by Bill Barich
In Tinahely, we saw a sign for the races, but no directions, so for help we dashed through the rain to Seavers Bar, almost colliding at the front door with a gent in tweed, who had his wife on his arm—a couple out for a drink before Sunday lunch, I thought, but they were racegoers, too, and just as lost. “Youse here for the pint-to-pint?” asked the barman, as if no other reason could account for strangers being in Seavers. Though we were only a mile away from Fairwood, the site of the course, I had to resist an impulse to stay warm and dry and go from one pint to the next, a suggestion the barman, with his country accent, had planted in my head.
Imelda wasn’t having any. She meant to see those horses and have that picnic, the weather be damned, so we ran back to the car and drove until we came to another sign that could have been written in blood, EIGHT EUROS, it said in bright red ink, a caution to sundry farm lads with empty pockets that they wouldn’t be able to sneak into the races for free. Two men from the hunt club were selling tickets, and they were wrapped in enough waterproof clothing to survive a monsoon. Only their hands and faces were visible as they waved us through a gate and into a soaked field, where our wheels sank into the ooze. I had a very disturbing premonition that I might be putting my shoulder to the car’s rear end later on.
Then we got a break. A tiny hole appeared in the sky, revealing a patch of blue. That lifted my spirits. Maybe we’d have our sunny picnic, after all. A good crowd had already assembled, mostly in family groups, so the mood was upbeat. From a giggling red-haired girl, whose brother was making mudpies at her feet, we bought a race program filled with courtesy ads for local businesses. I expressed some curiosity about the Crocodile Lounge and Black Tom’s Tavern, but Imelda took my hand, and we walked up a muddy path, propelled forward by the wind. Mud was everywhere, so our marching anthem became the slurp-slurp of boots and shoes being swallowed. The kids loved it, though, splashing in puddles and stomping through bogs.
What a scene at the crest of the hill! Here was a panorama worthy of Breughel, with activity at every corner of the frame. Teenage boys demonstrated wrestling holds on one another to impress the teenage girls; young mothers fed bottles to their nursing babies; nattily dressed country squires leaned on their walking sticks and packed their pipes with tobacco; and plump farmers with straw in their hair discussed the price of crops. They were all neighbors, too. A large tent for drinks was doing a brisk trade, as were a pair of chip shops on wheels that smelled of greasy cooking oil. The bookies were gathered in a soggy enclave and didn’t look happy about it. This was just a notch above a dog track—or maybe not.
Spectators had convened at a fenced parade ring for the second race. They were ready for the horses, but the horses weren’t ready for them. They turned up one by one, each on its own schedule, led right through the crowd by their grooms and narrowly avoiding infants in strollers and toddlers on the lam. Some of the horses wore blankets against the cold—that patch of blue had disappeared—with numbers pinned on them, frequently too small to read. Point-to-points are called the cradle of the jumps game, and though they’ve produced dozens of great chasers, including Best Mate, I had a strong inkling we wouldn’t see a future star that afternoon.
The Shillelagh & District Hunt began preparing for its annual meeting in the early autumn, Mary Dagg, the club’s honorary secretary, had told me before the races. When the leaves fall, the members cut the birch themselves and build the fences at night after work, a labor of love. Volunteers are the rule with most clubs, Mary said. Point-to-points occupy a significant place in the cultural life of rural Ireland, but they struggle to keep afloat because of escalating costs. Mary’s club pays almost ten thousand dollars a year for its insurance alone. Without the financial support that point-to-points receive from Horse Racing Ireland, they’d go the way of the draft horse.
HRI provides the support in order to give “not so good” horses, the country’s overflow, a chance to compete. At Fairwood, owners shelled out an entry fee of fifty bucks against a winner’s purse of about eight hundred dollars, although the feature race carried a purse of more than a thousand. Almost all the races (four of six were for maidens) had too many entries and needed to be run in divisions over a standard distance of about three miles, the minimum for pointers. The horses were certified hunters, meaning they’d hunted with a recognized club and had proved they could jump. In the two open events, their average age was twelve, and most had already failed disastrously at real tracks. The jockeys, all amateurs, held the status of qualified riders. Some aspired to be pros, but most were in it for—that word again—the craic, both the men and the women.
