Rooted In The Past But Ahead Of His Time

Biography is my favourite form of literature. I don’t count obituary as biography. Unless someone wants to write it now, I’ll never see mine.

That said, I wish to note the passing in New Zealand a few weeks ago of Jack Glengarry who was into his seventies.

For the uninitiated in Australia, Jack was a former member of the racing press, a specialist thoroughbred books seller, originator of the ‘Tesio’ pedigree service, athlete, arch-conservative, hail-fellow-well-met, royalist, Scotsman in drag and the guy who played the bagpipes at Karaka to signal the start of each year’s Premier Yearling Sale. And he was married to the lovely Heather who had predeceased him.

Google Jack Glengarry and you’ll probably find an obit somewhere on the net or go to the website for his own colourful account of his family history.

My reason for writing about Jack is that I acknowledge with hindsight that he was a pioneer in the technological revolution as it applies to thoroughbred breeding.

Jack was an idiosyncratic individual. We first came into contact in the late sixties and in the early seventies, when I was editing ‘Best Bets’ in New Zealand. Jack was contracted to supply the form lines from the race meetings in the central districts of the North Island. Jack’s descriptions of how horses performed were sometimes very colourful, frequently inaccurate, usually brief and lacking in meaningful detail. Mixing with him in the press room and being on the receiving end of his work, I came to regard Jack as a ‘once over lightly’ merchant.

I don’t know exactly how he morphed into the breeding consultant/journalist he became in the early nineties. Our careers had taken different paths and I never asked him about it. Apart from being well read – books must have been his passion, he sold thousands of them – I don’t think he was ever involved in breeding horses.

Jack’s rise to influence coincided with the recession which beset New Zealand in the late-80s/early-90s which saw yearling prices plummet about 60% in two years. (Things go in cycles folks; you bright young things who have never had to take a backwards step in life, keep your eyes on the credit crisis).

That recession sent some breeders to the wall while many others just decided to opt out of breeding altogether and quit their mares. Pre-recession, in times of high inflation (sounds ominous) most breeders who presented a yearling at sale received a civilized return on investment irrespective of how ordinary its dam was. When money became tight and the guts fell out of the market, the few cashed-up buyers could concentrate on the quality end of the market and disregard the rest – there were no other buyers! So owners of marginal, weak-paged mares found they couldn’t sell their yearlings any more, spat the dummy and bailed out of the mares.

That experience taught me for all time that it is quality mares that are the key to survival in the commercial market, not stallions.

While all this was unfolding, Jack perceived he could offer a lifeline of sorts to those breeders who were worst affected by the recession.

In conjunction with a programmer named Simon Morris (I think that is his name) Jack worked on creating a database which had the ability in a nanosecond to throw up on one of those new fandangled computer screens a seven generation pedigree, highlighting duplication of ancestors.

Jack had a love affair with the long-dead Federico Tesio, admiring his deeds as a breeder and selling stacks of his famous little books on the subject. Being to the right of Genghiz Khan, Jack would have wished Tesio was Italian royalty. Jack reasoned that, through his database, if he could encourage breeders to replicate the inbreeding patterns which Tesio apparently applied successfully then those breeders might be able to turn their spurned half-page pedigree broodmares into the producers of champions.

At a time when many breeders were looking for any justification for staying in the game, along came Jack Tesio. He struck a rich vein. "OK," said the cow-cocky who owned Daisy the mare, "Wrightsons don’t want her yearling in their sales any more but I’ll mate her like Tesio would, breed a champion then they’ll beg me to let them sell the next one."

All of a sudden, Jack exerted an influence which every stallion stud in New Zealand felt keenly. Personally, I think Tesio would have turned in his grave having his name and so-called methods bandied about like that for common commercial gain. At one point in his book The Tesio Myth, author Franco Varola disavows that Tesio used the type of simplistic approach Jack Glengarry later attributed to him. People forget what a great trainer, meticulous observer and natural horseman Tesio was. I also think Jack knew as much about breeding at grass roots level as I know about splitting the atom.

Nevertheless, the insecurity of marginalised breeders was manifested in a steady stream of mares’ names being submitted to Jack, along with cheques for $35 each so Jack could run them through his programme and recommend a choice of mates Tesio would have been proud of.

I also seem to recall that stallion owners had to subscribe to have their stallions put in the programme otherwise there was no chance of your stallion being one of those recommended.

I regarded it as a praiseworthy theoretical attempt horribly distorted by commercialism and came to regard Jack as something of a charlatan. And I told him so.

As I was a seller of stallion nominations – in those days I was general manager at Haunui Farm where we stood five or six stallions – Jack was making my life hell. Clients, many of them practical people of the land who had previously bred truck loads of good horses, were now asking before committing to a booking, “Have you run it through the computer? What does the computer say, how does it look?” I would retort, “Bob, you’ve bred stakeswinners for years, why aren’t you sticking to the principles you’ve always used?” But the seeds of doubt had been sewn by Jack’s widely advertised claims that adherence to Tesio’s ‘methods’, via his programme, would help upgrade bloodlines. So it was difficult-to-impossible to be a stallion marketer and turn your back on your client’s perceived needs. The $35 was depatched with increased frequency; Jack’s service flourished.

All the while, Jack was still writing articles in the racing media, unmistakeable with his unique, florid style matched only by Australia's Ross du Bourg. He had space in the now-defunct weekly Friday Flash (the poor man's Sportsman or Winning Post) which he would use relentlessly to promote his voodoo. He would make outlandish, unsustainable pronouncements which would make professional breeders seethe. However, because people on the outside couldn't command access to editorial space the opportunity to present a rebuttal or balancing view was seldom if ever granted. Blogs didn’t exist in those days.

Jack’s favourite saw was his weekly dire warning about inbreeding to Northern Dancer, especially through two sons. He hammered that even as evidence to the contrary rolled in. It would slow horses down, he continued to claim simplistically. I don't know about the horses but his campaign sure slowed down a lot of stallion owners at the time! Thank heavens the breeders of Fastnet Rock didn’t listen to him.

All that said, I take my hat off to Jack. To me, his major achievement was not that he ran at least once around every racetrack in New Zealand, all 57 of them. Though his approach was superficial and fluffy he was able to perceive a niche in the market and in collaboration embrace the fledgling technology we now all take for granted. He was a man ahead of his time in that respect, a pioneer. His Tesio product has been refined and upgraded and rightly takes its place as one of the most useful weapons in today’s breeding armory.

It hit home to me just how much sway it has when I was out at Rosehill on the day Polar Success won the Golden Slipper. A prominent breeder who had a beaten runner in the event was sitting with me (odd: Rosehill has a glass-walled losers’ room where the public can see people in pain close up, but a closed-in room where the winners celebrate- shouldn't it be the other way around?). Anyway, this breeder said to me, “Have you put Polar Success’ pedigree on Tesio? It’s got nothing”. My reply went along the lines of: “It might have nothing but whatever it's got I want it! I just saw it win the Golden Slipper! We should be up all night studying it!”

Jack was a character. Curiously, he always called me "St Steven". It was just another of his idiosyncracies, and I'll miss it.