Racing
Mistakes
Jeffrey Bernard
I offer you the story of last Saturday's events at Sandown Park in the hope that you might learn something from my idiocy. After three races I was £20 down and licking my wounds in the Members' Bar by the paddock when who should 1 sec but the jolly rotund figure of Johnny Dyer who bets and trades in Tattersalls under the name of George Picken. We said Hallo and then, thinking to save myself the walk to the ring and back, I decided to give him my fiver for the fourth race there and then. Although Tree Tangle was considered by all and sundry to be something of a certainty I had a sneaking sus that Flitgrove would win and so said, have a fiver to win Flitgrove.'
As soon as I'd spoken, Johnny's wife, who was scrutinising the race card, said, 'Flitgrove doesn't run.' I still didn't like Tree Tangle, so I said, 'Well, in that case, I'll have a fiver to win Supreme Halo.' Johnny took the money and left the bar to go about his business in the ring. A couple of minutes later they were 'off' and I settled down to watch the race on the bar television set. You can imagine my surprise when I saw the supposedly absent Flitgrove go to the front immediately, stay there for the two miles and eighteen yards of the race and win at no less than 10-1.
What you probably can't imagine is how utterly choked I was when Mr and Mrs Dyer completely ignored me after the event. They not only ignored me, but they didn't offer me my fiver back and they didn't even offer me a drink, let alone a consoling shrug of the shoulder. Now a bet is a bet is a bet, but when the mistake is originally perpetrated by the bookie's wife who is, incidentally, almost a professional punter, then you might think there would be some little redress. The moral of all this is loud and clear—if you're going to spend half the day in the bar, and the horses are just about the only people who don't, then you're going to make silly mistakes.
I should have checked up for myself to see whether Flitgrove was or wasn't running. So anyway, that's how another £55 less tax got away.
Apart from that it was a delightful day. Peter Blackwell, who works for William
Hill, invited me up to their box where I got
an even better view of losing my money and I had a drink with Jarvis Astaire and Sam Burns. Burns used to manage Terry Downs and years before that, when he worked with Jack Solomons in the gym in Windmill Street, he had an office boy called Harry Simmons who turned pro at about the same time as I did. We used to spar with each other and Simmons used to give me a weekly thrashing. At Sandown Park Burns said
Simmons was pretty useless and couldn't punch very hard, which gave me a pretty good idea—as if I needed it—of just how useless I must have been.
Reminiscing about all that I saw my final bet of the day go into reverse gear after jumping the last. I'll tell you one thing about this racing game and that's that it teaches you how to lose. What you do is linger in the bar after the last race and have yet more drinks with the trainers, jockeys and immovable people known as drunken punters. When the barmaids eventually shut down at about 6.30 p.m., then you don't give a hoot and, after all, you realise that tomorrow's another day.
We now come to Schweppes time. This
is my favourite race of the season, being a sucker for tricky handicaps, and I'll tell you what I've already backed ante-post so as you know just one to leave alone. Tiepolino. That's the one. Richard Baerlein of the Guardian, a man whose judgment I trust even more than my bank manager's, says Artifice will win.
Brown Admiral didn't do us any favours last week, but I hope Tiepolino will do me one this Saturday. He was gelded last spring and he's taken a bit of time to get over it, according to his trainer Josh Gifford. He actually sounds slightly puzzled when he tells you, but it's an operation that I'm pretty sure would take me more than a year to get over.
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