Empire building is not a basic ingredient of the Irish character. As a race they have usually been too busy trying to fight their way out from under England’s own historic ambitions to bother with any such delusions of their own. Men like Vincent O’Brien and John Magnier were the exceptions. In this land, the land of W. B. Yeats, Eugene O’Neill, Sean O’Casey, and the Dublin-born writers Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brendan Behan, the pen has usually proved at least as mighty as the sword. All the same, Arthur Wellesley of Maynooth, later the first Duke of Wellington, scored a few points for the warrior classes. The empire of Vincent O’Brien and John Magnier began in 1973 when the master of Ballydoyle bought fifty per cent of the nearby Coolmore Stud Farm, owned at the time by the ex-Battle of Britain pilot and ace international bloodstock agent Tim Vigors. Tim did not particularly wish to manage a major, and growing, stud farm and he readily agreed to Vincent’s suggestion that they bring in John Magnier to run it. Within a few months there was an even bigger merger being prepared. Vincent, Tim and John asked Robert Sangster to buy into the partnership and, when he did so, they proceeded to combine Castle Hyde and Coolmore into the strongest thoroughbred-breeding complex in Ireland.
At the time they stood stallions like the milers Home Guard, Thatch, Gala Performance and King Emperor, the sprinters Green God and Deep Diver, and the winner of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, Rheingold. They had also acquired, for a sum not far off £700,000, the miler Sun Prince, who had won at Royal Ascot at two, three and four, but who had been defeated roundly in his last race in 1973 (the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot). This had caused many long faces in the Irish bar, particularly those of Robert and John who had signed the deal before the race. Sun Prince, though about seven pounds off top class, was nonetheless outstandingly good-looking and John Magnier thought he would make a sire, given time. Altogether these stallions were a useful, commercial bunch, but they were not world-class, and they were definitely not precisely what the triumvirate of O’Brien, Magnier and Sangster had in mind for the foreseeable future.
They agreed that their opening attack would be on the Keeneland Select Sale in the July of 1975. Each of them had his priorities laid out. Vincent himself, the man who trained them, who watched each day of every horse’s development, had some fairly stringent views on stallions which he wanted to be followed. He knew that Nijinsky had sounded a trumpet call for his father, Northern Dancer, the tiny battling Canadian champion who had won the Kentucky Derby by a neck in a record time of two minutes flat in 1964. He believed that the tigerish little Northern Dancer, who was not much bigger than a pony, held the key to world breeding. As a racehorse the Dancer had never been out of the first three in eighteen starts. He had won fourteen of them, including seven wins and two seconds as a two-year-old. These were, in the opinion of O’Brien, the battle honours of a top stallion, because they displayed outstanding early speed at a very young age and they signalled the heart of a lion, which he had already bequeathed to his son Nijinsky. They also suggested soundness, on the basis that weak-legged horses do not run eighteen races in fairly quick succession, far less remain in the firing line for honours in every one of those contests. A testament to the horse’s quality was that in Northern Dancer’s first six crops of foals, born between 1966 and 1971, nineteen were major stakes winners. In addition to Nijinsky there were: One For All, True North, Franfreluche, Alma North, Minsky (trained by Vincent), Northfields, Lyphard, and Northern Gem.
Vincent was certain of where he stood. ‘We must buy the Northern Dancers,’ he told John Magnier and Robert. ‘We must buy them at all costs. And the same goes for yearlings by Nijinsky. I am telling you. We must have them. I am very certain of that.’
He was fairly certain of several other stallions as well. He had a very keen eye for any yearling by the lightning-fast American Two- Year-Old Champion of 1970, Hoist the Flag, a son of Tom Rolfe and thus a grandson of the immortal, unbeaten Italian stallion Ribot. He also wished to look extremely carefully at any progeny of the great American Horse of the Year of 1958, Round Table, son of the Irish stayer Princequillo, who was born about ten miles from Ballydoyle in County Tipperary, and became Champion Sire of North America. The other stallion for whom Vincent carried a constant torch was the ex-Argentinian Champion, Forli, an American-based grandson of the English Derby-winner Hyperion. This stallion was producing a lot of winners, several for Vincent, including Home Guard, Thatch and Lisa-dell. No one could select the Forlis like Vincent O’Brien, and it was deeply ironic that the fastest, toughest racehorse in the world during the next four seasons, the American, Forego, should actually be running for a different trainer. However, Forego ran for his breeder Mrs Martha Gerry in the USA. He had never come up at auction. But if he had ever done so, he would have ended up at Ballydoyle. No doubt about that. Vincent would never have missed this big, dark, rather stern son of Forli.
Vincent O’Brien’s one luxury when travelling across the world to buy horses is shared with many of his fellow countrymen. Vincent is apt to get homesick when not surrounded very closely by other Irishmen. In America he liked to be accompanied by his younger brother Phonsie O’Brien, who was formerly a fearless amateur rider over the fences – he survived a terrible blunder at the last fence in the 1951 Grand National, but held Royal Tan together to finish second to Nickel Coin. Phonsie, a superb judge of any racehorse or hunter, was himself a very useful trainer of steeplechasers. He also enjoys a towering reputation in Ireland as a wit, a raconteur, a fisherman and a Chinese cook. He is as close to Vincent as any brother has ever been to another, and the years have not mellowed the great trainer’s appreciation of Phonsie’s ever-green and always-renewable stories. The younger O’Brien’s gift for words does in fact enjoy a rather wider audience than that locally based in County Tipperary and its borders, not least in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
President George Bush only has to hear the name ‘Phonsie’ and that great Texan grin of his seems to light up his whole face. They go fishing together almost every year, mostly with Nicholas Brady, Secretary to the United States Treasury. Their stamping ground is the warm shallow waters of the Florida Keys, which stretch in a nearly two-hundred-mile-long archipelago, swerving south-west from the entrance of Biscayne Bay all the way to Key West. The friendship began back in the late 1950s when Nick Brady’s father, James Cox Brady, first had horses in training with Vincent – one of them, Long Look, won the Oaks in 1964.
Jimmy Brady, who was Chairman of the New York Racing Association, naturally spent endless hours with Vincent discussing racing and breeding, on his fairly frequent visits to Tipperary. His son Nicholas however was not quite so devoted to the subject of horseracing and Phonsie would take him off to the quiet waters of the Blackwater, or the River Suir, to cast for trout, or perhaps, in season, for salmon. The two men both loved to fish and as the years passed Nick Brady became something approaching an artist among the pools and runs of the Tipperary, Cork and Kilkenny rivers. Sometimes he and Phonsie would go along to the River Nore, near Thomastown, and fish the reach above the great McCalmont estate of Mount Juliet. The fastest racehorse who ever lived, The Tetrarch, is buried here. And the river which flows swiftly past the hallowed ground is paradise for the salmon fisherman.
In turn Nick Brady invited Phonsie to America to fish with one of his oldest friends, George Bush, off the coast of Florida. And there they have gathered almost every year ever since. Their quarry is the fabled grey ghost of the flats, the chromium-coloured eagle-eyed bonefish, which forages in mere inches of water, and goes absolutely berserk upon taking the fly. Also he can swim like The Tetrarch could run. Fishermen, prowling the dappled, sunlit shallows silently in their flat-bottomed boats, are apt to go almost into a trance at the sight of the forked tail of a big bonefish. He is wary, frightened and warrior-brave, all at the same time. The chase is conducted slowly, in utter silence, but George Bush, Nick Brady and Phonsie O’Brien