The Secrets of the

Professionals
Discover what lay behind the success of 9 legends that made their living and lived
their dreams in horse racing.

Alex Bird

Phil Bull

Paul Cooper

Barney Curley

Jack Ramsden

Clive Holt

Sydney Harris

J.P. McManus

Freddy Williams

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 Alex Bird

Epsom Racecourse, 22nd April 1947 – an important day in the annals of the turf. The
prestigious Great Metropolitan Handicap that afternoon, in which Pahelion beat
Salubrious by a head. It was the first race decided by a photo-finish.

It also began the phase of Alex Bird’s calling as a punter when he regularly had a
turnover of £2million a year.

In those days, the photo finish film took five minutes to develop and during that time an
active betting market was formed. Bird, who was racing six days a week, noticed that, as
the horses flashed across the line together, an optical illusion favoured the runner on the
far side. He found that by keeping his head perfectly still and closing one eye, he could,
with uncanny accuracy, predict the outcome. When he believed the unfavoured, (and
therefore longer priced), near side had won he would back it.

Until a combination of betting tax and more rapid film development effectively closed this
betting loophole, Bird took up the same position on the line for twenty years and
registered a phenomenal 500 consecutive successful bets at an average of £500 a time.

One particular horse was Mill Reef. It was Bird’s passionate interest in race times which
alerted him to the colt’s exceptional talents. He explained, ‘Mill Reef broke the clock on
firm ground and won the Gimcrack Stakes in the mud. That’s the mark of a great horse.’

Bird’s biggest bet was in 1970 - £20,000 at 4/6 – was on Paul Mellon’s mount in the
Dewhurst Stakes. Mill Reef won by 4 lengths. The following season Mill Reef became
the 7th Derby winner in 8 years backed by Bird. In total he won £123,000 on Mill Reef
alone.

In 1990, the year before he died, Bird summoned up one last coup. His friend, Peter
Hurst, owned a runner in the Ayr Gold Cup. He backed it from 40’s to 12/1. The winnings
were never in doubt. The name of this horse – Final Shot!

Here are the rules according to Bird:

1: Don’t bet when the going changes. If the going changes from firm to soft, keep your
money in your pocket. Northing upsets form more regularly than a significant change in
ground conditions.

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2: Follow up-and-coming jockeys. Look out for promising apprentices. I saw Kevin Daley
show the utmost coolness riding his first ever winner and told his guv’nor Reg
Hollinshead: ‘those boys’ better than money in the bank.’

3: Don’t bet when the bookmakers’ profit margins are unfair. At some of the smaller
meetings, particularly on bank holidays, the bookmakers have a massive over-round.
Sometimes the figures are 60% or 70% in their favour.

4: Bet each way in non-handicaps with 8-10 runners. Pick races where there are a
limited number of form horses, oppose the favourite and combine your second and third
fancies in each-way combination bets.

5: Don’t bet ‘first show’. The bookmakers’ profit is never higher than when they are
sparring for an opening. Almost all runners increase in price, especially when the market
is weak. Second show price will give you an extra 10% on your winnings over a season.

6: Never bet in handicaps. The handicapper is a professional who makes few mistakes.
When he does, the bookmakers are only too aware of them.

7: Don’t bet in 3 year old maidens. The biggest saving I made was to stop betting in
three-year old maiden races, especially those for fillies.

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 Phil Bull

The man who founded Timeform made his fortune as a gambler rather than as a
publisher.

His passion for the stopwatch began, when as a kid, he used to time his sisters as they
raced around the garden. A more sophisticated use of the clock and an application of the
use of mathematics led to a lifetime of successful punting.

By his own estimate, he took the bookies for more than half a million pounds.

Perhaps one of Bull’s secrets was his temperament. Reg Griffen recalls: ‘Phil was never
one to shout his selections home. One day at Ayr, Phil had a bet of £5,000 to £2,000
about a two-year-old of Ernie Davey’s. It crossed the line locked together with another
colt and I was getting into a desperate state until the result was announced in Phil’s
favour, I might ask him how he’d got on. He’d just say ‘£5,000 up’ or ‘£2,000 down’
before falling asleep in the back of the car on the drive home.’

