by Bill Barich
“That was my first choice, too.” I was reeling a bit, actually. “But everybody’s talking about Takagi.”
“Always stick with your first choice,” Rothwell cautioned me, with an oracular firmness that made me recall Allen Ginsberg’s motto about writing and creativity, “First thought, best thought.” In possession of such wisdom, I put fifty to win on Rule Supreme with Paddy Sharkey, violating a motto of my own that goes, “Never bet with a bookie whose name has a negative ring.”
There’s a wonderful relief in placing a bet. Like boarding an airplane or accepting a blind date, you’re in the hands of fate. Freed of the obligation to decide, I walked to the stand Jessie Harrington prefers, but I couldn’t find her in the swarm of fans, so I edged into the first available space and landed by chance next to Edward O’Grady. He was just back from a holiday in Barbados and still bore the traces of a tan, glowing like a beacon of good cheer in the midst of his pale-faced, sun-deprived countrymen. The moment was deeply unsettling for me—Grannie O’Grady, Brian Gleeson, and now the man himself. Why had I listened to Phil Rothwell? What did he know about the workings of the universe? The gods couldn’t have been more direct. Takagi was destined to win.
It was too late to do anything, though. The horses were off, and I was stuck with Rothwell, Ginsberg, and Rule Supreme. With every glance at O’Grady, I sank a little lower. He looked serene and unflappable, a veteran trainer with impeccable bloodlines. His father had been a champion trainer, and when he died suddenly in the early 1970s, Edward, who was twenty-two, quit studying to be a vet and took over the yard. He had scored many triumphs since then and weathered many setbacks. In fact, he’d just been dealt another bad hand. Sacundai, revived at Leopardstown over Christmas, now had a bum leg that would scratch him from the Festival, reducing O’Grady’s probables to just two, Pizarro and Back In Front.
O’Grady watched the race through binoculars. What he saw must have bothered him, but he didn’t show it. He kept his cool, even though Takagi was struggling—no, worse, the horse could have been mired in a pot of molasses for all the headway he was making. Barry Geraghty was flat to the boards on him, to no avail. Takagi was trapped in that mire. After a mile or so, O’Grady muttered through clenched teeth, “Not today,” and then, “Horse didn’t run.” He spoke not so much to me as to a spectral presence, his spirit companion. Takagi’s lack of pace was a mystery to him, but Rule Supreme was still going a good gallop, although he jumped with more abandon than finesse.
One horse who did run was Hedgehunter, another of Willie Mullins’s entries. A dedicated stayer, Hedgehunter had nearly won the Welsh National in December over almost four miles, so the three miles of the Thyestes didn’t tax him. Substituting for Ruby Walsh, off toiling in England, David Casey let the horse go to the front rather than holding him up as Ruby did. Hedgehunter seemed delighted to be out there on his own. He had speed, pace, and style, and romped to an eight-length win, while Rule Supreme botched the last two fences and finished third. Why should it be any different? I hear the mermaids singing, et cetera.
Gowran Park is the Mullinses’ hometown track, close to all their yards, so they raked in a number of pots that afternoon. Tony took the first race, while Willie later added a novice chase to his Thyestes haul. Noel Meade had a productive day, too, back on his feet again after the virus scourge. Meade’s Rosaker hiked up his Cheltenham stock by winning the Galmoy Stayers Hurdle under Paul Carberry, who was nursing a bruised kidney from yet another spill, this one at Fairyhouse. That was the nature of the Festival beast, I realized. Fortunes rise, fortunes fall. Sacundai was out, and Rosaker was in, at least for the moment. Meade was overjoyed, anyhow. “Happy days are here again,” he said, firing up a victory cigar.
THE TRIPTO GOWRAN PARK left me shakier than ever. Having committed the gambler’s mortal sin of thinking too much, as worthless as reading tea leaves or probing the entrails of birds, I needed a break from handicapping and spent the next day strolling around Dublin in a Bloomish mood, casting a cold eye on the betting shops. To elevate my mind, I bought some books downtown and stopped for a noon pint at Davy Byrnes, the pub where snuffley Nosey Flynn, with dew-drops trickling from his nostrils, tried to pry a tip on the Ascot Gold Cup (due to be run that day, June 16, 1904) from the owner, who refused to cooperate. “I wouldn’t do anything in that line,” Byrnes scolded, his place being a moral one. “It ruined many a man the same horses.”
