“Can we have your standout best bet each Saturday, I used to swear on your best bet when you were at the SMH?” Michael Oliver emailed. My reply: “Will oblige. Not as good as was though.”
Currently I hide behind a four-horse parlay in Play The Exotics hoping that I get one that doesn’t miss the start by two lengths and has a trouble-free passage due to astute navigation.
Alas best bets can be precarious. Oliver’s suggestion however takes me back to the Daily Express at Manchester in 1962, working with a turf writer Tom Dawson who tipped under the “Sir Harry” moniker.
Early on I noted he went into a state of rapture when his “nap” scored. Why the unbridled delight? Surely it was the leg of an accumulator that reaped a major dividend.
“No,” he explained. “I feel I may have done someone, who might have backed it on my suggestion, a good turn.”
Mind you “Sir Harry” was good at the caper and due to the memory, I will supply a “nap” for Oliver with all care but no responsibility.
Over previous decades I gleaned instincts regarding top hopes due to jockey and trainer habits. Now there are too many triers, with the wrong stablemate winning.
Once I worked with “The Sportsman” as a form guide with the benefit of “Pictureform”, race finishes and early stages photographed. The time for the last 600 metres was handy too.
Now horse players have sectional times and barrier trials galore, making up for the old-style track gallops, published on Tuesday and Thursday by the afternoon newspapers. We were regarded in a category more of tip slingers, urgers and touts, billed as “form analysts” in the modern generation.
All I can offer is an opinion, gleaned by study of “Best Bets” and “Winning Post”, excellent references.
Perhaps you will find the “nap” would be better titled “sucker bet” which we ran in “The Sun”, the great afternoon, long gone tabloid.
It morphed on radio into “lay of the day” at 2KY’s Turf Time. Dom Beirne, who became a leading bookmaker, ran up a remarkable string of top fancies that were beaten.
These days, garnished with the experience of 70 years, I regard every race as a gamble. Tony Bellanto, QC, outstanding at law and enthusiastic punter, maintained he was a “logical man and the favourite is the logical winner”. I countered it was also the logical dead-un or non-trier.
While I submit not every horse is at full throttle now, I doubt they are loaded up for defeat or under a grip that would hold a burning hot stove.
Still good things are taboo. “The Butterfly”, John Mort Green, who did well out of urging before finding religion in later life, maintained there should be an 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not back good things”.
Thus Columbus, who, in the Kia Ora Bloodlines, promises to put class into an otherwise drab program at Rosehill Gardens on Saturday.
As expected, The Rabbitohs were a major topic, with Jai Gray, overlooked by Wayne Bennett featuring, but we ventured into racing. Rarely does Bridge get enthusiastic about horses, and I go back prior to Sir Dapper (1983). I chide him about his lack of appearance at race meetings. “I’ll go when I get one good enough,” he counters. He was there for Classique Legend, one of the best winners of The Everest.
I first heard about Columbus from Chris Roots, once a colleague on the SMH, six months back. Roots can beam like “Sir Harry”.
“Les has got a horse by Dundeel that J-Mac is enthusiastic about,” Rooter disclosed.
Well, could Columbus be an ideal opening “nap” listed in Play The Exotics? Yet the advice of The Butterfly reverberates, also “remember as judges of racing, the jockey is the absolute worst”. Paterson not Presnell.
Hoofnote: Origin of Nap: “Derived from the old French card game Napoleon (or Nap), where declaring “Nap” meant a player claimed the highest hand or all the tricks.”
