Best Australian Racing Stories (25 page)

Though the motion made him dizzy,

Yet his baby brain was busy,

For hadn't he at length attained the substance of his dream!

He was now a jockey really,

And he saw his duty clearly

To do his best to win and justify his father's pride;

So he clicked his tongue to
Gaylad
,

Whispering softly, ‘Get away lad';

The old horse cocked an ear, and put six inches on his stride.

Then, the jockeys who were tailing

Saw the big bay horse come sailing

Through the midst of them with nothing but a baby on his back,

And this startling apparition

Coolly took up its position

With a view of making running on the inside of the track.

Oh,
Gaylad
was a beauty,

For he knew and did his duty;

Though his reins were flying loosely, strange to say he never fell,

But held himself together,

For his weight was but a feather;

Bob Murphy, when he saw him, murmured something like ‘Oh, hell!'

But
Gaylad
passed the filly;

Passed Jack Costigan on
Chilli
,

Cut down the coward
Watakip
and challenged
Guelder Rose
;

Here it was he showed his cunning,

Let the mare make all the running,

They turned into the straight stride for stride and nose for nose.

But Babs was just beginning

To have fears about his winning,

In fact, to tell the truth, my hero felt inclined to cry,

For the
Rose
was still in blossom,

And two lengths behind her
Possum
,

And gallant little S
terling
, slow but sure, were drawing nigh.

Yes! Babsie's heart was failing,

For he felt old
Gaylad
ailing,

Another fifty yards to go, he felt his chance was gone.

Could he do it? much he doubted,

Then the crowd, oh, how they shouted,

For Babs had never dropped his whip, and now he laid it on!

Down the straight the leaders thundered

While people cheered and wondered,

For ne'er before had any seen the equal of that sight

And never will they, maybe,

See a flaxen-haired baby

Flog a racehorse to the winning post with all his tiny might.

But
Gaylad
's strength is waning,

Gone in fact, beyond regaining,

Poor Babs is flogging helplessly, as pale as any ghost,

But he looks so brave and pretty

That the
Rose
's jock takes pity,

And, pulling back a trifle, lets the baby pass the post.

What cheering and tin-kettling

Had they after, at the ‘settling',

And how they fought to see who'd hold the baby on his lap;

As President Montgom'ry,

With a brimming glass of ‘Pomm'ry',

Proposed the health of Babs Malone, who'd won the Handicap.

PART 3
The Cup is More Than
a Horse Race

The Cup is more than a horse race

LES CARLYON

‘M
ORT FROM CHICAGO'—THAT'S
how he introduced himself to me in an hotel dining room four years ago in Lexington, Kentucky. If the name sounds Runyonesque, Mort wasn't. He was that peculiarly American creature, the urban horse investor. From the big city, he sent his money to Kentucky where thoroughbreds ate it, but in a tax-effective way.

Mort owned pieces of several swish yearlings to be sold in the pavilion across from Blue Grass Airport, where the Arab buyers had already parked in their jets much as we park Commodores. After we had been talking half an hour, Mort suddenly said: ‘Yeah, I bred a Melbourne Cup winner once.' It was less than a boast—more like you or I confessing to having once kicked a goal for Mount Pleasant seconds.

Years earlier, Mort and his partners had sold a yearling to Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai, dreaming the colt would make them famous in the Derby at Epsom, England, or the Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, France. The colt ran second in a big German race and third in the Rome Derby before being bundled off to Australia. As At Talaq, he won the 1986 Melbourne Cup. Mort felt things could have turned out better.

I told him that while the Cup wasn't as famous as the races he coveted, it was a lung-buster, perhaps the most honest staying race in the world, and never won by a soft horse. Cup day, I told him, was one of the world's great booze-ups, a public holiday no less. Then I hit him with the clincher: kids from Moonee Ponds went along dressed as the Pope. Mort didn't say much. I'm sure he thought it was Mt Pleasant seconds.

It's hard to explain the Cup to an outsider. Most of the turf 's fabled events were got up by racing insiders for themselves. The Epsom and Kentucky Derbies are about the supremacy of genes and the buying power of the ruling classes. The public is allowed to join in for the crowd scenes. The best colt of the year usually wins and is hustled off to the breeding shed. Sheikh What's-His-Name doesn't get too excited about the stake money because he's worth a couple of billion anyway. Besides, he spent $20 million on yearlings that year, so he's still behind, but who's counting?