“True for you,” replied Flynn. “Unless you’re in the know.”
To be in the know! That was every real Dubliner’s dream. Tips were circulating around the city with extraordinary brio as the Festival drew near, and I was blessed (or cursed) with one that morning when I bought The Irish Times—not, mind you, the Post. Brian Keighron, our newsagent, is a staunch racing fan, and privy to the steady stream of opinion that flows through his shop. With a discerning ear, he separates the conceivably useful information from the blatantly outrageous fantasies, Hasanpour being an example of the former. “I only got word of the horse the other day,” he whispered, just as Gleeson had done, and tapped my forearm for emphasis.
Twice a winner on the flat in England, Hasanpour was purchased from a prominent British yard by an Irish buyer presumed to be the spendthrift J. P. McManus—or so Brian heard at first. But when Hasanpour was entered at Cork the Sunday just past, the owner was listed as Mrs. G. Smith. But Mrs. Smith could be related to McManus, couldn’t she? Ah, whatever. Anyway, the rumor was that Charlie Swan, the horse’s new trainer, called Hasanpour the best he’d ever sat on—and he’d ridden Istabraq! And Istabraq belonged to McManus! The chain of coincidences … well, that was all Brian needed. He backed the horse at Cork, and when Hasanpour shot to a twenty-length lead, he began reciting a traditional punters prayer, “Jaysus, please don’t fall!” Hasanpour didn’t. The horse was the goods.
Tap, tap. “Hasanpour was 66–1 ante-post for the Festival,” Brian said, his voice an octave lower. “You won’t get him at that price now, but still …” So I put Hasanpour’s name in my Cheltenham notebook, while I crossed off Nil Desperandum, who had knocked a piece of bone off a front-leg pastern and wouldn’t be traveling to the Cotswolds. Hasanpour up, Nil Desperandum down.
Who would be the next pope? An article in the Times addressed that very question. The favorite was Dionigi Tettamanzi of Italy, according to Paddy Power Bookmakers (wrong, for once), whose PR chief, the Paddy Power, expressed some wholly contrived shock that anyone in a Catholic country would be offended by a firm accepting bets on the papal succession. Yet everyone from ordinary churchgoers to the adepts of Padre Pio had taken offense, especially since the current pope was still “alive and strong,” as the Right Reverend Thomas McMahon noted. In his own defense, Paddy said, “It is something people talk about in pubs, and because it is being discussed, I think it is something we should be betting on.”
What a fine bit of logic! Fair play to you, Paddy, I thought, although I’d never discussed the next pope with anybody at O’Herlihy’s. Had I been drinking at a heathen den? As a test, I asked the fellow next to me at Davy Byrnes if he liked Tettamanzi for pope. I cannot properly capture the blankness of his stare.
Around one o’clock, the lunch crowd began filtering in, so I packed up my little library and went over to McDaid’s, where they don’t serve food and a peaceful midday calm prevails. Down the bar, I saw the ghost of Patrick Kavanagh hunkered over the racing pages, irritable and hungover until the magical spirits lifted his own. Here, too, Paul Carberry was known to drop by of an evening. “You’ve been seen at McDaid’s,” I teased him once, and he smiled and said, “Yeah, sure, I’ve been seen at a lot of places in Dublin.”
McDaid’s is a properly bookish spot, quiet and conducive to study in the early hours of the afternoon, so I cracked open my new copy of Liam O’Flaherty’s A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland, first published in 1929. O’Flaherty didn’t rate restaurants or hotels. Instead, in a witty, satirical style, he advised tourists how to deal with the “four pillars
of Irish society”—the parish priest, the politician, the publican, and the peasant, whose influence could be ranked in that order. Maybe it was the talk about the pope, but I turned first to the section on parish priests, a dodgy bunch who were always soliciting donations, O’Flaherty remarked. He urged visitors to contribute only to a priest who is “fat and jovial and owns a good horse and wears riding breeches and goes around everywhere with a horsewhip,” perhaps because the author was an obsessive gambler.
