WHY BOTHER?

“The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room,especially if there is no cat.” Confucius.

I am giving serious thought towards submitting a request to have a new step introduced into the Medical lexicon of the evolution of accepting an Oncologist’s prognosis. It would be called “The Drinking Decaf Coffee” stage. That is, the “why bother” times.

Do some exercise – why bother? Eat healthy foods – why bother? Buy new clothes – why bother? Replace a faulty TV – why bother. Accept treatments that will prolong life but can’t deliver a cure – just drink a cup of decaf coffee instead! I am firmly stuck in the “why bother” phase at the moment and I need to find a way to put it behind me.

You can find support for absolutely any theory on the Internet. During one of my particularly flat times this week I Googled “societies dealing with the aged and the terminally ill” and I found this gem “Killing the elderly is called senicide, and Japan was not the only culture once familiar with the practice. In India, the Padaeans put to death old people and ate them while in North Africa, Troglodyte elders no longer able to tend their flocks asphyxiated themselves by fastening the tail of an ox around their necks. The Bactrians, who inhabited present-day northern Afghanistan, threw the old and sick out into the streets, where they were eaten by dogs. The Derbiccae, who lived east of the Caspian Sea, murdered males at age 70 and ate them; women were merely strangled and buried. The Heruli of Germany stabbed elders and burnt them on a pyre. In southern France, the Ligurians threw their parents, when they were no longer useful because of old age, off a cliff.”

Now I’m not suggesting we should eat the elderly but maybe a 70th Birthday Party culminating with throwing us off a cliff might be a good way of “dying with dignity”.😄

Some of my saddest recollections from years past concern my efforts to try and convince my dear Brother Johnny to accept life extending treatment for the Melanoma that tragically took his life way too early. I now realize pressuring him to undertake more therapies and extending his suffering was simply me being selfish and was something I had absolutely to right to do. Under no circumstances am I conflating Johnny’s agony with what I am dealing with – his physical pain was extreme and my suffering is mainly psychological – but dealing with Cancer has to remain the providence of the patient and not well meaning family and friends.

I already feel better now that I’ve aired my feelings of hopelessness with you and this week I will be back to doing everything possible to keep Rupert quiet for as long as I can.

Now back to the horses: As I mentioned in my last Post, we were absolutely blessed in having 3 Australian Horses of the Year and each one has a story attached to them. I had a few simple Rules that I employed in the “horse racing”years. 1/. When buying going horses shop locally and avoid Kiwis. 2/. When breeding, concentrate on putting reasonably bred mares to good stallions. 3/. Have the resultant foals reared by the best Farms in the business (it was no coincidence that our fortunes improved dramatically when we had Rob Van Dyke at Peppertree Farm rearing our youngsters and advising us on which ones he had the best opinions of). 4/. Give those resultant foals to the best Trainer you can find and for us Peter Manning was absolutely the best. 5/. Let the trainer do the training (a smart trainer will charge say $500 per week to train one increasing to $1000 per week if you want to tell him how to do it).

KATHRYN DANCER. He was a foal of 2000 and he won 42 races and $634,036 here and in the USA. Rob Van Dyke labeled him the pick of our foals that year so we decided to race him ourselves. Ron Lake is one of my very closest friends and his beautiful daughter Kathryn had lost her life to a car accident in 1999 and he took a 25% interest in this yearling on the proviso that he could name it Kathryn Dancer. As you will now undoubtedly be aware, I am far from being a believer, but I still think to this day, that maybe Kerryn Manning had an angel riding with her in the sulky as Kathryn Dancer dominated his age group as a two year old. He won 13 of his 15 starts that season winning Classics in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Bathurst and Adelaide. His biggest 2 year old win was in the $288,000 Australian Pacing Gold in Brisbane and the winning margin that night was officially a “bee’s dick” and just maybe Kathryn provided the little push he needed on the line to get the photo decision. I like to think she did and I like to think the equine Kathryn might just have provided Ron, his wife Rosalie and his son Julian with a bit of joy as he competed with and defeated Australia’s best.

