Personal hell in ’Nam continues with collapse of another stout party
Put simply, my engagement with the racing world has never been anything other than brief and unhappy. Two examples will suffice to tell the tale.
Way back in the mists, when I was but a cub reporter for the fledgling Hot Press, it fell to me to write the gossip column at the back of the magazine. Flicking through the papers one day as I ripped off — sorry, I mean researched — material for my column, I spotted that a horse belonging to the guitar hero Eric Clapton had won some race or other in England.
“That’ll do me,” I thought, as I lashed out a quick paragraph containing all the salient details. Then, in what I imagined was an inspired piece of wit, I decided to add the following entirely fictitious postscript: “Unfortunately, the horse was later disqualified after it emerged that its owner had been doped.”
My hard labour over for another day, I retired to the pub and gave strict instructions to the barman not to put through any call unless it was from someone called Pulitzer.
But the call, when it came a few days later, was from a man in Eric Clapton’s management office in London. And a very irate man at that, who pointed out that Eric had fought a very brave battle with heroin and that for some smartass in a poxy little rag in Dublin to make light of such a thing was very bad form indeed. Furthermore, Hot Press would be hearing from the legal eagles.
Needless to say, I wasn’t going to take that sort of stuff lying down. So instead, I hid under a desk and made soft whimpering sounds as I imagined my nascent career as a journalist going down in flames and, in all probability, Hot Press going down with it.
But then, a few hours later, the man from Eric’s office was back on the line, this time in a much friendlier mood. I sensed the thaw immediately when he insisted on addressing me as ‘Lime’.
“I think I might have jumped the gun a bit earlier, Lime,” he chortled.
“I probably misunderstood that Irish sense of humour of yours.”
Turned out that, since our previous conversation, he’d spoken to Eric himself. And not only had Eric seen the item in Hot Press but apparently he thought it was so funny that he had cut it out and stuck it with a magnet to his fridge.
Once bitten, twice shy they say. But deadlines and writers’ block can make for a risky cocktail and thus, a few years later, I found myself filling some more white space, this time in the Irish Press, with yet another controversial piece on the racing game — controversial in the sense that its casual dismissal of the king of sports was in no way inhibited by the author’s manifestly vast ignorance of the subject. The famous trainer Jim Bolger spotted this dichotomy and, in an effort to make me see the error of my ways, generously invited me to be his guest at Leopardstown.
So it was that I found myself doing something I had never done before — placing a bet at a racecourse.
The beast in question was called The Beruki and, after a brave effort, the weight of my crisp fiver clearly became too much for him at the final hurdle, where he dramatically fell to the turf as the rest of the field thundered past. “Dat animal is brown bread,” observed a voice behind me. And, sure enough, it was soon confirmed that the poor animal, having broken his neck, had indeed run his last race.
So, just to recap, in my two previous flirtations with the racing world, I have (1) nearly closed down a magazine and (2) killed a horse. Clearly then, I was just the man to entrust with €50 in gambling stakes for yesterday’s Cheltenham card.
Now, I may know nothing about racing but I can bluff with the best of them. “That Denman is a right tank,” I said to the man standing beside me in the betting shop. He nodded his approval. Seizing the moment, I went on: “Whereas Kauto Star, to my mind, would be more of an attack helicopter.” After that, they left me to bet in peace.
As a proper mug punter, I obviously avoided both Denman and Kauto Star in the Gold Cup and instead plonked €30 quid on the nose of Exotic Dancer. I can only hope he does better on the lap-dancing circuit where he clearly belongs. €10 having already been blown on the equally aptly named Gone To Lunch in the 2.50, I was left seeking redemption in the remaining €10 I placed on Christy Beamish in the 4.05.
Inevitably, he fell a few from home, the only horse in the race to do so. Christy Beamish eh? The phrase, I think, is: collapse of stout party.
Once again I was reminded of the gnarled old hippy with the wild eyes, darkly nursing a beer in a pub and muttering to anyone and no-one about “the hell in ‘Nam”.
“Vietnam?” asks the barman. “No,” says yer man, “Cheltenham.”