The parish priest is wary of outsiders, O’Flaherty wrote, and inclined to regard Ireland as the only ethical country, although his personal view of the Irish is “a very poor one.” Such priests believe the English are immoral, and that the French are even worse. Americans are not to be trusted, because they allow divorce. Germany is acceptable on account of Catholic Bavaria, but the Russians are “beyond the pale of civilization,” having overthrown the church. The Italians, Spaniards, and Belgians are “very nearly as pure as the Irish.” As for the Chinese, they might still be saved through the efforts of the Irish mission to China, but the Mexicans are doomed, and it is the duty of every parish priest to lobby Ireland’s leaders “to get the English to get the Americans to make war on Mexico.”
DURING THE LONG, HARD YEARS when the church banned its clergy from going to the races, some priests didn’t abide by the rules. They’d leave their collars and missals at home and travel to England, where they could go to the track incognito and return with their halos unblemished. I heard about this gambit from Father Sean Breen, who’s known around Ireland as the Racing Priest and also, warmly, as the Breener. He takes great pride in being the only priest in the world with two racecourses in his parish, Naas and Punchestown, both in Kildare, and likes to say, “Isn’t God good?” in praise of his bounty.
I had wanted to meet Father Breen ever since someone told me he dispenses tips on the Festival to his congregation. Though I’d been to both Naas and Punchestown, I got lost on the road to his parish, anyway, and when I phoned for directions, he asked, “So you’re a lost soul, are you?” That gave me a moment’s pause, but it was only an example of the gentle humor the Breener brings to bear on the complexities of being human. In his seventies, he has a sweet, boyish, untroubled face, and a talent for light banter and offering comfort that aging can confer. His house was next door to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, at a rural junction in Eadestown.
“You’re very welcome,” he greeted me, apologizing for the mess inside, as older people do, even though the mess didn’t exist. “Come into my bachelor pad.” He escorted me to the kitchen, his neatest room, and made a pot of tea.
Father Breen had held his current post for about nine years and served about four hundred families. (He has since moved to a new post in Ballymore Eustace, also in Kildare.) He grew up in a small town in farm country, but he didn’t have any particular feeling for horses as a boy, once falling off a neighbor’s pony when he tried to ride it, a deterrent to any further efforts in the saddle. Only later as a young priest in North County Dublin did he become fascinated by the races, largely through his friendships with such people as Jim Dreaper, Tom Dreaper’s son, and Joanna Morgan, a trainer. (He owns a piece of two horses stabled at Morgan’s yard in Meath.) On his initial trip to Cheltenham, he had the good luck to see Arkle win his first Gold Cup, and he has returned for every Festival since, barring illness.
Horses are integral to Irish culture, Father Breen thinks. In his parish not long ago, the priest still visited his parishioners on horseback.
“Racing is a marvelous social thing in Ireland,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “So healthy out in the open air! You meet all strands of people, too. It isn’t just the upper classes go racing here. Sure, there are those who overdo the drink and the gambling, but life is a temptation, after all. Anyway, I love it. I absolutely love it! It’s so relaxing it takes me right out of my head. Nobody knows what goes on in our heads, thank God.” Of all the Irish meetings, his favorite is Galway in July, a seven-day indulgence. “It’s tremendous fun! Everybody’s there. Even the politicians have caught on,” he said drily. “The prime minister wouldn’t dare miss it! The first three men I ran into one summer were the ministers for justice, finance, and agriculture.”
The Breener was looking forward to his annual journey to Cheltenham. He’d be with his usual group, men who’ve bonded over the last twenty years or so, and he would say a Punters’ Mass at his hotel on St. Patrick’s Day, which always falls during the Festival and inflames the Irish crowd. He expected to have a good time, but there would also be some melancholy.
“A lot of people die,” he said. “You don’t see them there, and you say to yourself, ‘He isn’t at Cheltenham, he must be dead.’” When I mentioned that I was going for the first time, he assured me I’d be ecstatic about the quality of the races, although he had some reservations about how the Festival has changed and become less intimate since his earliest visits. “It’s gotten very commercial. The corporate side ruins everything, doesn’t it? The Tented Village, all those shops, they’re a distraction.” He didn’t say this angrily, just in a resigned way, with a priestly tolerance for what others might prefer. “I’m just a purist, I guess. It’s the racing that matters to me.”
He poured more tea and passed the soda bread. Tacked to the kitchen door, I noticed a calendar from The Irish Field. On the table was a well-thumbed copy of the Post. Through a window over the sink, I could see a neatly kept back garden. The house was very still and peaceful, the kind of place where you can hear the tick of a clock and the drip of a faucet.
