By Brendan O'Reilly
The Cup sucks. This year I just couldn't get happy about it, being the anniversary of someone's suicide.
The most unread, underrated Frank Hardy novel has got to be The Four Legged Lottery. It dealt with what he called Australia's truly national game — horse-racing. Where else does everybody stop and listen to one race? In anything else is there ever such a communion of souls?
The hero is one Jim Roberts. He grows up during the Depression, is undone by gambling, kills someone and is hanged in Pentridge — a happy story! The Roberts family lived in Richmond. They were Catholics and Labor voters and barracked for Richmond.
The narrator writes from Pentridge. We learn that the two became friends, gambled together and helped each other out of financial holes. The narrator, Paul, worked in a bank. He steals, he gambles, he loses. He's in deep shit. Then he wins enough to cover himself. He's free and clear. He'll never be so stupid again. But the SP bookie, Pitson, defaults. He's profited from the poor people of Richmond for decades. Jim beats him to death, surrenders quietly to the cops and takes the death penalty on the chin.
Jim Roberts had had it all — beautiful wife, gorgeous kid, good prospects — but he lost it all to gambling and looking out for his mate Paul.
Jim had a brother Gerald who was active in left-wing politics, the CPA, I think. He steered clear of gambling, seeing how unhappy it had made his family. He comes to see Paul in prison and they talk about Jim's tragic end. Gerald says he wasn't destroyed by the gambling but by capitalism. God, I loved this book!
Cup Day, schmupp day. Have you read about the torture those horses go through? And those poor jockeys! Why doesn't someone look after them? Would you make your daughter starve and purge herself for decades in order to conform to a totally arbitrary and unrealistic idea of how much she should weigh?
Compare this to the footy, or even the cricket. Despite the grossly offensive invasion of corporate greed, footy is still, sort of, the people's game.
Of course Cup Day is not all bad. It's a day off, maybe four if you can swing the Monday. Everyone piling into the pub, screaming and shouting as the race is won and lost, knowing that most of the country is doing the same. I like that.
The "sport of kings" they call racing. Fine. Let kings muck around with it to their hearts' content. But how they shamelessly exhort the rest of us to worship at their throne makes me sick. Cup Day isn't about the nation uniting. It's a celebration by the rich for the rich. They celebrate with a horse race which symbolises how well the system works in their favour.