by Bill Barich
At the Curragh, Moscow Flyer was a vision of power in motion, his head carried low and his neck curled. He was tugging so vigorously Eamonn had to keep the tightest possible hold. “He’s very well,” Jessie said. She was very pleased with what she saw. “Eamonn’s arms will be six inches longer. The horse has so much ability! He doesn’t need to do very much to win a race. He’ll look around here, look around there, and he’s only in second gear. That’s why the Queen Mother suits him. The pace is so fast, and the competition’s so intense, he has to pay attention.”
We collected the horses. Moscow was scarcely blowing. Jessie was concerned about Start From Scratch, though, who had a habit of hanging left in his races and had pulled left again today. She hazarded a guess that his teeth might be hurting him, and also suggested a ring bit or a cross-nose band as potential remedies for his tendency to hang, but she was scraping the bottom of the barrel. She couldn’t find the key to him, really. Start From Scratch had a few more runs for her before his owner transferred him to a new yard, proving Jessie’s earlier claim. Owners are fickle, and every trainer, however shrewd, is subject to their whims.
BY LATE OCTOBER, my bold prediction that Ireland would never experience a drought looked shaky. The weather continued to be bone-dry. Teasing clouds drifted over Dublin, but they only delivered showers and squalls. The Brits fared no better. In a race that summed up everybody’s discontent, the English trainer Paul Nicholls collected a ten-thousand-dollar purse by sending his horse Satenay to Kempton Park Racecourse outside London for an unopposed walk over the track. Most trainers were still playing it safe with their best horses, too. Jessie wouldn’t run Moscow Flyer in the Fortria Chase if the going stayed firm, for instance, so I was glad to see that Henrietta Knight was willing to trot out her old warrior Edredon Bleu, now eleven, for the Desert Orchid Chase at Wincanton, in Somerset, toward the end of the month.
The Desert Orchid was on a Sunday. I planned to watch it on TV at O’Herlihy’s, our local pub. My weekends were a happy shambles now that I’d accepted I was hooked and had to wrap my life around the races. Like Moscow Flyer, I needed to concentrate and focus. The process was akin to runic divination, an attempt to break a secret code and reap the reward of untold riches. I began with the Racing Post’s form charts and circled recent winners who’d done it “impressively” or “comfortably”—an evident plus, yet one it’s easy to miss if you skip the fine print. Next I turned to the Selection Box to check on the experts’ views, and then read the trainers’ comments about their horses, an exercise in filtering out the half-truths from the bald-faced lies.
Around noon I left for O’Herlihy’s. Irish pubs can be divided into two categories: the striving-to-be-hip Euromodern and the devoutly traditional, a style that a visitor from the States once defined as “still having those little wooden stools.” I disliked the Euromodern places, put off by the shrill pop music and the blinding décor, all mirrors and shiny surfaces that imitated California at its most trendy, so O’Herlihy’s, with its little wooden stools, was ideal for me. During the day the light is soft (and softer at night), and the upholstery is frayed. There are some antique balsa fishing lures in a display case and framed prints of horses, of course, as well as a pair of bronzed baby shoes behind the bar that someone forgot once, in the distant past, and never reclaimed. Instead of pop music, we have the gentle murmur of a radio pitched several decibels below the level at which the program (whatever it is) might be heard.
As usual, my friend T. P. Reilly was already at the pub. Our friendship is an odd one, I suppose, because we never meet except at O’Herlihy’s or a bookie joint. A self-employed carpenter, Reilly is a talkative, sweet-natured behemoth, with a full head of curly gray hair and an expansive belly that tends to sink his trousers ever so slightly. First drawn to me out of curiosity, charmed to see an American studying (and muttering over) the Post, he took it upon himself to educate me, being an amateur racing historian and a collector of memorabilia. There was considerable pride in the endeavor for Reilly, who didn’t go to college and puts an unwarranted premium on learning of any kind, and at times he seems to regard me as his own creation, a punter he’s molded from plain unpromising clay.
