Roy Rocket

On the subject of names, I should just explain the nomenclature of Roy, who has been mentioned previously on this blog. I actually got ahead of myself because I was calling him Roy before he'd been named - but his passport (eventually) arrived back, to great excitement on my part, last week; so Roy Rocket he now is. To start with, I should explain why the fuss about Roy. I'd never particularly aspired to breed a horse, on the basis that I waste more than enough money on horses which other people have bred without breeding them myself so that I can waste even more. However, when Tony Le Brocq very kindly offered me Minnie's Mystery at the end of her racing career, this was too good an offer to turn down. I'd bought her as a yearling and sold her on to Tony, and she'd done very well, winning a stack of races in the Channel Islands including the Jersey Guineas and the Jersey Derby. It might be stretching it to call her a Classic winner, but she was a tough, hardy racehorse who'd won several races over a period of several years - in short, she was just the sort of mare who should be bred from (in stark contrast to the majority who are bred from nowadays). And she has a good pedigree. She's by a good stallion (Highest Honor) with her first two dams both being by good stallions (Green Desert and High Line respectively) and she's from an excellent Jim Joel family. Coincidentally, she's related to the first horse whom I ever rode in a race, the Jim Joel-bred Golden River, whose greatest claim to fame was beating Sea Pigeon in an amateur Flat race, ridden by Julie Cecil. Anyway, I'm breeding from her, and loving doing so.

Minnie's' first mate was, naturally, Largesse, who was standing at Greg Parsons' Upperwood Farm in Hertfordshire. Thereafter she has visited French stallions, so has lived and is living in France at Haras de la Cauviniere near Livarot in Normandy. There used to be one and a half euros to the pound which made things more appealing, whereas now there's only just over one, but even so I still think that there's often value to be had with French stallions. Her first mate in France was the excellent Gold Away (the resultant offspring of which mating is pictured with his mother in the previous paragraph at Cauviniere in April 2009). As I love Sunday Silence as a sire of sires, she then visited Layman (which union yielded her third colt, ie Roy) and then Gold Away again (a filly this time, now aged one). She is currently in foal to Le Havre, who stands at her home. Obviously, one can't keep all the horses one breeds (unless one wants to go broke, or unless one owns a country, or unless one owns and country and wants to go broke) and I do not own her first two foals Grey Panel (whom I named) and Dream Walker (whom I didn't). They are aged four and three respectively. However, I decided that I'd treat myself to retaining her third foal - hence the two-year-old gelding Roy Rocket being here. I think that I am quite good at identifying the potential of an untried horse (well, nobody is good at doing that, but relative to other people I think that I do OK) but I have to confess that with Roy I haven't a clue - I just can't be objective. What I can say, though, is that he is as friendly a little horse as you'd ever find. And that's got to help. Hasn't it?

Anyway, her unnamed yearling colt arrived here in early September. I don't think that I'd ever seen him, but after a couple of little hiccups he settled in well (helped by becoming acquainted with Gus, as you'll have seen in the previous paragraph) and is now the two-year-old gelding named Roy Rocket. Why Roy Rocket? Well, Minnie's Mystery doesn't give us much help, but as I understand things a lay is, in olde English, a song which is as much a story as a song. That's great for me: I'm not very musical so my favourite songs tend to be as notable for their lyrics as for their musical intricacy. Harry Chapin's 'Greatest Stories Live' or Chris de Burgh's 'Spanish Train and other stories' are as good album titles as you'd get, if it's the words that matter. So I was left looking for a name from a singer who tells stories. Harry Chapin would have been fine, except that the last time I named a horse after one of his songs (Abetterplacetobe) it wasn't a great success. Something from Paul Kelly ("a man who'll be remembered/Through the analog of time/Not for complicated feelings/But for passions sung in rhyme", as Rupert McCall described him so well) would have been great, or even something by the master of them all, Leonard Cohen - although admittedly his stories are so elegantly described that it's usually very, very hard to work out what's going on in them. I was swaying towards Harry Chapin's Mr Tanner, the true song-man himself, but in the end plumped for something similar from Queensland's greatest musical story-teller, Graeme Connors. I chose his version of Mr Tanner, Roy Rocket, another true song-man. It's a lovely story, as reassuring as 'Mr Tanner' is sad. Broken dreams maybe, but Roy Rocket ends up happy with his lot, "letting out his heart and soul/In the music that makes him feel whole/Roy Rocket is alive and well/Every Saturday night at the Grand Hotel". And Roy Rocket's name - well, it's not his real name at all, because before he settled down as a 9-5, Monday-Friday mechanic back in his home town: "When he was young, he moved to the city to give it a try/Changed his name to Roy Rocket, 'cos some fool promoter said it sounded right/Had a record released, but it died without even making the charts/Came back to his home town, married and settled down". It's a lovely story - and thus Roy Rocket is the perfect songman. Let's hope that the equine Roy Rocket can do this lovely song proud.

Let's hope particularly that he can do so because it will give some credence to the fact that I am now, by accident rather than design, a bloodstock writer. This is the other thing which prompted me to think that it would be a good idea to be breeding from Minnie's long-term. If you're going to preach, you should be practicing. Ross Du Bourg, in my desert-island book 'The Australian & New Zealand Thoroughbred', puts it perfectly when, breaking off from analysing the greats of bloodstock history, he expands on his own breeding operation: "On a personal note, I think it is fairly important that authors who expound theories on breeding in published form should 'have a go' at some stage of their lives and 'practice what they preach'. I launched my own financially constrained career as a thoroughbred breeder when I paid $A5,000 for my foundation broodmare Cabaletta ...". So, like Ross Du Bourg, I'm 'having a go' - and Roy will be at the forefront of letting you know whether there's any substance in my ideas. And, if it turns out that I've bred a dud, I won't be able to blame the trainer!