'I had time for 10 fags during the race'
Now “tipping away” from his base at Moynalty in Co Meath, McDonogh has never hit those dizzy heights again and, in truth, doesn’t reckon he’s going to at this stage.
“Look,” he says patiently, “you’ve got to realise in this game that you’re lucky to even get one good horse. Getting them on a regular basis is something you never even contemplate.”
And that’s how it is for the ‘small man’ in racing; in this country, no one fits that description better than Michael ‘Mouse’ Morris.
The son of titled gentry, the diminutive Mouse has never conformed to stereotype. Having turned his back on a gilded education at Ampleforth to become a jockey at 15, he went on to become one of the brightest young training talents the country had seen by 28.
However, his initial successes were out of sync on a graph that has only produced minor spikes in the ensuing decades. His innate honesty — he eschewed the practice of conning people out of good money for worthless racehorses — plus difficulties in his personal life and a seemingly endless battle to build his Fethard base against the combined forces of the taxman and the bank meant that after his initial training impact with Champion Chase winner, Buck House, there were more troughs than peaks.
Even so, with a combination of hard graft and a personal touch rare among top-class trainers, Morris persisted and on St Patrick’s Day this year his endeavours were rewarded with a victory in National Hunt’s blue riband chase.
His characteristically tousled mane gets swept back by a hand gripping the trademark cigarette as he recalls the day he once again entered racing folklore as the trainer of a racing giant. It can be hard to get a word out of Mouse at the best of times, and getting him to recall the detail of the day is not going to be easy, as the opening exchanges prove. “How did the day start off?” he repeats my question.
“Nervous.”
But, like all good stories, it does eventually emerge. Owned by Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, War of Attrition came to Morris’s yard as a four-year-old with a reasonable, if not entirely impressive, point-to-point record.
In 2004, having recorded victories under both David Casey and Conor O’Dwyer (who piloted him to victory over Mac’s Joy at Navan) he was sent to Cheltenham and ran hotpot Brave Inca to a quarter of a length in the Supreme Novices hurdle. Suddenly, all Mouse’s initial good feelings about his charge were becoming reality.
There was a blip at Cheltenham 12 months later when he was a well beaten seventh of 19 in the Arkle after a dreadful blunder at the third, but Morris never doubted the horse’s intrinsic strengths.
Then, last season, the War of Attrition he had always believed in began to come to the fore and started to impinge on the racing public’s collective consciousness. Having beaten Watson Lake at the tail end of the previous season in the Swordlestown Novice’s Chase at Punchestown, he began the 2005/6 campaign with successive wins over Kicking King and Rathgar Beau, before getting turned over in the John Durcan chase at Punchestown.
When he came second to Beef or Salmon in the Lexus Chase at Leopardstown over Christmas, O’Dwyer and Morris were convinced they had a Gold Cup prospect on their hands.
The owner, however, was not so sure and advocated a trip over a less demanding two-and-a-half mile chase at Cheltenham, in a race sponsored by his own company. He would later bow to their collective wisdom, however.
“He had a hiccup in the Durcan, that’s all,” Morris recalls, “but that was only minor and he came out 10 days later and ran a cracker at Leopardstown.
“That’s the way things have to go for you at Cheltenham. The year before we’d enough hiccups, and then he didn’t live up to expectations in the Arkle.
“After he finished second to Brave Inca in the Supreme Novices, the mistake was that I opened my mouth and said this was one of the best horses I’d ever had. But then the bubble kept bursting. We always thought he was special, but we should have said nothing.
“We knew that with an average bit of luck — more than an average bit of luck, really — he was capable of winning big races and going right to the top.”
After that four-length defeat at the hands of Beef or Salmon, War of Attrition was put away and was not seen again in public for 78 days, until Cheltenham itself. Of the day itself — and partly from the nervous start — Mouse recalls that while “Michael (O’Leary) was very calm and collected, I was far from it”.
He was really worried when he saw the state of the ground.
“I walked it in the morning and there was fresh ground on the inner and the outer wasn’t too bad either, but the middle was like a ploughed field. It was a disgrace.
“We had to make a plan there and then and Conor didn’t fancy going round the inner too much at the pace they’d be going and, in all likelihood having Iris’s Gift, a notoriously dodgy jumper, hugging the rail in front of him. But I told him I didn’t really care what he did as long as he was comfortable with it and as long as he didn’t use the middle of the track,” the handler says.
“The way I felt was that we were lucky. I mean, Jesus Christ, you have to be very lucky to even get a horse to Cheltenham. Getting them there is one thing and getting them around and in a position to win is entirely another.”
O’Dwyer had piloted Imperial Call to win the Gold Cup in 1997 and did so riding Fergie Sutherland’s horse around the outside of the extended three miles two furlongs of the Gold Cup course. He was about to do so again.
“The thing I remember most is that I had time for 10 fags, 11 maybe, during the course of the race,” Morris recalls.
The majority of the details are blurred until his internal video machine cranks into gear as the horses hit the top of the hill for the second time.
O’Dwyer had been handy throughout, but when he passed Forget the Past as they went past the dolled-off third last, it seemed like only one horse could challenge War of Attrition — and that was Willie Mullins’ Hedgehunter, with Ruby Walsh aboard.
“I thought I was dreaming. What we know and what we expect to see happening is completely different from what could or might happen. Seeing it happen and believing it was happening was very strange. I was wired straight to the moon.
“I can’t honestly remember the emotions or what I was thinking or doing. I’m sure I was shouting at him — ‘go on, ya dog ya’ — or something along those lines.”
Pertinently, Morris knew Hedgehunter could never match his fellow for pace and while he hung on doggedly under the urgings of Walsh, the trainer knew his horse would not give up the fight.
And so it was. War of Attrition was booted home by O’Dwyer by two-and-a-half lengths and redemption had been found by one very delighted man who was fast running out of smokes.
“I only have 35 or 40 horses and the chances of getting a Buck House was a privilege,” Morris recalls.
“To get one better than him is a miracle. Believe me, there are hundreds of guys in this business who never get a horse like a Buck House or a Trapper John — never mind a War of Attrition. To have him in the yard means a hell of a lot, not just to me but also to the people who work here, the people in the village, a lot of folk.”
BUT that was then; the question now being asked is, can the seven-year-old, soon to be eight, repeat the feat?
As the team accepted their prize for having the ‘horse of the year’ at the HRI awards earlier this month, Michael O’Leary was manfully playing down his horse’s chances but, typically, Mouse was keeping his powder dry.
“So far, so good this season, but there’s a long road to go yet. He’s run three times, winning first time out and then going under narrowly to both Beef or Salmon and In Compliance. He’ll run again in the Lexus and the aim is to get him back to Cheltenham, but you have to take it step by step. He won’t run between Leopardstown and Cheltenham.
“He has certainly got stronger over the summer. He was at home in Gigginstown Stud (O’Leary’s equine enterprise) and that has to be a bonus. But there’s nothing easy in this game and with Kauto Star coming on, we won’t be short of competition. The thing now is that I have one (Gold Cup) and nobody will ever take that away from me.”
Mouse’s instincts tell him Kauto Star will not be run by his connections in the Gold Cup, but in the Champion Chase instead. Either way, he’s not bothered.
Like Des McDonogh, he’s had his champion but was lucky enough to find a second. On that basis alone, he’s a happy man — whatever 2007 brings.
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