Like so many of the Irish, Reilly fell in love with horses as a child when a farmer uncle let him ride an old plow mare around the fields in Carlow. He hasn’t been in the saddle since then, but he believes the experience makes him a superior judge of horse flesh and banks on it, in fact, gearing his bets to a horse’s looks. As a system, it’s probably no worse than any other, and it doesn’t appear to cost him any money. He’s always good for his round, dines at our pricey Chinese restaurant (cheap eats don’t exist in Dublin, except at greasy spoons for folks whose trousers ride even lower than Reilly’s), and owns a terraced house he shares with two cats and Oliver, a raggedy old spaniel. A wife has been alluded to, but I’ve never seen her.
Reilly has one other idiosyncrasy as a gambler. He prefers to bet on British races because they’re more honest—“less bent,” as he puts it. Though immensely fond of his native land, he gives the Irish poor marks for strict obedience to either the rules or the law.
The day of the Desert Orchid Chase, Reilly had finished his deliberations and moved on to a crossword puzzle. I ordered my usual pint of stout and prepared to be transported. Only over a beer can I pick the winner of a televised race, or so I’ve come to believe. The Guinness lifts me into a state I’d describe as “fuzzy clarity.” I’m relaxed and yet able to address the Post with a more critical eye. Reading the paper again, I saw tiny filaments of meaning that my completely sober, less perceptive self had missed. Attractive horses revealed their limitations, while others I’d glided over gained new resonance. Thus enlightened, I thought Edredon Bleu couldn’t lose, even though he carried twenty-eight pounds more than the other four entries.
No pub in the city is more than a block or two from a betting shop, so I reached Boylesports in under three minutes. Besides Wincanton, there were races at Aintree and Towcester in England, and also some good Irish racing at Galway and Wexford, affording the fans a wonderful opportunity for confusion. The twenty-seven TV screens in the shop showed the odds, the live action, and redundant ads coaxing us to have a “flutter,” or bet. With so much going on, the overwhelmed clerks were gasping for breath. Edredon Bleu was a disagreeable 6–5, but you have to take short prices on small fields, so I swallowed hard and put fifty bucks on the nose, elbowing through the crowd to do it.
In the old days, the Irish wouldn’t be caught dead at a bookie’s office on the Sabbath, of course, but the church isn’t the power it used to be. There’s even a shortage of young men in Ireland willing to be priests. I was reminded of a story about Richard “Boss” Croker, a Catholic from Cork, who got rich as a corrupt Tammany Hall kingpin in New York and later set himself up as a trainer outside Dublin. When Croker entered Orby in the Epsom Derby in 1907, the British hacks blasted his presumption—“The turf in Ireland has no spring in it, and the climate is too depressing,” one wrote—but the loyalists at home backed Orby, anyway, and lit bonfires around Trinity College after his victory, where an old woman cried, “Thank God, we have lived to see a Catholic horse win the English Derby!”
THAT AFTERNOON, Edward O’Grady had a fine time at Galway. He saddled Golden Row, who won a novice chase, and Windsor Boy, who took a handicap hurdle, both with Barry Geraghty riding. Rumor had it that Geraghty might replace Norman Williamson as O’Grady’s stable jockey, a job to be envied. O’Grady is bright and sophisticated, with a dry wit, and has trained seventeen Festival winners, more than anyone currently active in Ireland. He also has the dubious distinction of being the only Irish trainer ever to be arrested at Cheltenham, charged with conspiracy to cheat and defraud the British bookmakers.
The scandal centered on a betting coup, later known as the Gay Future Affair. Tony Murphy, a crafty Cork builder, was its ringleader and borrowed his scam from greyhound racing. It involved a double or treble wager (two or three
“win” bets) that coupled Gay Future with Opera Cloak or Ankerwyke, or both, who would be scratched on the day—August 24, 1974—thereby turning the treble into a single on Gay Future, as per the bookmakers’ rules. All three horses were supposedly at the yard of Tony Collins in Troon, Scotland, although the Gay Future there was a decoy. The real Gay Future was with O’Grady in Tipperary, in serious and secretive training, being honed to a fine edge over hurdles.
