Barnavara Fairytale Keeps Jones Young

[Wandering Eyes]

He called it a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience, smiling in the Paris sunshine, spry and dapper in his bow tie and blazer. And then he added: “I mean, I'm 90 years old, so I don't know how much more lifetime there is!”

That helped the interview go fairly viral. But there was much else besides: the sheer joie de vivre, the sense of just how much living Russell Jones has crammed into that lifetime; plus an infectious sense of the fulfilment available, when you invest in a horse in a purely sporting spirit.

Jones only found himself at Longchamp because he had wanted to honor the memory of Johnny Harrington by participating in a partnership at the stable run by his dear friend's widow Jessica. In his time, to be sure, Jones has plenty of horse trading. He would know as well as anybody the commercial potential of bloodstock. In fact, along with his late brother Richard, he consigned Producer (Nashua) to achieve a broodmare record $5.25 million at Keeneland in 1983. Even so, there may be a lesson for those people who nowadays approach the game in a wholly mercenary spirit, in the way things have played out with Barnavara (Ire) (Calyx {GB}). Because this €70,000 yearling goes to the Sceptre Sessions at Tattersalls Tuesday (hip 1753) as winner of the G1 Prix de l'Opera–a race once won, funnily enough, by Producer.

What a weekend the Alpha Racing syndicate had in Paris–and how often did thoughts turn to Johnny. Jones had gotten to know him way back in the 1960s, when Johnny was working for the Curragh Bloodstock Agency, and had come to America to help launch Jonathan Sheppard's training career. They hit it off so well that Johnny started staying with Jones in Pennsylvania, whenever he travelled over.

“But then, one of his first visits, my wife went into labor,” Jones recalled. “She told him she didn't know where the hell I'd got to, and he was to drive her to the hospital. At that stage Johnny hadn't yet had any children himself, and he was in a total sweat, praying that she didn't deliver this baby right there on the front seat.

“He was a great one for telling stories on himself, and always said that was the most nervous he'd ever been. Anyway, over the years, it just became a great friendship. So it was tough, when he died. They got me to do a reading at the service, and I helped carry the casket. So I was almost like family.”

Jones told Patrick Cooper he would like to support the stable, but didn't imagine he could make too much of a difference with just the odd horse here and there. Cooper mentioned that he was setting up a syndicate with Elaine Lawlor and the Harringtons' son-in-law Richie Galway. At first, Jones felt that that he might not enjoy delegating selection to others, but after a couple of years of doing his own thing, he got on board with Alpha Racing.

“And I've been there ever since,” he says. “It's just been so much fun. Unlike a lot of syndicates, more or less all of us were veterans in the horse game. They weren't doing it as a financial investment–which was right up my alley because you do that, in this game, you're a little crazy. This was not going to be too expensive and we were all just doing it for fun.”

And that approach has actually proved more lucrative than tends to be the case when people are under pressure to make things pay. Last year, the syndicate sold its €65,000 yearling Kinesiology (GB) (Study Of Man {Ire}) to Australia after four consecutive runner-up finishes in stakes company. Now the time has come to cash out Barnavara.

“I think she was just maturing as she went along, and getting better as a result,” Jones suggests. “Every time we asked her the next question, she got better. It was amazing. At the Curragh, she was devastating, just galloped them to death. She has this very high cruising speed and can keep it going. She's a filly that can take the run out of horses. She goes out there and says, 'Come on, then, here I am: come get me.' Sometimes she gets headed, and comes again. The whole thing has been unreal, especially the way it has opened up Ireland for me again.”

Russell Jones | Tod Marks

That's because many earlier years, of this life well lived, were largely spent jumping across open country, whether at home in Chester County or in Ireland. Jones connects us to a golden age, to an extent, one that has gone beyond recall. He won his very first race, aged 13, in a point-to-point staked out cross-country, with flags. But the gusto characteristic of those days keeps Jones very much engaged in the here and now–still serving, in fact, on the Pennsylvania State Horse Racing Commission.

“I grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania,” Jones explains. “Started out fox-hunting, then riding point-to-points and eventually steeplechase. That first race, I was on a 14.2hh pony, but she was mostly Thoroughbred, I think. My mother was against my going, unless my father rode in the race too, to look after me. By the time I got into the final field, I had opened up on them–but there were all these people standing along the fence, and I couldn't tell where the finish was. Then an old man that used to follow the hounds took off his cap and threw it in the air, so I shot over and got there. My father finished ahead of the rest. Probably he let me win!”

Jones was not permitted to contest the open at the adjacent hunt until he was 16, and promptly won that at the first attempt, too.

“But I'm sounding like I was some kind of important talent, which I never was,” he stresses. “I was just game to go and have a crack at it, and lucky as hell to win a couple of races. Basically, most of my riding career was on horses I was trading. Like the Maryland Hunt Cup winner I bought at the racetrack for five grand.”