The horses continued to assemble for the first division of the second race. They were maiden geldings of five and six, and primarily first-time starters. If they’d run before, they’d fallen (F), were pulled up (P), unseated their rider (U), or were brought down (B)—made to fall by another horse, that is. Lost In The Snow’s record was characteristic—BFPPUP, it read. It would take a courageous, or maybe self-destructive, jockey to ride Lost In The Snow, but the same was true for most of the field. The jockeys were already a mess, too, wet and covered with mud. You might expect young riders to get a kick out of this, but there were also leathery guys in their forties saddling up for more abuse.
Fairwood is one of the most testing point-to-point courses anywhere. It demands stamina in spades. It has five fences, and riders must negotiate a hilly route marked in spots by hay bales; they complete the circuit twice during a race. There isn’t a grandstand, so we stood a few feet from a fence, near enough to hear the horses’ bellies brush it when they didn’t jump high enough. That sound, and the loud thump of their hooves on landing, captivated Imelda. She thought it was sublime to be so close to such tremendous energy and gave me a mini-lecture on Edmund Burke, who wrote that our astonishment at such moments, coupled with a degree of terror, suspended the soul’s “motions,” and caused our dependence on comforting concepts like order and clarity to slip.
The jockeys rounded a turn, bowled downhill, and vanished for a minute before they thundered back toward us on their second circuit. Only three horses finished the race, and Louisburgh, the winner, who was trained by Ted Walsh, had many lengths in hand—not that you’d know about Walsh from reading the program. It didn’t give the names of any trainer or jockey. As for the lack of finishers, that was routine for a point-to-point. In Louisburgh’s last race, where he fell, just five of seventeen horses had lasted the entire trip.
If the finish couldn’t be described as thrilling, the loose horses certainly were. Two riderless geldings—they’d fallen, lost their jocks, and got up again—were on the rampage, galloping hellbent toward the chip shops on wheels. An old woman practically did a somersault to get out of the way. I had a vision of hot vats of oil being upended, while the french fries flew. Grooms and jockeys pursued the horses on foot, as did some hardy fans, while less intrepid folks hid behind a tree, as we did. The geldings were caught after a few minutes, and the crowd seemed disappointed. The chaos had delighted rather than threatened them. “There is a sympathy between the rush of the racing hunter and their own impetuous natures,” as the Dublin Saturday Magazine once said.
Everyone regrouped for the race’s second division. The Royal Dub won it in a Carberry family production, with Tommy the trainer and Nina Carberry, Paul’s sister, the jockey. Those facts weren’t in the program, either. I gleaned them at random, listening to the chatter. The chief attraction of a point-to-point, I realized, was its glorious informality. If the sport became too organized (and less sublime), it might lose its grassroots appeal. The program was only a document, no more than a rough guide, and if you relied on it for information, you exposed yourself as an outsider with no direct line to Farmer Matthews, say, a dairyman from Carnew, whose speedy mare had a big chance in the fifth race.
Yet long before the fifth race, there were problems. First came the snow. That might have been fun and even romantic, but when the snow turned to an icy, stinging sleet,
we looked for shelter in the drinks tent, but so many people had preceded us that even the tiniest, most undernourished jockey couldn’t have squeezed inside. For some reason, this got Imelda talking about the mass evictions of farmers during the Potato Famine, their doors barred or padlocked and the roofs torn off their cottages for good measure, with entire families tossed out into just such a hostile environment, but I wasn’t the best audience for a history lesson since I was running for the car as fast as I could. There, we cranked up the heat and ate our sad little picnic, scarcely able to break off chunks of bread for the cheese because our fingers were so numb.
