence on my life,’ Childs said. ‘She lifted my profile and my bank balance . . . she helped pay for the house we are living in.
‘It’s not only the jockey, it is the family as well, my wife and my kids,’ said Childs, ‘they all love Sunline.’
Firecracker
JIM BENDRODT
I TURNED AND LOOKED back. Now, that is something many folk contend should not be done. But I did.
I’d sat all day at the edge of the sale ring while the thoroughbreds paraded and men paid tens of thousands for them. I’d looked with covetous eyes at horses I’d have given my very soul to own, but this was a place where hard cash talked, and I had no cash, hard or otherwise.
And so at last I had walked away because the prices were beyond me, and when I’d travelled some 50 yards towards the exit, I heard the auctioneer’s derisive roar upbraiding those whose highest bid was 50 guineas.
I said I turned and looked back, and in the distance I saw a tall black horse, and once again I heard the auctioneer roar, ‘What, 50 guineas? Surely, gentlemen, you haven’t looked at this one!’
I started walking back, and I heard someone call 52 and a half and then, after a bit, 55, and the auctioneer shouted, ‘I’ve got 57 and a half just over here.’
I said, ‘You’ve got 60, mister.’ And then his hammer smashed onto the rostrum.
That’s how I bought Firecracker, by Cistercian out of Persian Nan. And the folk who knew Persian Nan said the mare was mad.
Well, maybe so, I didn’t know his mother, so I couldn’t tell you, but I do know that her son was equine dynamite. I’ve had so many horses but, among them all, I’ve never owned a horse like him.
I paid my 60 guineas at the auctioneer’s desk, and I remember that the balance in my wallet wasn’t much. Then I found the number of his stall, and went to see him. I found the man who cared for him and seven other yearlings. I gave him a little money, and then I said, ‘Well, let’s have a look at him.’
‘So you bought the blighter, did you?’ the man asked, and added, ‘Well, you’ve got a handful.’ He pulled the top and bottom bolts of the heavy door and opened it. ‘You be careful,’ he said, ‘this coot is mad. I come from the station he was bred on, and it took five of us three days to catch him in the paddock where he’s been running wild for months.’
He sidled cautiously towards the colt’s near side. He had tied the horse’s head to a strong ringbolt with a heavy length of rope, a thing no horseman worthy of his salt would do. ‘Get over, you!’ he roared, and smashed the horse in the soft underbelly with his clenched fist, and the colt struck at him with the speed of light . . . and so did I.
My right hand took his shoulder and whirled him round so that he looked at me in blank astonishment. ‘Take it easy, lad,’ I said, and looked at him for a little time. ‘Now get out,’ I ordered, ‘and stay out.’ He left the stall without another word, and did not come back.
We got the black colt home eventually to the humble stable that I rented for him, and began to break him in. I say ‘began’ because that about describes it. We couldn’t break him in, and we never did, to the degree that is desirable. He was a queer horse, lean and hard and streamlined, with a lovely fine-drawn head and a remorseless wicked eye.
They are usually so gentle, so easily handled, these baby horses from the famous studs. A little touchy maybe, a trifle nervous, perhaps more difficult than a pleasant-natured dog, but not much trouble as a general rule. But Firecracker! Well, why go into it in detail? By an imported English stallion f
rom the black mare Persian Nan, and knowing folk said Persian Nan was mad!
Well, her son was surely crazy in his first four months with us, and then he settled down and, up to a point, but not beyond it, would do as he was told, but it was always the horse that drew the line as I remember it, though we tried to.
It was in the midst of the Depression years when I bought Firecracker, and 60 guineas was a lot of money then. You may know the Palais Royal, or you may have heard of it, no doubt. The giant dance hall I owned was staggering through the lean hard times with every sail set to catch its hard-won silver pieces. We didn’t get 6000 people back then, as we did in better times.
We got Firecracker ready and entered him at Menangle in a race of 5½ furlongs, just enough for Firecracker. He won at 6 furlongs eventually, but ‘only just’, as the horsemen put it; but that was later. At three years old he moved over 5½ furlongs like a swift machine, and then he’d stop. He wouldn’t go another yard, except at a canter.
On Monday night when the show was all over, I called my Palais Royal staff together.