Collins entered Gay Future in a race at Cartmel, an out-of-the-way track in the Lake District with the longest stretch in England. The phony horse departed from Collins’s yard in a van, but it was switched for O’Grady’s horse at a phone booth near the racecourse. Before sending Gay Future into the parade ring, the conspirators further covered their scheme by rubbing the horse with soapsuds, so he’d look nervous and washed out. They also arranged for Collins’s top jockey to be on another horse, Racionizer, and plunged on Racionizer at the course to throw off the scent. Gay Future, priced at 10–1, soared home by fifteen lengths under Timmy Jones, an Irish rider flown in for the day—a perfect coup, it seemed, except that Collins had messed up.
Instead of dispatching Opera Cloak and Ankerwyke to their respective engagements at Plumpton and Southwell, and then inventing an excuse for their failure to arrive—a traffic jam, say, or an accident—he left them at his yard. A reporter uncovered the ruse with a simple phone call, speaking to a stable lass who told him she could see both horses from her window. The authorities were alerted and began an investigation, and the coppers arrested Murphy and O’Grady at Cheltenham the following March, on the Festival’s first day, while Collins was detained in Troon. The case dragged on for a year or so, with the accused out on bail. When it came to trial, the prosecutor failed to present any evidence against O’Grady, who was cleared.
The judge, though sympathetic to the others—the fraud was “very minor,” he said—still felt compelled to fine them because a jury had found them guilty. For the rest of his life, Tony Murphy denied that he’d done anything illegal. In essence, there was no fix. The right horse had run at the right track, as advertised. But the bookies didn’t agree and only paid out on a fraction of the bets Murphy’s Cork cronies had spread around London, investing about sixty thousand dollars as they dashed from shop to shop. Aside from the notoriety, the Gay Future Affair brought Edward O’Grady an unexpected bonus—a movie deal, with Pierce Brosnan playing him in Murphy’s Stroke.
At Wincanton, the horses were milling around before the start of the Desert Orchid. As hopeful as I was, I suffered a nervous spell because Edredon Bleu is a front-runner, a style of racing I distrust. Often front-runners are like those celebrated novelists who publish a brilliant book at twenty-two, then burn out over the long haul and wind up reviewing novels by a new crop of brilliant twenty-two-year-olds. I shouldn’t have worried, though, because Edredon Bleu had class to spare and won by a Gay Futuresque margin of fifteen lengths, setting a track record in the bargain, eleven seconds faster than the former one. Henrietta Knight, very gratified, thought she might try her horse at a longer distance next time and threatened to write his biography, as she’d done for Best Mate.
A winning bet confirms a man’s genius and elevates his spirits. I never told Imelda about my losses, only about my scores, of course, and if I needed another reason to feel affection for her, which I didn’t, it would be that she never asks how I’m doing at the track. Besides, her interest in racing is confined to the elegance of the horses and the beautiful places where they run, a scene that hasn’t changed much since Degas painted it at Longchamp. We talked about such things on an evening walk to town, down Grafton Street with its giddy crowd of shoppers, to the Liffey. The river, though low and murky because of the long dry spell, its thrust curtailed by dams, still had the regal presence of all great streams that flow through cities, and we walked along it to the sea, delighted to be where we were, together.
And how did it happen? I had asked myself that question more than once. The initial attraction, the sheer bliss of a romance, the falling into love, those parts were easy, but there were difficulties, as well. Being older, we were both wary, on guard for each other’s fatal flaw, desperate not to repeat our past mistakes, and cautious about her children’s reaction to the newly minted fact of us. I had friends who thought I was rash or just plain foolish, while some in Imelda’s circle wrung their hands over her choice of a partner, this gent from abroad traveling without portfolio—and a writer to boot. But trust and conviction grow if real love is in the mix, and with them comes the courage to say, I want this to work, an admission that centers you in the midst of swirling waters.
We splurged on a good bottle of Burgundy such as a winner deserves and a standing rib roast for our Sunday dinner. There would be roast potatoes, too, sprinkled with sprigs of rosemary from the garden at the younger boy’s request, and a salad and some buttered carrots from the root-crop heaven of Ireland. We had a new CD to listen to, a coal fire blazing, the Observer for penetrating commentary, and a scandal sheet for the gossip—life in all its embraceable simplicity. The transition still seemed miraculous to me. I could have been on the porch of my hermit’s fishing cabin instead, gray-bearded and alone, staring at those swirling waters. Amazing grace, indeed.