PELICANRAMA. We have our Daughter Megan to thank for this Champion Filly and for her unusual name. Before she started taking an interest in partying and boys, Megan would regularly accompany me to the Track and became well known to all the regulars at the Trots even spending part of her school holidays with Barb, Peter and Kerryn Manning at their Great Western property. In 1994 when Megan was 13 we headed off to a Broodmare Sale at Oaklands Junction with the wise and threatening words of my wife and Megan’s Mum ringing in our ears – “if you two buy another bloody horse don’t bother coming home!” As was the way, we completely ignored Robyn’s entreaty and purchased a barren mare for the princely sum of $500. Beauteous was her name and she was actually knocked down to another buyer for $300 and we gave him a $200 profit on his purchase to secure her after getting assurances from one of the very good guys in Harness Racing in John Coffey that her breeding failures were due to bad luck rather than any physical issues she had. Beauteous was from a great family but hadn’t had much luck getting in foal the previous few years. The aforementioned Rob Van Dyke worked his magic however and got her in foal to the Farm’s great stallion Panorama and Pelicanrama was the result of that breeding. I’m not sure how many months later it was when we let it slip to Robyn that we had ignored her “no more horses” directive but it was quite a while. Pelicanrama went on to win a total of 55 races and $730,271 competing both here and in the USA. When her USA racing career was over she was returned to Australia becoming a successful broodmare with one of her Granddaughters winning this Season’s Queensland Oaks. Pelicanrama won 18 of 24 starts as a two year old against a banner crop of fillies and was one of the greatest youngsters I’ve had the pleasure to see race. Most her defeats as a two year old were directly attributable to bad racing luck and she competed in virtually every Classic on the calendar traveling along the Eastern Seaboard winning nearly all of them. Perhaps Pelicanrama’s greatest achievement though was turning Megan into a “Page 3 Girl” in the Herald Sun back in the days when it was a genuine newspaper. Her ownership of the filly was a featured article along with this gorgeous photo of A Girl With Her Horse❤️.

KNIGHT PISTOL. I saved the best and most unbelievable horse tale till last, for the unusually named Knight Pistol or Trigger as was his Stable Name or as our mate Glenn Tippet dubbed him The Terminator. Firstly the origins of his moniker. He was first Registered as Pistol Knight in recognition of a particularly heavy night on the drink but Victoria’s Bastard Registrar who has the initials of Richard King, determined that the name Pistol Knight might offend the sensibilities of some old lady if the horse ever made it to the races and made us reverse the order of the two words. I still believe that the Race Caller in Norway proclaiming “and here comes Pistol Knight flashing down the outside and I expect the owners will be pissed all night tonight celebrating this unbelievable victory” would have had a great ring to it, but because of the Bastard Registrar, history was denied a great race call.😂

I’m probably getting ahead of myself referring to The Terminator’s win in Norway so let’s go back to his beginnings. He was broken in for us by Kevin McFarlane just outside of Benalla and his was the typical good news/bad news story. The good news was that he broke in nicely but the bad news was, all he wanted to do was trot (he was bred to be a pacer). We had no use for a Trotter so Kevin organised for us to lease him to a group of owners headed up by Football Legend, Ted Whitten. After a couple of years, Ted’s trainer returned him to us with the advice that “he is a nice horse that should win a couple in the bush but we want a Metropolitan horse so he’s on his way back to you”. Living in the suburbs, returning him to our backyard wasn’t an option and eventually he was leased for life to my Brother In Law, Geoff Sanderson and his late wife Wendy to be trained in Stawell. They had far more success with Trigger than Teddy Whitten ever envisaged becoming a Moonee Valley winner and competing in two Trotters Interdominions. Knight Pistol had over 100 starts for Geoff and Wendy winning 17 before they surrendered the Lease in September of 1996. They returned the horse to the Manning’s property and I asked Peter could he drop the horse off to Glenn Tippet on his way to Moonee Valley on Saturday night with a view to him giving The Terminator a try. Peter said he’d never trained a trotter and wouldn’t mind having a crack at getting him going again and the rest is, as they say in the Classics, history. Three years and 39 wins later Peter had transformed Knight Pistol into one of the greatest Trotters ever seen in this part of the World. To this day, 25 years later, he is still the only Australian horse to ever win on the European Grand Circuit. Thankfully Geoff and Wendy stayed in the Lease of the horse and could enjoy his successes with us. The win on the European Grand Circuit remains the highlight of our Horse owning years. Getting Trigger an invitation to race in Scandinavia was like a well executed Military Exercise involving firstly introducing this old gelding to the Swedish Trotting Association and then convincing them that he was good enough to justify them spending US$56,000 in flying him there to compete in their Feature Races but somehow we did it. It was a 54 hour trip from the Farm in Great Western to the Stables in Sweden involving a roadtrip to Tullamarine and a flight to Copenhagen with stopovers in Perth, Singapore, Dubai and Dublin then a 13 hour truck trip to Stockholm. It was the adventure of a lifetime and introduced a young Kerryn Manning to the International World of Harness Racing. She became a superstar of the Sport.

 

Comment
You can also reply to this email to leave a comment.
Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Living With Rupert.
Change your email settings at manage subscriptions.
Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://rupertandruss.wordpress.com/?p=108
Powered by WordPress.com