A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  Hourigan had a foot up on a fence rail, chatting with some pals, apparently relaxed. At the same time, though, he was assessing the horses minutely with those small bright eyes. I thought he could do it all day long and never be bored. His son Paul was with him, a jump jockey as Michael had been—and a good one, too, who’d won about two hundred races. But Paul would soon be too big to ride anymore, and he was taking it hard.

  “The love for it doesn’t go,” Hourigan whispered when Paul was out of earshot, but he was also relieved. That very morning Sean Cleary, a flat jockey, was being laid to rest in the town of Athlone, having died in a freak accident on the flat at Galway. “First Kieran Kelly, then Sean,” Hourigan said quietly. “Two dead in three months. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  The horses kept emerging from the barns in a ceaseless stream. Lot 287 was a chestnut filly by Good Thyne (USA) out of Financial Asset (IRE). When I studied the filly’s family tree, going back five generations, I found a dam called Sark, who’d given birth to Roll-A-Joint and Sarcastic. The Tattersalls catalog was a document worthy of structural analysis, a treasure for the postmodernists. As I thumbed through the information-dense pages, each thick with type, I suspected I could become as addicted to the science of bloodlines as I once was to baseball statistics, able to recite Roll-A-Joint’s achievements (ten wins, nine over fences, including the Scottish National) as quickly, say, as Duke Snider’s lifetime batting average (.295).

  But a pedigree can only tell you so much, particularly about jumpers. To rely solely on a horse’s breeding as the guide to its potential is a big mistake. It robs the process of intuition, magic, even poetry. Whenever I talked to trainers about buying a horse, they used the same phrase repeatedly, “Something about him [or her] I liked,” as Jessie had said about Moscow. The attraction bore a close kinship to falling in love, starting with a glance across the room (or sales ring), an exchange of meaningful looks, and some flirting that led to an emotional connection. The horse telegraphs its readiness to surrender, and the trainer senses that pliability and translates it into a desire to be trained.

  The art of judging a horse, of seeing into its heart, is mysterious, and Hourigan told me that nobody in Ireland is better at it than Tom Costello, his old friend. I’d heard the name before, of course. In the pantheon of Irish racing’s folk heroes, Costello is on a par with John P. McManus, although he is more private and secretive. With his five sons, he runs a horse-trading empire in the tiny village of Newmarket-on-Fergus in County Clare and sells to such top clients as Hourigan and Willie Mullins, as well as to the English, but Costello can be so picky he rejects any would-be buyers who fall below his unstated yet impeccable standards. I had no doubt he’d be as celebrated someday as James Sullivan, a famous Irish horse whisperer of the early 1800s who—with a single command—taught a horse to lie on its back and remain so still that a glass of beer could be balanced on each hoof.

  Costello’s exalted status derives from the fact that he discovered and later sold six winners of the Cheltenham Gold Cup—Midnight Court, The Thinker, Cool Ground, Cool Dawn, Imperial Call, and Best Mate. There are positives in all their pedigrees, but not enough to justify that much success. As for Beef Or Salmon, he was another story altogether, with the lowly ancestry of a street urchin. Cajetano, his U.S.-bred sire, was such a lackluster stallion he was shipped to the minors in Italy, where he serviced scruffy mares until his demise. Beef Or Salmon’s first owner acquired him for a mere $9,000 or so at Tattersalls in 1999 and unloaded him a year later in another auction, where Hourigan snapped him up for about $11,000 because he “liked the look of him.” The horse had repaid his faith, winning the Irish Hennessy Gold Cup and four other chases last season, before his fall at the Festival.

  “I brought four horses to Cheltenham last year, and three of them fell,” Hourigan said wistfully. “Hi Cloy ran on Wednesday, and he fell. Beef Or Salmon fell on Thursday, and so did Dorans Pride, who died. It’s terrible to lose a horse like that! Terrible! But that’s how it goes, doesn’t it? Can’t do feck-all about it.”

  “Will you be running Beef Or Salmon soon?”

  “We might go to Down Royal for the Nicholson Chase,” he told me. “But only if the ground comes right.” Hourigan stopped talking abruptly, his eyes on a yearling in the holding ring. With a sign so subtle I missed it, he conveyed his interest to the groom, who brought out the yearling and walked it over a path, up and down, like a model on a runway. Satisfied with what he saw, Hourigan brushed a hand over its coat, knelt to feel its legs, and then, without a word, dismissed the groom.

