Every Man Has His Price and So Does Every Horse
“Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations”
-Thomas Gray, poet and scholar
Thomas Gray knew the difference between business and love and that though there could never be absolute symmetry, they could co-exist. Jack Ingham once knew this as well. He knew he could turn a profit from his love of the racing game and still retain his passion and adoration for the horse. He knew about horse trading and he knew about champions and he knew about both ends of the racing spectrum. Few understood racing like Jack did and fewer still possessed the affection he had for the game. Big Jack, however, is long gone now.
And so soon will be his horses, his passion and much of his life work.
Word exploded down the wire with a great deal of force that Bob Ingham had agreed to sell the entire Woodlands Stud operation to Darley Stud, owned and funded by an Arab oil tycoon with a certain keenness for racing and a real desire for world domination. The stud properties. The training facilities. The stallions. The broodmares. The yearlings. The foals. The racehorses. Octagonal. Lonhro. Forensics. Paratroopers. Canny Lad. Crown Lodge. Everything will go to Darley except the famous cerise racing silks.
And even those most famous of silks, cerise now synonymous with success in these parts, will no longer carry the same weight that they have for my lifetime and probably longer.
For somewhere in the vicinity of $500 million, an Australian institution, the Australian racing institution, was sold to foreign interests. The racing empire built over nearly fifty years was reduced to a dollar figure and sold off. Bob Ingham, the remaining chicken king, was given an offer he said he could not refuse and that was that. A simple act of commerce, the free market at work, a mutually acceptable business dealing. And there is nothing immoral or even slightly unethical about it. Rather, Ingham has ensured that all staff will retain there jobs after the deal is done, from trainer Peter Snowden and stud manager Trevor Lobb through to the stable hands and trackwork riders.
That, however, does not take away from the sadness or the shock of seeing the operation built up by two Australian boys sold to a global racing power with domination in the eyes. A fairytale has finished, an icon passed, the sturdy hand of consistency no longer rocking the cradle. It probably shouldn’t come as a shock. Big Jack was gone. And John Hawkes, the head trainer for the glory years of Woodlands, he had moved on as well. When pondering all of this in a melancholy mood, I couldn’t help but hear the words of Ted Dibiase in my ears. Dibiase used to constantly exalt the mantra of “every man has his price” and though he was only a fair-to-middling wrestler and I was only a wide-eyed eight year old kid, his words rang true then and they ring even truer today. It does not matter who you are or what you possess, everything has its number.
It must, however, be said that if Big Jack was still kicking about today then it is doubtful whether that last sentence would be as embedded in concrete as it is now. Bob, he enjoys his racing and seemingly always has. But Jack, well, he seemed to live and breathe the game. And nobody, from his closest confidant to his most loathed enemy, would dare say with any conviction that Jack would have sold the lot. He seemed to have a greater affection for racing, a better understanding of the true importance his racing empire had across the continuum of Australian racing. When Big Jack was alive, betting big and enjoying the rumblings and ruminations of the turf, it would be a most dubious proposition indeed to believe that all the money in Monaco would have been enough to pry Woodlands away from him.
But that is by the by. There is very little to be gained by dealing in hypothetical musings about the probable actions of a man long dead and not all that well known by your author. It certainly won’t change the fact the Woodlands is no longer the fairytale racing operation of the chicken kings, who started with a lone broodmare and ended up with an empire.
And now all we have are the memories, a tale filled with champions and greatness and love and people and legend and standing and respect.
No racing man or woman will ever forget the feats of the mighty Octagonal, the people’s champion, beloved and adored by a racing public besotted with his will to win. His three-year old season will stand the test of time as one of the finest ever seen on the Australian turf. Against a class that included Saintly, Nothin’ Leica Dane and Filante, Octagonal won seven times that magical season. Those wins included a memorable Cox Plate triumph over the perfectly-ridden Mahogany, the Sydney Triple Crown and an amazing Tancred success. He went on to win a second Tancred, an Australian Cup, an Underwood Stakes and a Chipping Norton. When the Big O was retired, the leading money winner up to that point, Randwick was showered in cerise and tears flowed like a funeral. It could certainly be argued that Octagonal was the most popular horse since Phar Lap. And to the eternal credit of the Ingham’s, his popularity was fostered by them, never fearing opponents, never running from the challenge like many with breeding interests in mind. Octagonal took on the best and often beat them. He wasn’t perfect but he had the courage of a lion and nobody ever questioned the heart of Octagonal. Nor did they question the intentions of the Ingham boys. They owned a champion and like the rest of us, they wanted to see him race.
And then there was his son Lonhro, another champion, the Little O, the Black Flash. Perhaps because of his father, perhaps because of his owners, perhaps because of his stunning black looks and perhaps due to a combination of them all, Lonhro was adored by nearly all racegoers, reflected in the fact he started favourite in all but four of his thirty-five races. The market was right more often than it was wrong, Lonhro winning twenty-six races including eleven at group one level. Two wins, however, stand out when the memory switches to Lonhro and those heady turn-of-the-century days. There was his amazing Caulfield Guineas triumph when he swept down the outside like a tidal wave, coming from last to score in such brilliant fashion. And, of course, his Australian Cup fightback, when on the canvas and “in desperate trouble”, he picked himself up and ran down Delzao in a victory that will live on in the legend of the Australian turf. “He’s coming, he’s gonna get there, yes, Lonhro won it, what a champion, what a way to go”. Those elegant Greg Miles words still send a chill down the spine.
There were, of course, plenty of other champions. Viscount, Guineas and Freemason. Forensics, Unworldy and Sweet Embrace. John’s Hope, Arena and Paratroopers. Sports, Strategic, Niello. The list goes on and on, all the way back to that single mare, Valiant Rose.
Woodlands Stud, of course, was more than just horses. It was about people. It was about Vic Thompson and John Hawkes and Peter Snowden. It was about Trevor Lobb. It was about Darren Beadman and Darren Gauci and Larry Cassidy and Shane Dye. And it was about everyone who ever had anything to do with the organisation and anybody who has ever stepped onto a racetrack knows that plenty of people were connected to Woodlands. A bristly chap known only as “Stinky”, a colourful identity at Thoroughbred Park for many years and one always seemingly down on his luck, used to help break-in horses for the Ingham’s and never once spoke anything but glowingly about the operation. Many years ago when handing out party propaganda at a polling booth in my racketeering days, a cute and quick-witted trackwork rider for Crown Lodge was also engaging in the ceremony found outside church halls and schoolyards every election day. It was only in recent years that an associate, One Thumb Willy, called to say how impressed he was with Woodlands after he had bought a tried horse that turned out to be a dud. Woodlands promised to replace it with another despite the fact that they held no culpability for the original horse’s failures.
That dream is over now, though. Bob Ingham had a price and a rich Arab oil baron had the cash. What once stood tall as the pride of the Southern Hemisphere is now just one more cog in the racing machine that will one day rule the world. If Woodlands can be bought, well, so can anything. Every horse has a price. And so does every man. Though rarely does that price correctly value the true cost of selling one’s soul.