News

More than smoke and mirrors to legend Bart Cummings

26th Oct 2009

Herald Sun - Matt Stewart - Sunday, 25 October 2009

ONE afternoon last year, I happened be in front of Bart's Flemington stables. I can't recall why. Another reporter, Mick Hedge, was also there.

Bart welcomed us at the front gate and invited us out back near the feed room, where the three of us chewed the fat for about an hour.

Bart owns the last of the old suburban stables, like the ones that used to be in side streets at Epsom and Caulfield; brick, rather than aluminium and steel, pigeons, pet cats and blue-blood horses poking heads through nooks and crannies.

Bart was in no rush and Mick and I had him to ourselves.

I had always been told that Bart feels far more comfortable among his horses and chaff bags than tape recorders and microphones and mad race-day crushes.

He certainly seemed at ease this day, telling us yarns, asking us about our families and interests, telling us why most of the horse boxes around us had mirrors in them.

He claimed he came up with the mirrors idea.

He said it fooled the horses into thinking they had room to move, twice the space. He said it calmed them. Hedgey and I gave each other a sideways glance but who were we to think Bart was bonkers.

I remember wondering if Bart had claimed someone else's invention as his own because Bart is well known for mischief like that.

He used to arrive at the trackwork hut at Flemington just as the Herald Sun quiz was being read out by his foreman, Reg Fleming. Bart's strike rate was phenomenal.

He eventually fessed up that the first thing he did back at the hotel at 4am was read the quiz and memorise the answers.

After our afternoon with Bart, Hedgey suggested he and I have a counter meal at the Metropol in North Melbourne.

Hedgey likes horse racing because, for him, it is a sanctuary from the horrors of the stuff he usually writes about for AAP.

He has flown to tsunami disaster zones and witnessed horrors most of us couldn't imagine. He has sat in court and reported on murders.

Not much shocks or impresses him.

But he said something to me at the Metropol that dawned on me at the time and dawned on me again after the Cox Plate yesterday, as Bart ambled through the mounting yard, surrounded by the now standard horde of media and well-wishers.

Hedgey said that our hour with Bart, just passing the time with the pigeons cooing and the afternoon drifting by, would probably be our most cherished ever memory. Maybe a dead heat with kids and marriage.

He said it would be like telling the grandkids that you once played kelly pool with Lindrum (a mate of mine once did something similar, beating Eddie Charlton in pool at the Royal Hotel in Bacchus Marsh), or tossed Bradman the golf ball that he whacked into the concrete water tank with his cricket stump.

Hedgey said that in years to come, we would tell people we used to hang out with Bart Cummings -- well, we did once -- and they'd think it was the equivalent of saying we had ridden Phar Lap.

This old man just keeps trumping himself. He has added so many layers to the legend that they all merge together.

There's nothing more that can be said, thought or written about Bart.

One reporter was so out of chips and angles last week, after Bart's Caulfield Cup, that he wrote that Bart was so good at training horses that he must be a horse.

I ran into that reporter amid the Cox Plate pandemonium yesterday and he joked he was jack of Bart and that he would be writing about the two-year-old race instead.

You could write about the instinctive mastery of the great man, how he turned a green, raw three-year-old, incapable of keeping up in a Caulfield Guineas, into a bombproof, front-running locomotive in the Cox Plate just 14 days later.

But with Bart this sort of thing is commonplace - just another day in the life.

Bart is the ringmaster, but he has his helpers.

Yesterday it was Glen Boss.

The myth is that the toughest, classiest horse always wins the Cox Plate, that it is run at such a merciless clip that the lesser and less experienced horses always wilt and the big guns take over.

In recent times it has lulled riders of favoured backmarkers into a false sense that the race will come back to them. It didn't last year and it didn't yesterday.

There is no doubt that So You Think was a classy, untapped three-year-old before he graduated to something far more grand at 4.30pm yesterday.

But he had come off an unplaced run in the Caulfield Guineas, albeit with excuses.

He star-gazed in his gallop at the Valley on Tuesday.

On paper he looked a smart three-year-old who still had a lot of mental growing up to do and no time to do it.

Enter Boss, who rolled the dice and decided the only way to beat the older horses was to grab the race by the scruff of the neck, make the play.

It was like Maldivian in 2008; precision and procession.

Boss shot the feather-weighted three-year-old out of the gates, was in front at the post the first time and from that point on, to win the race with a subtle game of cat and mouse.

Boss gave the colt a breather at the 700m, then released the brakes and the race was over.

Boss is an extrovert, Bart the opposite.

Bart paddled around the winner's enclosure, mumbling to the microphones that the secret to his success, the magic, was simply "good horses".

He was shuffling about as Boss came towards him aboard the sweating, heaving So You Think.

Boss pointed to Bart with a wide grin, shaking his head. "Legend, you're a legend," he told Bart.

Hedgey wasn't there yesterday. I heard he was taking a sabbatical after a tough year on the world disaster circuit.

I bet he was watching though, and remembering the day we had with Bart, talking about horse mirrors.