Our Cup is quirky. Got up for people, it is: a cross between a horse race and a folk festival. And it mocks good order because it's a handicap. This gets rid of the preordained factor: just about any runner can win. It's the best sporting idea anyone ever had in this town—if only because racing is international and AFL footy isn't.

And the Cup is folksy. Ray Trinder, the Tasmanian owner who won in 1972, was seen outside the course holding the Cup in a cupboard box and trying to hail a cab. It doesn't go like this at Epsom or Longchamp. In Melbourne, the script is by Shakespeare. The Cup is a saga about horses and the human condition, about lowbrows and highbrows, toffs and villains, irony and rough humour. And the improbable.

In 1987, Harry Lawton had bought Kensei out of a New Zealand paddock for $15,000. Now the chestnut had won the Cup. ‘Looked like a yak when I bought him,' said Harry. ‘Had a coat about 3 inches long.' Harry used to be a fitter and turner, and played footy for Preston at $4 a game. Rosedale, a bay stallion owned in America by Nelson Bunker Hunt, once thought to be the richest man in the world, ran third to Kensei. ‘Tell Bunker I'm sorry I knocked him off,' said Harry. It only goes like this in Australia.

As the Cup field paraded last year, the crowd, as it always does, fell silent. When Fraar, owned by the above-mentioned Sheikh Ham-dan, reached the top corner of the yard, a falsetto voice cried out: ‘I love you, Fraar.'

Next time around, Michael Jackson cried out even louder. ‘I want to marry you, Fraar.'

Only on such a day can a wag from Werribee, or wherever, make thousands laugh. When, around 15 minutes later, Ireland's Vintage Crop came back the winner, a joker in white Arabic robes rose, arms outstretched, to welcome him. Here, having a day out, was Lawrence of Nunawading, or possibly Sheikh Akbar Bin Merv of Wagga. In 1992, maybe the same gent came as Batman. Next Tuesday he could be Roseanne. Only in Australia.

Cup crowds always seem bigger than AFL Grand Final crowds because racegoers need to move around more. Last year I was looking for an old friend, the Irish journalist Robin Park. I couldn't find him. But when Vintage Crop swooped on the leaders, I heard Robin's voice. Somewhere in that throng of 80,000, he was yelling as only a patriot with a bookie's ticket can. I didn't find his body until an hour later. Robin flushed and short in his action, mainly because of all the money he was carrying.

One reason the Cup had endured so well is that it keeps reinventing itself. In the early 1980s, it began to look worn. Too often it was won by mere handicappers, game horses but not the stuff of legend. People said the Cox Plate at Moonee Valley had more class. Without fanfare, the VRC began to handicap the Cup as a ‘quality handicap', which favoured good horses. Up popped winners as classy as Empire Rose, Kingston Rule and Let's Elope. Then, last year, the VRC attracted two European runners and took the race to the world.

So it was that in the wind and rain we heard Irish accents at the winner's stall. Back came Vintage Crop, a long chestnut with a sheepskin noseband and a plaited mane. Hauntingly Irish, it was: the light soft and grey, the grass bruised and squelching, the rain incessant.

Back, too, came Mick Kinane, Vintage Crop's jockey, mud spattered across his shoulders, face and crotch. He had struck the chestnut just five times with the whip. He had gone out along its neck, kept his head low, and helped the gelding to the line. Behind him, local jockeys were sitting up, flailing away, and generally demonstrating why Australian jockeys are no longer as popular as they once were in Europe. Vintage Crop changed the nature of the Cup. Kinane's example may yet change the way Australian jockeys ride.

As usual, the return to scale made the running of the bulls at Pamplona, Spain, seem dull. Eventually Rod Johnson, the then VRC chief executive, took Dermot Weld, Vintage Crop's trainer, and some of the print journalists to a bar. Here, we met a chameleon. One moment Weld would talk as clinically as a surgeon, explaining how he had planned the whole thing, which he had. Next, he was a romantic, reciting bush poetry. Can you imagine the winning trainer on Derby day at Epsom holding forth on Michael Magee, who owned a shanty on the outer Barcoo?

