WHEN CASH WAS KING
Asmussen spent just one year in Ireland as the number one jockey for Ballydoyle but it was far from plain sailing
Asmussen spent just one year in Ireland as the number one jockey for Ballydoyle but it seems that he was the only one who enjoyed his time here – the talkative Texan rode over 3,000 winners in a glittering global career but still fondly recalls his days in Ireland, even if the punters and the press railed against him
CASH ASMUSSEN guffaws into the cooling Texas evening with such relish one almost expects a nearby coterie of hyenas to respond in kind. “Kathy Barry!” Cash Asmussen hollers. “If I’m going to be remembered for something, I’d rather hope not to have her name alongside mine on the tombstone buddy!”
A story resides behind the reverberating laugher. A serious tale, too. “I need to clarify some things,” he adds. But hey, the story is more fun so we’ll start there.
During the brief, glory days when a racecourse re-emerged Phoenix-like in the eponymous park by the Liffey, Asmussen spent an even shorter stint there during his year-long employment, in 1987, as Ballydoyle’s pre-eminent rider.
For all its sylvan charms and quaint stands, Phoenix Park was a racecourse much like any other; more horses lost than won; punters held these same enduring truths.
But even when there were days there when Asmussen won more than he lost, he still ended up a loser. It is the nature of any sport but in this one of Kings, it stands out more; after all, AP McCoy rode more than three times as many losers as winners.
And so here we are on a steaming August Saturday, the beer glasses and spent dockets accumulating in mountains of littered despair as the field from the Persian Bold Stakes return to the winner’s enclosure.
Asmussen’s Golden Temple, switched tardily from the rails, swept into the picture but lost the judge’s verdict; and, at 9/4 favourite, a significant wedge of the locals’ money.
Drink and despair marry into melody. “California here I come!” the choir chant, “right back where I started from.”
And then a lone voice. “Ah jayzis you wouldn’t f**king ride Kathy Barry!”
Asmussen, all languid elegance, a man who seemed to only move when he really needed to do, jerked his head around and flashed a steely stare with his turquoise eyes.
“Well sir, if you pass me her number, I’ll give her a bell some time!”
Laconic humour wasn’t a big thing in the Ireland of the 1980s.
“He should be sent back to America, preferably on the Titanic,” stormed one anguished eyewitness. “It is like literally having money taken out of your pocket while your hands are tied. I have never been more incensed in my life,” puffed an, erm, incensed ally.
Irish crowds jeered him at the starting stalls and cursed him at the finish.
“Yankee go home,” they cried.
The Irish press had a field day, too; back then, racing writers here wielded significant power – this organisation alone had more than a half-dozen correspondents – and they were fiercely parochial, too; only a few were loyal to the charms of a man who rivalled Jay Gatsby for chutzpah.
Columnists, under a variety of “noms de plume”, deployed anonymity to frequently and freely lambaste him, as they pined for Vincent O’Brien’s erstwhile eminence, Pat Eddery, who only spoke when spoken to, and even then, not much.
The vituperation of the time reminds us that Twitter has only re-fashioned plunging discourse, not invented it; even JR Ewing, another visitor to the Park, was not as violently detested as this ten-gallon ego, it seemed.
“The press need to know it is very easy to incite the crowd by writing things which are derogatory and which give the crowd an excuse to boo and jeer,” bemoaned John Oxx, who retained Asmussen as second stable. “That is not responsible behaviour.”
It also didn’t help that, like Steve Cauthen, who appeared in these pages a while back, Asmussen’s imported style disputed constant whip use, which made it seem as if he was disinterested; or, at least, not as interested as his backers felt he should be on their behalf. Sitting back on the horse seemed to indicate to punters a lack of eagerness.
Damned
“I’m taking some slagging, then,” Asmussen says, now. “So like when you win four in a day and you lose one, which used to happen a lot, the headlines read “CASH LOSES ANOTHER”. And you just know when the guy picks up the paper, he’s saying, that damned American lost another race!”
That’s the fun story; now here’s the solemn sermon.
By the end of the season, Asmussen had 62 wins in Ireland, second only to champion Michael Kinane; throw in his UK trips and he boasted 126 winners overall (at a rate of 38 per cent).
But that is not remembered, nor his stunning piloting aboard classy juvenile, Caerwent, in the National Stakes, nor the outrageous performance on Eurobird on stodgy ground in the St Leger, nor the multiple winners.