  “No good? What was wrong?” I asked him. He didn’t answer, so I tried another tack. “Think you’ll be buying anything, Michael?”

  “I already have,” he said smugly. He’d bought Lot 276 from Carraiganog Stud, a bay gelding by Saddlers’ Hall (by Sadler’s Wells) out of Lunalae. Further back, the yearling had some links to Northern Dancer and Bold Lad, and was also distantly related to Beef Or Salmon. Hourigan paid almost eighty thousand dollars in cash, on behalf of an unnamed owner.

  That was the highest price of the sale so far, but it was later eclipsed in a bidding war over a Supreme Leader yearling. (Be My Native and Supreme Leader are the top two National Hunt sires, based on the amount of money their offspring have earned.) The yearling, bred at Spratstown Stud in County Clare, was out of a half sister to two or three Festival winners. Alastair Pim, the flamboyant auctioneer, asked for an opening bid of about $100,000. He got just $20,000, but the price escalated rapidly. Only two bidders were still game at $90,000, and only one was left when Pim banged down his hammer at $120,000, a new record for an Irish yearling. The buyer in absentia was J. P. McManus.

  THROUGH THE FIRST WEEK of November, Cheltenham continued to parch. Rain fell in nearby Tewkesbury and Circencester, but the racecourse might have been a desert. I wanted to go to the Open as a warm-up for the Festival, so I called John Nicholson, the head groundsman, for the latest update. He is a typical horse-loving vagabond, who’d served time as a rancher in Brazil, a works rider in Australia, and a stud-farm hand in England. His ties to Cheltenham run deep. His great-great-grandfather was clerk of the course in the 1860s, and his father, a champion trainer, had a yard around the corner at Jackdaws Castle, now part of the overstuffed McManus portfolio.

  Nicholson was doing his best to salvage the meeting. For the past two months, he’d been watering the turf steadily for ten or twelve hours a day to ease the going. (Cheltenham has two courses, called the Old and the New for obvious reasons.) In a normal year, he goes through about seven million gallons of water, drawing on a reservoir that fills from a brook on the grounds, but he had used most of that already and had to buy five million extra gallons from the local water authority. To add to his worries, there were vigilant fishermen about. An anglers’ club stocks the reservoir with such coarse species as roach and pike, and if the water level kept dropping, the fish might die and spark a rebellion.

  Logistics form the core of Nicholson’s job. He manages a large staff, even though Cheltenham hosts only sixteen meetings a year, all for jumpers. Ten staffers care for the turf and two for the twenty-five fences. The fences, made of birch packed in an oak frame, cost about twelve thousand dollars apiece and must be rebuilt every couple of years when the birch becomes brittle and rots. Nicholson buys it in bundles from commercial foresters, because it won’t grow in the clay soil around the course. The sixteen sticks in each bundle are graded and trimmed, then jammed into the frame, pulled tight with a wire rope, and trimmed again to a proper height—a minimum of four feet six inches, by the rulebook—with a hedge cutter. Hurdles cost less at about two thousand dollars apiece, but they need more attention. Horses bash right through them at times—they give a little, while the fences don’t—so they’re repaired frequently. Eight to ten are in tatters after an average racing day.

  At the end of a meeting, Nicholson hires a special team to mend the turf. The team walks the track and replaces any divots by treading on them.
When the season is over in April, the chewed-up course undergoes a major reconstruction. It must be harrowed through the late spring and summer, and spiked in early autumn. The grass cover gets ripped out, and the soil is subjected to direct-drill reseeding, a painstaking procedure common at golf courses, too. Coordinating the effort can be complicated, but Nicholson takes pride in the results and hopes, given his historical ties to Cheltenham, that what he and his crew accomplish will still be around in the next century.

  He must have a sunny disposition, I thought, because he was also hopeful about the Open Meeting. “We’re doing all we can,” he said, and even in faraway Dublin, I could almost hear him knocking on wood.

  EVER CAUTIOUS with his precious goods, Michael Hourigan decided against sending Beef Or Salmon to Down Royal for the Nicholson Chase, the track’s centerpiece for its two-day Northern Festival of Racing, a smaller-scale event than Cheltenham’s grand ball. The ground was still too firm, he said, as it was at Leopardstown, where he’d recently walked the course—“soft on top but like flint underneath”—so his big horse would also skip the important November Handicap there a week later. Disappointed as I was, I still planned to visit Down Royal, then double back to watch Moscow Flyer’s debut at Navan. It would be an enjoyable trip, I thought, because for the Irish any festival suggests a raucous party, and people who don’t give a damn about the horses turn up just for the fun.