‘Boys,’ I said, and then I bowed a trifle towards the grinning girls, ‘and ladies, I think the time has come to have a little talk. Now let’s see, there are about 125 of you and I’ve been having quite a time taking care of you in this damn Depression. I think I’m right when I say most of you have been with me for years. I know you all have a faith and trust in me.’
A somewhat raucous bellow from the background interrupted me at this point. I paused and then continued, ‘Well, we’re going to have a gamble. Your wages for your work this week are in the bank for payment on Friday, about £600, I think. I’ve got the change the cashiers use, and I’ve hocked everything I own, which isn’t much, and tomorrow I’m going to put the proceeds on a horse.
‘If he wins, he’ll save the Palais Royal. If he gets licked, well— that’s the end of us, and I’m afraid you’ll have to go to work at last. Now how about it? Two to one is the price you’ll get, no matter what the price is that he starts at, and the rest is to go to keep this old show open.’
I could see Bill Swift. I could see him grin as I talked to them.
Bill was the lad they’d follow in a case like this, so I talked to him, and he grinned back at me derisively, and once he interrupted with his deep rich Irish voice, ‘Sure, boss, and it’s a generous little soul you always were, so help me, and it’s round your little finger that you’ll be twisting us poor stupid goats as usual.’
‘Bill,’ I said, ‘how well you know that, night and day, only one thought moves me, and that’s your blasted welfare, else how could it be that you are my staff manager at your luscious salary, when half the world is starving?’
‘Sure and it’s three-quarters of my luscious salary that you’ve been borrowing from me to feed your crackpot horse, who would otherwise be starving like the rest of them, and now it’s the lot you’ll take to bet on the feckless loon tomorrow, and that’ll be the end of it, so it will, or me mother’s name was Rachel.’
The delighted treble of the girls’ laughter fought with the rumble of the male voices when he answered me. He was a natural salesman, this Bill Swift.
He was so many other things to me. Years before I’d advertised for a fighting man. I ran a show in those days, a fine big rink in a hard tough section near the waterfront, and I needed help because respectability was its slogan, and its patrons needed guidance in the civilised amenities as ordained by me. And so I had to have a ‘man of his hands’ to help me in my inroads on my precious patrons’ natural inclinations.
So many likely fellows came in answer to the advertisement, and when one stood before me I would say, ‘And now, my lad, do you think you could whip me in a dust-up?’ and, because of policy or some other reason, they all said ‘No’, until Bill came.
A great tall lad about my own age, from a wind-jammer in the harbour, thick in the middle even then, with a caveman’s torso and lethal hands. With bright blue eyes under thick red brows, and a torrid head of hair. And when I said, ‘Well, Bill, do you think you could whip me?’ he said without an instant’s hesitation, ‘My flaming oath!’
So I took him to the rink’s high roof where my small gym was, and we pulled the gloves on. He was a rough-and-tumble fighter, whose equal I knew but once before, but he was a child in the tricks of Mr Queensberry. I doubt if he’d ever seen a pair of boxing gloves. It was the rapier against the blundering broadsword, but I knew this was my man right from the start and ever since he’d been with me through tumultuous years of triumphs and disasters.
I think the things I liked best about Bill were his Irish sense of humour and his loyalty. With him, loyalty went to far extremes, and this little yarn will tell you just how far it did go.
Some years before we had rocketed out of Melbourne in my Marmon Speedster, Bill Swift, Steve and Bill Romaine, and I. We climbed the Gippsland mountains over the yellow slippery highway, and a summer cyclone kept us company. The narrow road was greasy, un-tarred, unpaved, and, at a point where the mountain was a wall on one side, my back tyres slipped, and the Marmon skidded sideways.
When she stopped, the car’s rear wheels rested a bare 3 inches from the outer edge of a gentle slope that skirted the road itself, and beyond the edge of that slope where the wheels rested there was nothing. Two thousand feet below, the treetops growing in the valley looked like children’s toys. The bonnet of the car thrust upwards at an angle to the road itself.
You know those old cars. You held the foot-brake on with sheer strength. The handbrake was nearly always useless. You didn’t have hydraulic power in braking systems back then.