“And let me tell you, in my career never did I have a 38 per cent rate for one season. Now if you’re a bookmaker, you can get a whole pile of publicity to slag the American jock with a fairly large pay cheque and a larger attitude.
“And if you have a few people coming to the races to bet against that guy, that’s a bookmaker’s dream. Me? I was just trying to win races. But I’ve never had a 38 per cent win average in my life. I came with a good average but never close.”
He came as a recidivist champion in two different countries – 1,000 winners and €20m Stateside for starters before being tempted to France by Stavros Niarchos in 1982; the pair would team up with O’Brien for Tate Gallery’s National Stakes win in 1985.
Only his sojourn in Ireland interrupted a five-year reign as champion jockey in France; in 1991, Suave Dancer and he were inextricably linked thanks to their extraordinary Arc success.
He would end the decade with backto-back Irish Derby wins, returning to a more mature audience in belated acknowledgement of his undoubted class; Montjeu, a case in point in a storied campaign he shared with Kinane in 1999.
Overall, he rode more than 3,000 winners in a storied career broaching two continents, three countries and spanning four different decades, scalping numerous Group One successes. And yet, befitting the lazy perspective of many an Irish person, he is deemed a failure thanks to one year when quite the opposite was in the case.
Also, aside from the persuasive evidence of the numbers, so many factors were against him; for one thing, if not quite the only thing that mattered, O’Brien’s stellar career was in decline, as was the ammunition being provided to him by his coterie of normally savvy owners.
“We didn’t have the bullets other guys had,” the 58-year-old concedes, without relish. “It was a tough time in that spot. We didn’t have the number of grade stakes winners that were demanded. I was a team player and when you’re there, you’re only as good as a team.”
If blame is to be assumed, he will share it. His reputation was harmed, but only temporarily.
One horse summed up the malaise; Seattle Dancer, the yearling secured for Ballydoyle in 1985 for a then record purchase price (€13.1m, €28m in today’s money) with a pedigree (Nijinsky-Northern Sun) which screamed the kind of dollar signs Asmussen used to attach when pleasing autograph hunters.
But, in an eerie parallel to modern times, a virus had swept the yard a year later and none of the owners, from Niarchos to Susan Magnier to Sangster and O’Brien himself, ever saw him don silks as a two-year-old.
As a three-year-old, he won two Group Twos, finished fifth in the French Derby and second in the Grand Prix de Paris.
“He would have had to win three derbies just to live up to his reputation,” rues his former pilot. “He won some awful good races but the
price tag wore heavy when everyone around the place was thinking he’d be the next Nijinsky.”
You would think such a miserable year might have tainted the American’s reflections but it is the reverse; Asmussen thoroughly enjoyed his time in this country even if so many others apparently did not.
“I have great memories of my year in Ireland with Ballydoyle and with John Oxx” he demurs demonstrably. “Great stuff. Great stuff! You leave Tipperary in the morning and win three or four races somewhere in the country, return and have a little sleep at Cashel Palace. Then get up and talk to Denis (Heffernan, the hotel’s inimitable, legendary bar man) and have a couple of Budweisers. A nice dinner over at Chez Hans near the Rock.
“The next day you breeze a few horses in Ballydoyle. Then they pick you up in a little plane, whip you to York and win a few more races over there. And then come back home and have another nice dinner. It was a tough job but somebody had to do it. It was that good.
“Robert Sangster would come to the Wednesday night meeting in Phoenix Park. Everybody would have a jar or two. You’d get beaten on a favourite and they would give you a good description of what they thought of you!” He was the last to leave work in the yard and the first to buy beer at the bar.
Adored
“And I adored France. We’d race five days a week and then come back to Chantilly. A long day would be a bullet train to Bordeaux, a bit of lunch and a few rides. It was a beautiful set-up. You’re home at seven every night. Good racing on good tracks.”
If it sounds like fun, that’s because it was. And always has been. His parents were immersed in the game; dad Keith used to ride the fairground tracks and the kids – Steve is a renowned trainer – would spend their days in the barn with their mother, Marilyn, who trained horses.
To that particular manner born. “I think so! My mom jerked me out of the front room at about the age of three for beating up on her couch so I figured I probably jumped out of her with a bridal rein in one hand and a saddle in the other.