THE VIRUS SCARE seemed to be passing at last. Horses were rising from their sick beds with their health restored. In the Post I read that Beef Or Salmon was already back in training, although Michael Hourigan couldn’t (or wouldn’t) say when or where his horse would run next. In England, an equine physiotherapist was treating Kingscliff for muscle problems in his shoulders and withers, but Robert Alner still had the Gold Cup as his target, while in France Guillaume Macaire was readying Jair du Cochet for the Pillar Property Chase at Cheltenham. If Jair du Cochet did okay, Macaire, too, would try for the Gold Cup. Asked to explain the horse’s abysmal performance in the King George, Jacques Ricou replied sagely, “I don’t understand why, and he isn’t able to tell us.”
In other news, the rabbits were wreaking havoc again at Down Royal. They ignored the sharp stones, burrowed under the chase course, and made it unsafe for racing. Paddy Power joked that the track should change its name to “Watership Down Royal,” a quip that displeased the track’s manager, who countered by saying, “I need this like a hole in the head.” Elsewhere, the Irish Turf Club released the results of its random drug-testing program. The sixty-five urine samples donated by jockeys came back negative, even for alcohol, a balm to punters and bookies alike. Finally, Willie Mullins reported that Florida Pearl, perhaps the most popular chaser in Ireland, was ready to resume his illustrious career after a long absence.
If the National Hunt has a dynasty, it would have to be the Mullins family, who are even more entrenched than the Carberrys. Paddy Mullins, the revered patriarch, still trains horses at the age of eighty-five (“I’d like to be Paddy Mullins!” Hourigan once exclaimed, envying the longevity), and his four sons are also in the game, Willie and Tony as trainers and George as the operator of a horse transport business. George shares a farm with Willie and sells shredded newspapers for bedding as a sideline. (The paper generates less dust in a stall than straw does, so it’s easier on a horse’s breathing.) Tom, the youngest son, helps his father and will take over his yard when the time comes, all this despite Paddy’s assertion that he discouraged his boys from joining the profession.
“I could not get them to do anything else,” he complained to his biographer. “I wanted them to do something else. I thought there was not room in it for them all. When some of the boys were in school at Roscrea, I preached to them every chance I got. ‘Go and do something else,’ I might as well have been talking to the table.”
As the most established trainer, Willie tends to attract the best stock, Florida Pearl being his treasure. Again Tom Costello had a hand in the magic. Willie first noticed and fell in love with the horse at Costello’s yard, buying him as a four-year-old and later selling him to Violet and Archie O’Leary. “The size of him, the scope of him, it’s tremendous,” he enthused to me once. “He’s a beautiful athlete!” The bay gelding, by Florida Sun out of Ice Pearl, proved it at the track, winning both the Champion Bumper and a big-money chase at the Cheltenham Festival, plus the Irish Hennessy three times, with only the Festival’s Gold Cup eluding him, although he has placed in the race.
The current season had been dismal for Florida Pearl so far, though. Originally slated for the King George—he had won it over the young Best Mate in 2001—he suffered a sprain and had to be scratched. Almost twelve, he kept limping and failed to show his usual spark. That was a worry to Mullins, who had more than his share of anxieties, the chief one being a draining legal battle with the British Jockey Club over Be My Royal, a horse he trained. Be My Royal had won the English Hennessy at Newbury last winter, but the Jockey Club withheld the purse because of a positive test for morphine, later traced to a tainted batch of feed. A court battle loomed, during which Mullins would attempt to declare his innocence and reverse the decision before the club’s disciplinary panel.
Frustrated with Florida Pearl’s lack of progress, Willie had turned over the horse to Grainne Ni Chaba, an equine physiotherapist who has a practice on the Curragh and an intriguing résumé. She worked in Florida breaking yearlings; rode as an amateur jockey on the flat (“I didn’t win any races”) and on her own mares in bumpers; and cared for abused animals for the RSPCA before branching out. Because she doesn’t have a trainer’s pressures, she can concentrate all her skills on an individual horse. The intimacy can lead to unexpected results, as it did with Rebelline, a savage mare.
“I still have a scar on my bum from her,” Grainne told me when we talked.
“How did that happen?” I imagined an explosive fall and a very hard landing.
“She bit me!”