I knew I’d hold the foot-brake down for quite a long time, and I knew that when I got tired, as I must eventually, my leg would lose the power that kept the pedal level with the floor. I knew then that we’d go tumbling down to where the treetops waved so far below. I told Steve and Bill Romaine to get out quickly, but I said to do it quietly and with care. I didn’t want to shake the car. Along the running-board and over the bonnet, and then onto the road. That was the way they reached safety.
And then I said to Bill Swift, ‘Now, Bill, get going. I can’t keep this pressure on forever.’
Bill looked at me and growled, ‘No, boss.’
‘But Bill, why two of us?’ I asked. ‘There’s nothing you can do, that’s obvious. You get out.’ I looked at him and his heavy face was hard as granite, so I tried again in a different way: ‘Please, Bill.’
‘No,’ he said, and nothing else.
I watched him reach for his tobacco pouch and papers. He rolled a cigarette and leaned over and put it in my mouth, then rolled another one. Above and about us the cyclone howled. He held a hooded match to my cigarette, and I said curiously, ‘Why, Bill?’
He answered, ‘Aw, hell, there’s times a man likes company. Let’s forget it.’
Then for a time there was nothing except the crazy roaring of the wind, and then Bill looked at me and his voice was gentle when he asked, ‘Getting tired, boss?’
‘Yes, a bit, Bill.’
Then I saw his eyes lift above my head and he said urgently, ‘Take it easy, boss. Keep that foot down hard, then take a look.’
I turned my head and there, coming round the shoulder of the mountain, a hundred yards away, was a bright red Buick Phaeton.
The driver had a steel tow rope, and he said he came from Denmark, which was a queer thing because my father came from Denmark, and you wouldn’t have found another Dane in all that thousand miles of mountain wilderness, especially one with a power-laden Buick Phaeton and a steel tow rope, on that tempest-ridden day.
You have to hand it to a man like that Dane. He knew as we knew, because we warned him, that when he took the strain my car might slip that bare 3 inches and, if it did, then he’d go tumbling down with us to where those treetops twisted in the gale so far below.
We thanked him a little later when the Marmon stood four-square on the road, and we drank his fiery advocaat and went
on our way.
So that was Bill and that was loyalty. A handy thing. And rare. So now I beckoned Bill to bend down while my crowd of dance-hall people waited.
‘Bill,’ I whispered, ‘it’s worth the chance. They’ll get their £600 in wages on Friday, then we’ll have to close, and they’d get nothing else except the dole. Now, if Firecracker can make it, we’ll have lots of money to carry on for weeks, and this Depression cannot last forever. How about it?’
He looked at me with his bright blue eyes alight with laughter. ‘Sure, and I always said you’d talk the leg off an iron pot, but you’re crazy, boss. Gold-digger will beat that long-legged loon of yours by half a mile.’
So I tried again and this time I was cunning because I didn’t argue. I simply said, a little sadly, ‘Quitting is a queer thing for the Irish, Bill.’
He shook his head like an angry bison, and then stood up and his great voice filled that echoing dance hall.
‘Now, blast the lot of you,’ he roared, ‘what’s all this talk about anyhow? This bonny horse the boss has got is just a certainty. Sure, and it’s a fine idea and good enough for the little bit of money he wants from us. Now, get about your work. We’ll get our wages Friday, and for a lot of Fridays after that. It’s a grand notion, so it is.’ Then sotto voce to me, ‘May the good Lord forgive me for being Australia’s greatest liar, because it’ll be that chestnut rascal Gold-digger that’ll be paying off tomorrow afternoon.’
By the price of him, the bookmakers agreed with Bill, because when we reached Menangle Gold-digger was at a nervous 6 to 4. We had come up in the Marmon Speedster over the dusty country roads on a lazy summer day, and there were eight of us all told in a motor built for four. They were the smartest of my big boys from the Palais Royal.
You didn’t run a dance hall like that one without some headaches. Five and six thousand people in a night are a lot to care for in one big public place within four walls. They came and chattered, dance and flirted in that gaudy mausoleum, and as the night wore on the giant building shook and quivered with the thrust of stamping feet, or whispered like the wind brushing sand along a beach when the musicians played a waltz.