THE RAIN CAME AT LAST. October ended with a bristly, stinging storm that had a harsh foretaste of winter at its core. It struck while I was on a train to Thurles, a large but plain market town in County Tipperary, for a Thursday meeting. I sat across from a quartet of neatly dressed men in jackets and ties, who were toting old-fashioned leather satchels. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have taken them for senior citizens on a holiday trip to Limerick, but they were just bookies on their way to the racecourse with a rough afternoon ahead of them, the weather the least of their concerns.
In the pecking order of Irish tracks, Thurles ranks toward the bottom, so the bookies could not expect any windfalls. Their costs were still fixed, though, whether or not the betting ring was active. They paid an annual fee for their pitch at the course, with the choice spots being the most expensive, along with a daily fee (five times the price of a ticket) and half of one percent of their turnover. Corporate bookmakers offer Internet betting now, so that cut into their profits, as did the high-street shops where punters can plunge on sports other than racing. (Going a step further, Paddy Power features novelty bets—10–1 that Bono will become a Buddhist, say.) They also had travel expenses and the cost of hiring a helper to chalk up the wagers. Only twenty percent of on-course bookies in Ireland earn a substantial living. In effect, they’re an endangered species, although the public doesn’t believe it.
I once arranged to visit a retired bookie to learn more about the trade. Kindly and arthritic, in his late eighties, the Old Bookie was a tenth-generation Dubliner from the tougher north side of the Liffey. “Can’t you hear it in my accent?” he asked, as he greeted me. In his powder blue cardigan, sharply creased tan slacks, matching socks, and shiny loafers, he resembled a fringe member of the Rat Pack. His living room, furnished in the 1950s in a single decorative swoop, hadn’t been touched since and presented a museum-quality tableau. He told me he’d made book for about sixty years, following in his father’s footsteps. “I was brainless at the start,” he said modestly, but he added that a bookie doesn’t have to be super-intelligent, just good at math. “I knew three fellas who belonged to Mensa, and they were so hooked on theory, they were lousy at the job.”
“Is it difficult to get a license?” I asked.
“Nah, the police will license anybody.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Unless you have a criminal record, or serious enemies.”
“Serious enemies,” I repeated, picturing a row of shallow graves.
He nodded again, rather sadly, as if he knew where the bodies were buried. At any rate, he’d done all right in the business, flush at times and just scraping by at others. He went broke once, but that was par for the course. It was silly to worry about the setbacks, he thought. “I put it
behind me with a stop at the pub, or at the Gresham Hotel if I was feeling good,” the Old Bookie said, although he warned that the work was stressful and took its toll on family life. “The things I did wrong, they haunt me,” he confessed, and again my head filled with colorful images of mayhem. The only way for a bookie to get rich was to invest his money wisely—in real estate, or a share in a betting shop—rather than pissing it away on a flashy lifestyle, with too many stops at the Gresham.
A lack of courage had inhibited his own success as a turf accountant. “I didn’t have the nerve to ride out a hot streak or take a big gamble when I had the touch,” he explained. “And if somebody wanted me to lay a really huge bet—five grand, ten grand—I ran for cover. Care for a drink?” he asked. I watched in awe as he poured a generous shot of Bushmills from a tray layered with generations of dust, and when I didn’t add any water, he gave me a look of mock horror. “Whoa, that’ll kill you! Drinking that stuff straight!” He grinned and hitched up his trousers. “I’m going to be eighty-nine soon. Think I’ll make it?” I had the good grace not to ask, “What are the odds?”
A line of taxis waited at the train station in Thurles. The racecourse was only about a mile away, but the rain was coming down hard now, whipped into a fury by a nasty wind, so I joined the bookies in a cab. At the track, I searched for a warm corner to hide out, a snug little bar or a cozy restaurant, only to discover they don’t exist at Thurles. There are two bars, but they’re unheated, as is the dour café, where the dull fluorescent lighting created a penitential gloom. Someone had put wilted carnations on the tables in tumblers and cream pitchers, a sight so pitiful it almost brought tears to my eyes. For all their gentleness, politeness, and conviviality, the Irish can be awfully good at punishing themselves.