The Friday Interview: David Barron - `I'm not someone who gives out information easily... The Friday Interview Peter Thomas talks to David Barron and finds out exactly what motivates the trainer the bookies fear.
Byline: Peter ThomasTHE eyebrows stalk across the yard to meet you, followed at a respectful distance by a stout and slightly forbidding Yorkshireman. So the legend goes, these eyebrows, dark and sleek, are the two-headed hound guarding the secrets of Maunby House.
For 25 years, they have deterred intruders with such doom-laden efficiency that they were recently offered a freelance job tightening things up at Fort Knox, but their owner, determined to keep the outside world outside, wasn't ready to let them go.
So, the bookmaking and betting fraternities may peer through the gates, but only those on the inside know what really goes on under the steely gaze of David Barron.
When the market moves in favour of one of Barron's, people sit up and take notice. The common perception is of a yard that knows how to `get one ready' and isn't afraid to back its judgement with hard cash. The man himself isn't denying any involvement, but he believes the battle between him and the bookies doesn't rage quite as fiercely as the stories might have you believe.
He says: "I think our reputation as a gambling yard is blown up a little bit, although I do get a lot of enjoyment out of a horse being primed on the day.
"If I can help an owner's expenses, I will. I'm not someone who gives out information easily, and I believe that if there is any money to be made, the man who's paying the bills should get the first chance to make it.
"I'm quite capable of investing a little bit, too. I wouldn't make my living out of it, but I'll have a few bob. I'm quite selective, though. I often see ones of mine going off shorter than they should, because somebody has put two and two together and come up with all sorts of figures.
"Sometimes I think there are punters who have either got an awful lot of money or have taken a grudge against the money they've got, but I'm not there to look after them - as long as the money's not mine, I couldn't care less."
Money is Barron's recurring theme, and like any good Yorkshireman, he'll tell you it's his motivation. He was an
all-weather pioneer at Southwell because, with Alex Greaves claiming 7lb and only a handful of trainers in on the act, it was money for old rope.
He got out of the jumping game because the money was easier on the sand. He always hated the breeding side of racing because "it cost you a damned sight more money to breed one than to buy one". He likes to land a touch, but he'll sell the good ones when they've landed the money.
It's only when he starts to tell you about the really good ones, however, that the true function of those beetlebrows becomes apparent. They're not for intimidation, they exist purely to shield the rest of us from the twinkle in his eye.
The fact of the matter is, landing a gamble, copping the readies, is an
anti-climax for Barron - "once you've done it, you haven't got it to look forward to any more".
The real pleasure lies not in the cash but in the planning; his greatest motivation is to find the right plan for the right horse; and the right horse means the world to him.
Ask him about Coastal Bluff, and he draws all the strands together to form a rich tapestry of life at Maunby: the intrigue, the anticipation, the excitement, the vindication, the muck, the brass, the pain and the compassion.
THE wingheeled grey gelding took the bookies to the cleaners in 1996 with two big-handicap successes, and went on to dead-heat in the Nunthorpe the following season - but the final reel of the drama tells as much about Barron as the
action-adventure sequences.
He recalls with passion: "People didn't know what I had with him. When he was a four-year-old, I set out to win three races - the Wokingham, the Stewards' Cup and the Ayr Gold Cup - and I misfired in the Wokingham, the old
so-and-so didn't come right in time and was drawn on the wrong side anyway.
"Then we needed to get a little penalty to get up to Jimmy Fortune's weight for the Stewards' Cup, so we won with him at York, won at Goodwood, then waited eight weeks for Ayr.
"Anyway, he did a gallop ten days before the Ayr Gold Cup, his final serious bit of work. We went to Thirsk with three horses: Musical Season, ridden by Kevin Darley, For The Present, ridden by Jimmy Fortune, and Coastal Bluff, ridden by Val Greaves, who looked after him all the time here.
"The gallop was over five furlongs, and the instructions for Kevin and Jimmy were to jump off and go flat out, as fast as they could. I said to Val to give them a ten-length start and see what happened. She gave them a ten-length start and in the final furlong he came past those two with his lugs up.
"The following Wednesday, the other two went to Doncaster for the Portland, and Musical Season won it, on the stands' side, and For The Present finished first on the far side.
"They couldn't understand that even at 3-1 and with 9st 10lb at Ayr, they couldn't have beaten him if they set off the day before.
"Just to clean up, I was going to win the Diadem with him. But he pulled a plate off on the way back from Ayr and pulled a bit of foot off with it, so we waited until the following year. But he didn't come to hand early, then started to make a bit of a noise, and although he won at Newmarket and then the Nunthorpe, he wasn't as good as he had been, and after that he was never the same horse again."