Phil took the day’s results with equanimity – it was the season as a whole that counted.

All the races came alike to Bull. He regarded a race as something which required
examination. If, having studied it, there was no bet, so be it. Every race was treated on
its merits; but he drew up the following lists of DONT’s:

1: Don’t bet unless the odds are good value – a matter of individual judgement. ‘If I’m
offered only evens about what I judge to be a 6/4 chance,’ he said, ‘I do not bet. If I can
get 2/1, I bet. And 3/1 about the same horse is a bet with a capital B.’

2: Don’t bet beyond your means or try to make your fortune in a day.

3: Don’t follow tipsters or tips. If they were that sure they’d have their house on them.

3: Don’t bet ante-post unless you know the horse is an intended runner.

4: Don’t bet each way in handicaps or other races with big fields: a place bet at one fifth
of the odds is rarely good value. To get a 1/4 the odds you need the cavalry running.

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 Paul Cooper

Betting on tricasts seems an improbable means to punting profit, but professional backer
Paul Cooper used it to win nearly £400,000 on a series of bets at Thirsk.

Cooper was one of the first to capitalise on the fact that horses drawn high seemed to
have a pronounced advantage over the straight sprint course at Thirsk. There are a
number of tracks around the country where, in soft ground, a particular draw can prove
an enormous asset, but at Thirsk the same was true on fast going. It appears that the
inadequacies of the course watering system left a strip of ground under the stand rails
‘unsprinkled’ which was significantly faster than the rest of the track. By perming the five
or six highest draw numbers – those most likely to grab the favoured ground – Cooper
was able to pull off a series of major coups.

‘I was hooked on betting at a very young age,’ admits Cooper. ‘But even then I knew that
you had to be in control of it – otherwise it would control you.’

During the 1970’s , the ITV Seven was introduced. It immediately caught Cooper’s eye.
‘One of my first wagers was a £1.90 bet which won over £800. I was in business! A
couple of years later, I collected £13,365 on a £3 accumulator and I was really on my
way.’ Cooper is still fascinated by multiple bets – the prospect of huge returns for a small
outlay – and believes serious punters should not treat them in such a cavalier fashion.

‘The Lucky 15 is a value bet.- it is a Yankee that also has four win singles, and the
different bookies offer a variety of bonuses and consolations. For instance, if only one of
your selections wins, you may get double the odds. So just one 7/1 winner virtually
guarantees your money back.’

Cooper’s penchant for what Barney Curley calls ‘miracle bets’ is not his only apparent
similarity with the man in the street. Like all betting shop regulars, he is irresistibly drawn
to competitive handicaps where they bet 6/1 the field – but he hits the target far more
often.

Cooper insists that studying trainers is the key to his whole business operation. The fact
that, as an owner, he has chosen to have horses trained by Barry Hills, Jimmy Fitzgerald
and Robert Williams gives a clue to the men he most respects in the game.’ ‘There are
certainly some trainers I much prefer to back,’ he says. ‘What I really look for is someone
who is perhaps underestimated and as a result their horses start at bigger prices than
they should do.’

So what can we learn from the fastidious, immaculately turned-out Mr Cooper? Well,
here are his 8 great ‘Do’s’ and ‘Don’ts’, known as “Cooper’s Law!”

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 ”Cooper’s Law”

1: Do stay cool, calm and collected when making a selection, and don’t go in head-
down. Weigh up all the possibilities and then have the nerve to go through with it.

2: Do bet only when you are getting good value and shop around for the best early
prices.

4: Do back horses that have winning form. Shy away from maidens – the form is
unpredictable and unproven.

5: Do bet in sprints. The form is often more reliable than in longer distance flat races.

6: Do find a small, competent yard to follow; because it isn’t fashionable, you’ll almost
certainly get a value price on their horses. If the stable uses a capable apprentice, all the
better.

7: Do look at horses in the paddock, especially in the spring and autumn. You can
usually discard quite a few which are obviously not ready or are showing all the signs of
a hard season.

8: Do bet within your means. Reduce your stakes when having a bad run – and increase
them when things are going well.

1: Don’t get drunk or mix alcohol with betting. You need your wits about you to pick
winners and to deal objectively with losing.