That was the famous Jacko (Chi), five-time Timber Horse of the Year.

“He'd been brought up from Valparaiso in Chile to Delaware Park,” Jones recalls. “He'd beaten a total of two horses in four races here, was really just an acclimatization project in the works. We took him home, gelded him, and started hacking around the country. And he jumped like a horse that had done it all before: just a natural at the job. He won 19 races over timber for us.”

But Jones was no mere passenger, as his myriad other accomplishments as horseman attest. A Master of Fox Hounds for a decade, he was still fearlessly out in the field to the age of 85. In the Thoroughbred world, too, he has added to the heritage of a neighborhood that once produced breed-shapers Danzig and Storm Cat. His own impact was through Walnut Green, for many years the largest sales agency outside Kentucky, achieving global reach through the likes of Flower Alley, At Talaq and Golden Pheasant.

“In the early '70s, I was working in the stock market business and just training some jumpers on the side,” Jones recalls. “But then in 1976, I consigned a horse for a lady in Wilmington, Delaware, the first horse I ever consigned, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But we just built and built. Producer was a mare we sold for a couple of guys from Chicago. They sent her to us to breed to Northern Dancer, and just hit an absolute gold mine. But I think we only held the record until the January Sale!

“Anyway, we did that until '05. But our major clients were dying off, and we weren't developing new ones. It had become a disadvantage being in Pennsylvania. We even thought about starting up in Kentucky, but we liked our life so well at home. Kentucky hunting just wasn't as good! So we decided we'd look for somebody younger that might take the business over.”

They were struggling for takers when Mark Reid approached Richie at the September Sale and asked whether they might ever consider selling the business.

“Are you crazy?” Richie replied, quick as a flash. “We're making so much goddamn money, I don't think we can afford to.”

But they found a way, right enough. Not that Jones was done yet. One evening he found himself sitting at dinner next to an old friend, Phyllis Wyeth.

“Her father had bought Devil's Bag as a yearling, Gone West too,” Jones recalls. “And Phyllis wanted to get into the business herself. So she had me come down and look at their horses and help with consigning. Next thing you know, she's not only a great friend, but an important customer. We had some great years, topping out with Union Rags.”

Wyeth sold that horse as a yearling for $145,000. When he resurfaced in the Gulfstream Sale, the following February, Jones called her.

“You bred a monster here,” he said. “He's gorgeous, 10 times the horse we sold.”

“Well, let's buy him back.”

“Phyllis, you wouldn't get him even for double what they gave us. He'll make $400,000.”

“Okay, go to $390,000.”

It was eerie how it played out. The bidding raced along until Jones managed to get in his single bid, at $390,000. And the hammer came down.

“He was the best 2-year-old in the country,” Jones marvels. “Got beat a head at the Breeders' Cup, by a better ride on Hansen, and then won the [GI] Belmont. But finally her infirmity caught up with Phyllis and six or seven years ago she died. So many of these clients that were great friends are gone now. So I'm now down to five mares in Kentucky, with Noel Murphy, plus one in Ireland.”

Nonetheless, he spent virtually the entire Keeneland November Sale seated by the inside back ring, making notes on foals.

Complimented on his stamina, he shrugs. “At my age, I can't walk around the grounds like I did when actively engaged,” he says. “So it's a compromise. I can tell if they're crooked, but most of all I like to see how they move, what the frame is. These foals are telling me what stallions to think about, for breeding mares next year. I have gotten away from going to the farms to look at stallions. They don't always produce what they look like. Looking at what they're putting on the ground, for me, is more reliable. The only reason I'd look at stallions is to see whether they're a suitable physical match.”

The system seems to be functioning pretty well, Jones having recently used Good Magic, Vekoma and Yaupon when “on the bubble.”

“I could see what they were throwing and breeding to them before they exploded,” he says. “But you'd even do it for amusement: it's all such theater, so addictive. You've got to keep pace with what's happening, got to keep improving yourself. You see somebody doing better than you, you say, 'I better find out what they're doing that I'm not.'”

Some attitude, at his time of life! Again, however, it is chicken-and-egg: what got him this far is the same verve that keeps him going now. That's why the old horse trader is happy even to sell Barnavara, so ending a sentimental journey. As it says in the film, they'll always have Paris.

“I think that trading instinct in me still comes to the fore,” he says. “She's sound as a bell and may get a whole lot better next year. But we finished off with that incredible weekend in Paris: museums, Notre Dame, restaurants. Our race was right after the Arc, so we're with our filly in the stable area and here comes the Arc winner being led back in. It was just so much fun, the whole weekend, even before winning.”

And, as such, an apt tribute. Because it would never have happened but for Johnny.

“I suppose not,” Jones says. “I mean, you never know why these things happen. But when they do, you just make sure you enjoy the hell out of them.”

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