Barron, who retained a quarter-share in Coastal Bluff, was keen to retire the falling star, who had already earned over pounds 200,000 for connections, but majority owner David Sharp insisted on sending him to the sales, where he was knocked down for pounds 17,000 and raced on.
Barron says: "He started to develop a bit of a wind problem, and everything I did to help him just made him worse. I knew the only thing to do was put a tube in his throat, and I said [to Sharp]: `If you think after what he's done for us, I'm putting a tube in that horse, I am not! I wouldn't disfigure him for the world.'
"The job went sour with him and when he went to the sales, I was the underbidder. I wanted to bring him home, but I was going to have to spend
15 grand to turn him out in a field, and I just couldn't do it.
"It was a thorn in my side for a bit after he went, and I didn't enjoy seeing him run, but time is a great healer, and now he's with Paul Dixon and at least he's got a good home."
Sentimental stuff from a hardened stockman, but still touched by financial reality, as all Barron's gambles are - or almost all.
He and wife Chris married in 1968 and, following the Barron family line, bought a farm ten miles from Maunby, with a few broodmares on the side. The breeding game left him cold (even though his father had bred Aldaniti), but the pair had racing blood bubbling in their veins and, with two children in the planning stage and against everybody else's better judgement, they branched out.
Barron says: "We were just married and had a house with nothing to sit on, so we thought we'd go and buy a racehorse. Great idea! I cringe at what our parents must have thought of some of the things we did, but they always supported us and never criticised."
IN 1969, Barron took out a permit. He remembers Chris, in the spirit of the age, wearing a mini-skirt to Hexham the day Tembo won them a selling hurdle, although she hastens to add that there was a sheepskin coat over the top of it.
In the mid-70s, the full jumps licence was taken, and after an encouraging level of success, Barron had his arm twisted into training a nippy two-year-old for one of his owners. That was Miss Import, and in 1981, the year the couple moved to their present home, she provided them with their first Flat winner, with LK Piggott, one of the trainer's few riding heroes, on board.
The new place wasn't much to look at, but it was expanded and moulded to fit the new owners, and now houses 50-odd horses in slick and spotless surroundings that the licence-holder might not be prepared to eat his food off, but is certainly prepared to wander around in his slippers of an evening.
The gambles are road-tested on a seven-furlong sand strip that follows the line of the old Ripon-Northallerton railway, and Barron seems happy that, from precarious footings, a thriving business and a close family have been built up.
He says: "We were still farming all through this time and milking until the backend of the 70s. The thing is, what we were doing was safer. People would always tell us that as long as you're milking cows, you'll make a living. With racehorses, it's never certain.
"Knowing what we know now, we wouldn't have bought the farm, and perhaps I would have spent a couple of years with a couple of trainers, looking at a few ideas. As it was, everything we did was brand new and we made all our own mistakes.
"It was a very, very steep learning curve, but if it's costing you, you soon work it out!"
In many ways, Barron is a traditionalist. His son Tim still runs the family farm, and even when the big successes came his way, Dad never contemplated moving from the sleepy backwater a few miles from Thirsk that has been home for 23 years, or chasing richer owners and better horses to take his operation to the next
level.
BUT in other respects he is an innovator. He was ahead of his time on the
all-weather and now visits Keeneland every year in search of the obscure US pedigrees - researched by Montana-based daughter Nicola - that have yielded so much success with the likes of $23,000 purchase Dim Sums, who landed
the pounds 100,000 Redcar
Two-Year-Old Trophy before being sold back to the States for a king's ransom.
He explains: "We started going over there in 1998. We'd had a desperate season over here, the horses had been all to hell, and we always used to go to Ayr for the Western meeting, have two or three days up there, but we had nothing to run and I was pig sick of the job.
"So we said to hell with Ayr, and I haven't been to the Western meeting since. It always clashes and I've watched the Ayr Gold Cup for the last six years from Keeneland."
With a best-ever total of over 60 winners last year, and this season chugging along nicely again after a bout of ringworm, Barron can reflect with satisfaction on a professional life lived on his own terms.
Driving ambition may not have been to the fore - "If
I have a fault, I've ducked out occasionally when I should have got stuck in, especially maybe with the two-year-olds, when we've had a decent one and I didn't take the big boys
on" - but he can still claim to start every new year
with the enthusiasm of a man well ahead on points in the fight with the old enemy.
As he says: "There's nothing better than a new two-year-old that flicks his toe, when you think: `Look at him, I'll have 'em with that one!'"
CAPTION(S):
David Barron: those heavy eyebrows are not for intimidation, they exist purely to shield the rest of us from the twinkle in his eye
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| Title Annotation: | Sports |
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| Publication: | The Racing Post (London, England) |
| Date: | Jul 2, 2004 |
| Words: | 2024 |
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