They drink at the Cup. Leaving the course in the dark after phoning in your story, you feel like the lone wowser at a Roman orgy. Cans rattle, glass crunches underfoot, tote tickets flutter, car boots gape. The air reeks of stale beer and you have to step around the bodies. Feeling absurdly chaste, one makes it to the street and hails a cab. Except the driver doesn't stop at once; he slows down and peers. ‘Why didn't you stop right away?' I ask as we head for town. ‘Got to be careful who you pick up here,' he says.

The carousing starts early. Arriving at the Cup one year, the first human I saw on the course was a youth, dead drunk and wearing only shorts, stretched out along the limbs of a shrub near the birdcage entrance, like a South American sloth but with tattoos. Far away a pipe band played ‘Scotland the Brave'. There were similar wildlife displays all over the course. The runners were going out for race one.

Long ago before the police brought precision to breathalyser queues, a knight of the realm was leaving the Cup in his Rolls with a crony. Both had enjoyed a top day of betting, drinking and lying. They were waved into the queue to be tested by the new-fangled breathalyser. Both at once tumbled into the back seat.

A policeman strode up. ‘Get this car moving . . .' he started. ‘What's going on? Who's driving?'

‘It's the damned chauffeur,' said Sir M.‘Just got out and ran away when we were signalled to stop. Must have been drinking.'

‘Well, one of you move the car,' the policeman demanded. ‘You're holding up the line.'

‘We can't possibly do that, officer,' said Sir M. ‘We're pissed.'

Broadly speaking, four classes of people go to the Cup. A few men come in morning suits and toppers. They are the last surviving members of a class to which they never belonged—the English aristocracy. They look more self-conscious than the working-class kids who come dressed as Madonna. There are the thousands of women who dress so elegantly. You think of the Rome's Via Veneto, then notice the lady is standing next to a drunk in a gorilla suit. And there is the suburban middle class. They stake out patches on the Flemington lawns. Things are so territorial here one thinks of the rookery scene in nature documentaries. Plots are marked out by a tartan rug on one's corner, a Great Western bottle on another. Oh, and there are the racing diehards. They mostly hate Cup day.

The Cup is a reference point. Grand Flaneur, ridden by the crack Tommy Hales, won in 1880, days before they hanged another useful horseman, Edward Kelly, after a $30 trial. By 1895, Grand Flaneur was champion sire and no one knew where Ned's body had been thrown. The wounded from Gallipoli limped around Flemington to see Patrobas win in 1915, the year Australia bought its nationhood with blood. Russia, a chestnut stallion, won in 1946, as the Allies realised they had licked Hitler only to inherit Stalin. Equally poetic, Think Big won in 1975, days before Gough Whitlam was sacked as PM by Sir John Kerr. A few years later at the Cup presentation, Kerr, slurring and looking like something gone to seed, tried to upstage a horse on Cup day.

In the country towns of my youth, the Cup was the reference point. A squint-eyed farmer would say: ‘We haven't had a crop as good as this since . . . buggered if I can remember . . . when The Trump won the Cup.'

One of the townsfolk was a defrocked jockey who once rode a double at Flemington. In Cup week people bought him beers and took him seriously. For the rest of the year we treated him for what he truly was: a derelict.

But, in the end, and rightly, we remember only the horses. Who can forget Light Fingers nosing out Ziema in 1965? Light Fingers, the mare, small and finely chiselled. Ziema, the gelding, big and homely. Roy Higgins throwing everything at the little girl, asking her to crash through the wall. Johnny Miller cuddling Ziema, who was inclined to give up if passed. Two bobbing white bridles, two hearts close to bursting.

And what about Empire Rose in the muggy heat of 1988? She was huge like the Himalayas and had a lot of bad disposition. With joints like water melons, she should have broken down, yet she won our hardest race, neck down low, ears laid back threateningly. Laurie Laxon, her trainer, said she won because she had a ‘good aggressive attitude'. What Laurie meant was that she hated other horses.

In 1960, the Centenary Cup, 101,000 of us turned up because Tulloch, the best horse most of us will ever see, was going around. That's just what he seemed to do: go around. Neville Sellwood took him via Footscray Tech and he flashed home seventh. Hi Jinx, the winner at 50 to 1, came back in silence. I was young and idolised Tulloch. I couldn't understand what had happened. I have matured a bit since; I think I now understand what happened.