“The Irish used to ask me to bless their horses before a race at Cheltenham,” Father Breen went on, “but I don’t do it anymore. Do you know where the word blessing comes from? It means ‘to speak well of I’ll tell you an old joke, it’s been around for ages. Seems this trainer had a horse he wanted blessed, so he got a priest to do it, and the horse won. A COI fella”—COI being shorthand for Church of Ireland—“witnessed that, and the next time he saw the priest do a blessing, he bet on the horse, and the horse won again. That happened twice more, but the fourth time the horse finished last. The COI fella was upset because he’d lost all his money, so he cornered the priest and asked what went wrong. The priest gave him a disgusted look and said, ‘Ah, you Prods can’t tell the difference between a blessing and the last rites!’”
“Old but good,” I laughed. “Are you a gambling man, Father? What are your Festival picks?”
The Breener does enjoy a bet, but he worries about getting carried away in the reckless carnival atmosphere at Cheltenham, so he puts down his bets in advance, three each morning with David Power, before he can be swayed. He was considering a treble on Moscow Flyer, Best Mate, and Rooster Booster, who won the Champion Hurdle last year and was favored once again, even though history and the statistics dictated against all three champs retaining their titles.
“Bookies love trebles,” he said merrily. “Three chances for the punter to lose!” He already had an ante-post wager on Willie Mullins’s Sadlers Wings and was pondering a plunge on Brave Inca, whose trainer Colm Murphy, a protégé of Aidan O’Brien’s, was new to the game. “No young trainer would get his hands on a fine horse like that in the past,” he told me. “The horse would have been sold right out from under him, gone from Ireland to England or France.”
Soon Father Breen would become a “seven-day wonder,” the subject of a media frenzy during the week before the Festival. He did interviews by phone with radio hosts. “They pick my brain,” he said, joking again, “if I’m not being presumptuous about having a brain.” His passion for the races was particularly striking to the English, and the BBC once pressed him to account for it. “What does your vicar do for entertainment?” he answered smartly. Alert to being manipulated, he refuses to play along with those who are fishing for stories about drink and debauchery. He relishes his brief burst of celebrity, but he surrenders it without a care.
As a good Christian, the Breener tired of tal
king about himself and asked me some questions, what type of books I had written and why I was in Ireland. “I met an Irish woman in London,” I began …
“End of story!” he cried, interrupting me. “Best women in the world! And they’re great mothers. They have to be.” He halted for a second. “Why is that, I wonder?”
Certainly, Father Breen didn’t fit O’Flaherty’s satirical profile of a parish priest, being too good-humored and self-aware. It was a bad time for priests in Ireland and elsewhere, of course, and yet there were many decent, committed men like the Breener who accepted the foibles of their congregation and did what they could to meliorate them. His was a life lived in service, rich in the rewards of community. As I was leaving, I asked if he’d be going to the track anytime soon. “Oh, yes,” he said emphatically. “If I didn’t see a horse for a week, I’d be unwell.”
THE NEXT TRAINER to watch a dream go up in smoke was Jessie Harrington, who brought Spirit Leader to Leopardstown for the AIG Europe Champion Hurdle. After Spirit Leader’s second-place finish in the Bewley’s over Christmas, the students of form were supporting her against Rooster Booster for the other Champion Hurdle, the one at the Festival. Gutsy and genuine, the mare thrives on a fast-paced fight, and Cheltenham’s hilly racecourse would be another bonus for her. If she ran a good race in the AIG, the theory went, she might peak in the early spring, a trick Jessie had pulled off a time or two with other horses.
But Spirit Leader was hardly a banker at Leopardstown. In the AIG, a Grade One worth about one hundred thousand dollars, she faced a strong contingent of opponents. Golden Cross, the Bewley’s winner, was in the mix, as was Noel Chance’s Flame Creek, third in that same race. Willie Mullins had Davenport Milenium ready to go, too. His horse had come up against Spirit Leader once before, finishing second to her sixth in a race at Cheltenham in December while carrying a pound more. Today Spirit Leader had a five-pound advantage, as she did over two horses from the J. P. McManus stable, Fota Island and Foreman. German-bred, Foreman was the more feared of the pair. The horse had done well as a hurdler in France, prompting McManus to buy him for a handsome price.