  My drive to the north went smoothly at first. Traffic thinned out past the Dublin Airport, with only a few cars on the highway, and again I was aware of how underpopulated Ireland is, the broad fields and broader skies a kind of comfort. But my reverie clattered to a halt in Dundalk when I hit the morning rush hour and got trapped in the shadow of some gigantic chain stores—another sign of progress, alas. I felt relieved to break free and climb toward Newry and Armagh, where a zealot’s billboard cried out, THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. Soon I was skirting the Mourne Mountains and hearing the words mourn and moan as I looked out at the pretty but melancholy scenery, a series of gorse-choked hills brown and even slightly purple in the thundery light.

  The landscape beyond the Mournes reminded me of the English countryside. Technically, I was in the U.K., and that must have contributed to it, but so did the farms, very tidy compared to Ireland’s, where a wild raggedness often prevails. The Irish seem reluctant to interfere too much with nature, maybe out of a Celtic respect for the gods who preside over it, while the English are quick to provide order where none existed before. As attractive as the farms around Banbridge were, their fields divided by hedgerows and drystone walls in perfect repair, I responded to the rough edges in Ireland and that mystical sense of bowing to invisible yet potent forces.

  Hillsborough was my destination. Situated on a strategic spot above the Dublin to Belfast road, it had grown up around an artillery fort built in 1650 by Colonel Arthur Hills. The fort is a park now and has a lake, where men were casting flies to trout. I had a fleeting desire to join them, but I checked into my hotel instead and got a taste of the mild paranoia of the north. My room, booked as a single, had twin beds, but the pillows were gone from one. The bathroom, too, had been edited. I was limited to a towel, a washcloth, and a bar of soap, apparently to prevent me from smuggling in the extra guest hidden in the trunk of my car.

  Hoping the bookies wouldn’t view me the same way, as a craven opportunist ready to skim whatever he could from the north’s bounty, I headed for the racecourse a few miles away. Founded by Royal Charter in 1685, Down Royal is still surrounded by farmland, although the suburbs are marching toward it. The setting is so rural that rabbits are a nuisance. A three-foot-deep trench had to be dug, then lined with sharp stones, to keep the bunnies from tearing up the chase course. After parking, I had to walk across the course to reach the gate, surprised that the grass stuck up in clumps rather than being cut uniformly. When I tried to dig a heel of my boot into the ground, it barely gave an inch. Firm going, indeed.

  Those thundery clouds over the Mournes had cleared, so the crowd was as large as anticipated that Friday afternoon, and in an appropriately festive mood. Having swapped the harried concerns of the business world for the freewheeling universe of chance, office workers were shedding their jackets, ties, and inhibitions, as jolly as kids playing hooky from school, but once more I caught a whiff of suspicion. Scattered on the main public bar were leaflets that warned of counterfeit bills. So many were in circulation that patrons were advised their money would be scrutinized closely before a drink was dispensed. The barmaids were unruffled, though. They were distracted, busy, and all dolled up, ready to be whisked off to Málaga if some joker hit the jackpot.

  At the paddock before the first race, a hurdle for maidens, I recognized an old friend, You Need Luck, who’d lost twice more since Gowran Park. He was beautifully turned out and won a fifty-dollar prize for his groom, but I still couldn’t bring myself to bet on him. His head sagged and his eyes looked guilty, fixed on the ground instead of bright with sublime images of victory. Young Vintage, a Noel Meade filly, was far more appealing, a brilliant babe strutting her stuff, but the halo around her was evident to everybody. At odds of 6–4, I had to pass on her and played Willie Mullins’s Raikkonen, though not with much conviction.

  I watched the race from the rail and saw why the hurdles take such a beating. Some horses only lifted their hooves a few inches off the ground—the merest nod toward a jump. The hurdle wobbled after they hit it, then snapped back into place, no more than a minor annoyance. To my astonishment, You Need Luck ran well and even took the lead seven furlongs from home. He had the race in his pocket, really, but at the second-last hurdle he jumped so far to the left, Barry Geraghty was in shock. It was as if the horse had just remembered an appointment in Hillsborough and had to get there as fast as possible. Geraghty grabbed his whip and sent You Need Luck on a crashing sprint to the wire, all too late. For his noble effort, Geraghty received a one-day suspension for careless riding.