“I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps. He was my mentor and my tutor. He allowed me the opportunity to show the ability that I had and to be educated on a grander scale.”
It started on a modest scale; at 16, he hustled his way to a tiny town, 150 miles from home, to take part in three races at an outlaw track. He won all three and the tidy sum of €1,500.
Getting paid was the bonus but an engine, too; he once negotiated a six-figure deal when asked to move off Dancing Brave to let Eddery ride. That’s a long way from 500 bucks a race. Cash appreciated his value because he knew he was worth it.
“To this day, that is what keeps me fresh,” he says as you remind him of his hustling days. “I’m a student of the game. The horse doesn’t care what you did yesterday. He doesn’t care how many races you’ve won. He doesn’t care how much he cost.
“The problem is what you see in the mirror in the morning. Not the horse. That’s the truth. It’s your job to know what he is capable of doing, or not doing. If you’re as spoilt a horseman as I have been, to have the sweat from the shoulders of the greatest horses God gave breath to dripping on to my body, and the sweat from my body dripping onto theirs, it’s something else. And if you’re not able to communicate with that horse, you better learn a new language.
“If a man or woman wants to be true to himself, the humility we get in our relationship with horse at every level comes from that attitude earned in my younger schooling; to be hungry for knowledge about the horse. How he moves. How he thinks. How he is bred. Because that is an indication of how he will react.
Hot-blooded
“So if you study it, you can get an advantage with the knowledge of that blood-line. Some are hot-blooded, some are laid-back, some don’t react at all. So that groundwork young people put in with horses, to be a student, is invaluable when you try to translate into performances.
“So riding out in the sticks, in that unknown place, gave me that knowledge to perform in Ascot or Longchamp or the Curragh. I truly believe that. The more knowledge and familiarisation you have with the horse will come in handy some day. And you never know when.”
No money could buy that instinct. On this side of the pond, his familiar style was at odds to what audiences here were used to; only Belmont Park resembles anything close to a European track; but, like Cauthen, he was a revolutionary; Olivier Peslier leads the outstanding generation of modern French riders who attest to his seminal influence.
“No matter how good a pilot you are,” he explains, “you’re still a foreign object on a horse. So the best you can do is attempt to become one. The less you can move around that eight stone the better, aside from doing what you can to encourage your partner to accomplish what you both want. The rest is wasted motion.
“And then I’d to adapt to different tactics on the racecourses, compared to the US, where you’re only going left-handed flat. Now you’re going up and down, right and left.
“And at Longchamp, if you’re five wide, you might as well get off and take to the showers right away! Because you ain’t never gonna get your picture taken from there! But the different dimensions and challenges in Europe make it a more beautiful test.”
He retired in 2001 but in a way he just carried on, breeding and training. “I try to share the experience of every one of the 20,000 or more races that I’ve ridden so that if they’re asked a question when they’re performing, they’ll be ready to answer it.
“I can’t say this for other professions because it sounds arrogant. But if you’re engulfed in what you do, like me with horses, they make me crazy but they are my sanity.
“So when they don’t move right or they don’t eat, it will make you crazy just as much as if you were breathing air yourself through them. But to come through that and see where it might end up on a track? That’s your sanity.”
Slowly, the sport is re-emerging from its enforced shutdown, despite the sneering of so many.
“Racing is a big spoke in the wheel. It’s not the most important one when people’s lives are at stake. But when people are rocking along and allowed to go to work and live their lives on a daily basis as God intended, then we’re going to get some horses back in action and people will be able to enjoy ’em and respect ’em.
“And us as professionals can play our part with the horses and put on a good programme. That’s where we can get our support, from our racing public.”
And three hours after accepting our call, it would be rude not to finally ask. So, Brian Keith Asmussen, why ‘Cash’? Aged seven, the life of Brian ended and – legally – his name changed.
“They asked my dad so many times, ‘Why did you call him Cash?’ And so finally he had to tell them. ‘You never know what’s going to happen in life. But even when he’s broke, he’s going to have a little cash!’”
Dad wasn’t wrong. Indeed, it’s an attitude that hints at the faintest Irish lineage. “If it’s not in his blood, it’s most probably in his attitude!”
One more thing. He never did get Kathy Barry’s phone number.
“I’d like to be famous but I’m not sure if it’s for the Kathy Barry story!” The song of his laughter and his poise in the saddle have bequeathed us a much longer lasting legacy.