Racing
Oh Antonio
Jeffrey Bernard It's fascinating to watch people fall by the wayside. To see a newcomer to racing getting hooked, then stumbling, then crashing, is like watching a man falling off the top of a building in slow motion. As far as Antonio goes, it's too late to shout out a warning. I'm simply trying to cushion the inevitable sickening thud by giving him a few winners on the way. Antonio is a Portuguese barman who serves in the Soho pub I use. He gives the impression of being carefree, but he's manic. His addiction to matters concerning the Turf began about eighteen months ago when he put 50p on a horse of Scobie Breasley's called Hittite Glory. The animal trotted up at 100-1 and Antonio got the idea that he could repeat the performance every day for the rest of his life. The fact that he doesn't know one end of a horse from the other makes things awkward for him and watching him studying the midday Evening Standard is sadly like watching a junkie who can't remember how a hypodermic's put together.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, when someone told him I knew the odd trainer and horse, he started asking me to mark his card for him every day and I think the results might have speeded him on his downward way. I started off by giving him a couple of winners a day and then last week I astounded myself by giving him four out of four which he did in a yankee. The very next. day I gave him Crash Course and Diorina which made up into a nourishing 32-1 double, followed by Pleasure Garden the next day which cruised in at 9-1.
I now actually fear for his sanity although I always thought he was suspect in the head. In two lousy weeks only, he suddenly knows it all, and last night I nearly killed him when he, like a baby trying to walk by himself for the first time, actually had the nerve to venture an opinion. 'That horse Wollow, he's no good any more,' he said. So crass was the remark that I can very nearly savour it now, but at the time I was tremendously tempted to jump over the counter and hit him over the head with a bottle of his own revolting Mateus Rosé. I know a teacher at St Martin's School of Art who felt much the same when one of his students told him that Rembrandt couldn't paint, and there was Antonio, only one and half flat seasons, a yankee and a couple of doubles old, telling me that Wollow was no good. They really make me want to weep do newcomers to racing.
But if only Antonio's lunacy stopped there. It doesn't. He has an irritating habit of telling me that the Portuguese discovered the world. Surely, I asked him the first time he said it, you mean a part of it ? No. Apparently not. Before Mr Ferdinand Magellan's trip there was nothing. Worse is to come. Antonio is now falling under the spell of one 'Irish' Des, a man who says that Lester Piggott can't ride racehorses. God preserve us from these people. Perhaps it's a bit like what Stevenson said about marriage. Betting on a horse is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts lightheaded, variable men by its very awfulness. It could even be simpler. Maybe I just happen to use a pub frequented by two lunatics.
What I have done recently is debate whether or not 1 should intentionally give Antonio a couple of pigs to back in the hope that it will put him off and shut him up for good, but even that harsh measure isn't as easy as it sounds. In the 'fifties and in the same pub I used to have a pound bet with a friend every day in which we'd try to go through the card naming a horse in every race that would not get placed. Time after time I thought and we both thought we'd done it and then some hack would get its nose in the frame at 20-1.
Anyway I'm glad Antonio wasn't with me when I went back to Newmarket on Saturday. The first person I met was Wollow's trainer Henry Cecil. He hopes the horse is going to win the Benson and Hedges at York next Tuesday and so do I. Apart from anything else, it would be nice to see some of the big prize money stay in England or at least see an English trainer at the top of the list. Cecil admitted that he felt a trifle childish about wanting to top the trainers' list— 'Then no one can say I'm no good'—but racing brings out a nationalistic streak in me that wants to see French challengers get stuffed. After discussing the well-being of Wollow, Cecil was good enough to drop a heavy hint to me that I should back HabeeMi. This brown filly by Lorenzaccio out of Dugo, owned by Charles St George and ridden by Tony Kimberley, really hacked up from her twelve opponents and won by an easy five lengths. I haven't seen a twoyear-old win so impressively for a long time and this one could turn out to be really something. Remember the name, Habeebti. Also remember that there's some good racing at Newbury on Saturday where Oats should win the lecture race. I just hope to God that Antonio doesn't take the day off and turn up there.
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