From the start, Grainne liked Florida Pearl. “He was an ideal patient,” she said. “He wanted to get better.” She rode him every day, slowly and steadily, and got to know him, doing both dressage and pole work. By being on his back, she could isolate his problems and figure out how to fix them. He had a sore ligament in a near-side knee, for instance, and Grainne was dismayed about the way he looked from behind. He wasn’t properly balanced and ran with his neck too high instead of down low, and that created a little hollow in his back and put extra pressure on the muscles. Though Florida Pearl had only fallen once in a race, Grainne believed the fall had thrown him out of kilter.
Her job was to rewire the horse completely. “It was like, okay, mister, time to sort yourself out,” she said. She had to teach him to run correctly again—to relax and regain his confidence. She used balancing reins to strengthen his back and his hocks. For his minor pains, she gave him electrotherapy. He got some laser treatments for his sore knee and did plenty of stretching. To build up his cartilage, Grainne put him on Cortaflex, a dietary supplement. Soon he was involved in a regular routine that included an hour or so of dressage, a forty-minute massage, and thirty minutes of physio.
The program was a smashing success. Florida Pearl stayed with Grainne for more than two months, and when he returned to Mullins’s yard, he was in super shape, transformed into a racehorse again. Grainne still missed him a bit. “He had a stall next to a horse called Chubaka, and they became wonderful pals. Chewie’s the kind of horse who makes other horses happy. He’s huge, too, at seventeen hands three, even bigger than Florida Pearl. They were mad about each other. They’d jump up and start playing the minute they met,” she said. “You should have seen Florida Pearl! He had this great big bum on him. I meant to take some before-and-after photos, but I always forget.”
Shortly after our conversation, I did see the rejuvenated Florida Pearl when Willie Mullins brought him to Fairyhouse for the Normans Grove Chase. The race was a trial balloon of sorts. If the Pearl did well after his 238-day layoff, he might go for his fourth Irish Hennessy in February. He was the classiest horse in the field by far, but the fans shied away from him because he’d been injured, letting the odds drift out to 8–1. Yet Richard Johnson had flown in from England to take the mount, and since Johnson rarely rides in Ireland, I assumed that Mullins wasn’t fooling around.
The other five horses in the race (Rathgar Beau, Knife Edge, Rince Ri, Beachcomber Boy, and Arctic Copper) had knocked heads for months without any of them winning a race, so it seemed obvious that a fresh, classy, and healthy Florida Pearl could spring an upset. I felt smug about doping this out, another sign that my education was advancing nicely, but as I waded into the ring to bet, the earth must have wobbled, because I heard myself yell, “Twenty to win on Arctic Copper.” Then I watched morosely as Fl
orida Pearl dashed to the lead and garnered the prize with incredible ease.
CONFUSION HAS A HABIT of compounding itself. Once it sets in, you start to double-think every aspect of your life. Should I pour milk in my coffee, or drink it black? I hear the mermaids singing, et cetera. My hapless condition followed me from Fairyhouse to Gowran Park for the Thyestes Chase, a prestigious Cheltenham prep race for stayers. The Thyestes drew another record crowd of almost nine thousand, and the Irish gift for sociability was at its most expansive. Even I, the wandering American, met someone I knew—Tamso Doyle, a friend from HRI—and as we made a prerace promenade, passing the flat-capped bench sitters (only sixteen this time), she introduced me to people along the way.
First, we ran into Mary O’Grady, Edward’s mother. Known as Grannie O’Grady, she was perky and chipper. “I’ve got my fingers crossed for Takagi,” she confided. That was her son’s horse. Next we crossed paths with Brian Gleeson, our moderator from the Dunraven Arms. He leaned toward us in a posture of utmost discretion, as the Irish do when they’re about to whisper a tip, and said that Takagi had been laid out perfectly for the Thyestes. “His jockey used him very lightly in his last race at Leopardstown,” Gleeson told us. “He’ll have plenty of zip saved for today.”
He spoke with such authority I began to waver about Willie Mullins’s Rule Supreme, the horse I’d selected on the train to Kilkenny, but then Phil Rothwell put me right as we chatted by the parade ring. The son of a dairy farmer, Rothwell trains horses near Tinahely, and when I asked which horse he liked, he said, “Rule Supreme.”