  Sentiment betrayed me in the third race. There, in a sudden and glorious blast of sunshine, was Andrew Leigh, Eamonn’s teenage son, on Jessie’s Slaney Fox, being led around the ring by his beaming father. They talked and joked as they probably did when Eamonn first put the lad on a horse, but all was not what it seemed. In fact, Eamonn worried about Andrew, who had just completed high school and had insisted on taking out an apprentice’s license. “Last job I’d want for him” Eamonn had told me, knowing the dangers involved, all the bones that might break, even the young life that could be lost, but the only emotion on his face at the moment was a parent’s bubbly pride.

  How could I not back the horse? I put a hundred to win on Slaney Fox—and I wasn’t being entirely rash, either. Andrew had won a fifty-grand handicap in September, and that was good for his confidence, although maybe not so good for Eamonn, who feared the kid was getting cocky. “Already thinks he’s a pro,” he’d grumbled. When Andrew moved early and let Slaney Fox dash to the front, I assumed he’d made a mistake, but the mare had plenty in reserve. He kept her in high gear down the stretch until she brushed a hurdle, lost her rhythm, and faltered. Down went Andrew in a heap, his share of the purse vanished in an instant. Eamonn frowned and shook his head, no doubt wishing his son had chosen a sane trade like plumbing.

  ON MY RETURN to the hotel, I was delighted to find my towel hadn’t been confiscated, and after a pleasant dinner I slept for a dreamless eight hours and woke refreshed and besotted with the familiar gambler’s notion that today would be the day, all dismal memories of my losing bets having fled. But the morning sky was as black as tar, and soon the rain was spitting down, joined by a howling wind. The crowd at the track was different, too. I saw a few business folks around, but they’d been infiltrated by a hard-drinking gang of tough guys with copious tattoos and piercings, their hair reduced to nubbins or shaved off entirely to reveal skulls of terrifying dimensions.

  The gang’s focus was a row of large tents that billowed like the sails of a ship on a gusty sea. Each tent hous
ed a little bar. The tents were already packed with guzzlers and a trifle sloppy underfoot from the rain and the beer sloshed on the floor. Not that the tough guys took any notice of the weather—no, half of them were in T-shirts to show off those tattoos, and I noticed a certain absence of teeth, as well. I could feel the punch-ups brewing, desperate battles to be fought over arguments nobody would ever remember. What a foul, mean-spirited afternoon! To make matters worse, only four horses were entered in the Nicholson Chase despite the generous hundred-thousand-dollar pot. The firm going on Friday had scared away most trainers. They’d be sorry now, because the track was turning to mud.

  After Thurles, another baptism of sorts. I had a brief twinge of nostalgia for Golden Gate Fields, for palm trees and San Francisco Bay—okay, for California. Race-going was not supposed to be a version of Outward Bound, and yet it seemed to be in Ireland.

  The Nicholson, run over three miles, lacked any drama at all, except perhaps for the trainer Arthur Moore, whose mud-loving Glenelly Gale outlasted the others. “Pure poetry,” Moore remarked, rubbing it in. Meanwhile, the sky grew blacker, more bleak. I heard a drunk pester Paul Carberry, shouting, “Hey, Paul, got any tips?” as if Carberry didn’t have enough to do warding off hypothermia. The jockeys resembled bog people. I could have squeezed a pint of water from my socks, so when Jessie scratched Intelligent from the Killultagh Chase, leaving just three horses, I called it quits.

  Across from Down Royal is a golf course with an old-fashioned clubhouse, where a single-minded golf nut or a drenched racing fan can rent a cheap room. Simply for the opportunity to change my clothes, I rented one—a coffin-size cubicle—and after I was inside it, nobody else could get in, but it was dry and functional, at least. I had a cot, a small desk for working on the Great American Novel, an elderly TV, and a window with a view of a scrubby vacant lot. A man—although not a fat man—could live here quite happily, I imagined, albeit sexlessly and alone, but I was probably a bit delirious from exposure. In fact, my initial satisfaction faded fast, and I was so bored by the early evening that I looked forward to The Evil Gun on BBC2, featuring Arthur Kennedy as a maniacal killer.