2: Don’t back short-priced favourites. The returns simply isn’t good enough, and let’s
face it, they often get turned over anyway.

3: Don’t chase your losses. There’s always another day.

4: Don’t bet heavily when there’s been a sudden change in the going.

5: Don’t back out of form trainers or stables or jockeys carrying overweight.

6: Don’t back heavily at Chester. The tight track is a law unto itself.

7: Don’t bet in races over 18 runners. This is when the horses will split into two or more
groups, effectively making it two or three different races.

8: Don’t bet in too many 2-year-old races. There is more evidence and form with older
horses.

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 Barney Curley
The reason Barney Curley has been the bane of bookmakers and one of the most
celebrated punters of modern times can be traced back to an evening at Belfast’s Celtic
Park Greyhound Stadium some 40 years ago.

It was the night Barney’s father, a grocer from Irvinstown, Co. Fermanagh, went for the
gamble of his life on one of the dogs he owned. At the first bend the dog fell and broke
his neck.

The sight of his dad walking back up the track, cradling the dead dog, haunted Barney
ever since.

Curley senior took Barney, the eldest of his six children, out of school and into self-
imposed shifts in Manchester where the two of them worked double shifts in a plastics
factory for 15 months until enough money had been raised to clear the gambling debts.
‘My father wouldn’t come back to Ireland until everyone was paid and he could hold his
head high in the local community,’ said Barney. ‘But it left him deeply wounded.’

Every gamble Barney lands is a form of retribution for the way the bookies made him
suffer. He has accumulated closed betting accounts all over the country, but he drew a
perverse pleasure when William Hill decided in the late 1980’s that they no longer
wanted his business – after he had taken them for £200,000 over the previous two
years.

At 24 he began to manage show bands – a phenomenon curious to the dance hall circuit
in Ireland at the time. He diversified by buying a handful of pubs and betting shops but
sold up and went south of the border to start punting.

‘I wanted to prove myself,’ he says. ‘You have to be out of the ordinary to make money
as a punter.’

‘I fancied myself as a race reader and I thought I could crack the system. My first big win
was about £80,000 and within 6 weeks it had all vanished. I was drinking. I soon
discovered that drinking and gambling don’t go together!’

The biggest gamble he masterminded in Ireland was the infamous’ Yellow Sam’ coup
which netted almost £300,000. The race was at the Mount Hanover Amateur Riders
Handicap Hurdle at Bellewstown on the 25th June 1975. Bellewstown is a small country
track north of Dublin, which at the time had just one phone line. Curley and his team got
to work backing the horse off-course in stakes up to £50, while another associate kept
the single phone at the course out of commission. In the days before mobile phones and
a sophisticated blower system, the bookmakers were unable to notify their
representatives at the track that a coup was going down. Yellow Sam, who had shown
little form in his nine previous runs, started the complete outsider at 20/1 – and ended up
winning by 2 and a half lengths.

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Like all the professionals, Barney Curley made a very comfortable living from racing. His
house is a seven bedroomed mansion near Newmarket, complete with an indoor
swimming pool – and there’s a top of the range Mercedes in the driveway. It’s adorned
with the personalised number plate – ‘I BET’.

When asked what advice he would give to the average punter, his answer was not
entirely positive. ‘It’s very difficult to make racing pay in the bookmakers’ shops with their
computerised tracking systems and expert analysts. Always go to the course if you can.
You will invariably get better prices by shopping around. The important thing is to control
your emotions and don’t chase your losses. There’s always another day. I know my
judgement of form is sound enough to pay off in the end.’

It’s FREE with Sir Racing System

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 Jack Ramsden

To call Jack Ramsden the scourge of the bookmakers is not strictly true. He bets with
only one – Colin Webster – and sees his relationship with the leading northern rails layer
as a partnership. ‘It’s years since I had any betting accounts closed,’ says Jack. ‘Now I
bet personally with Colin. He’s an honourable man and we work as a team. He has the
problem of getting the money on and in doing so he knows the horses I fancy, so we
both benefit.’

Ramsden’s individual punts are not the sort to send shudders around the ring. The
biggest single bet he ever had was £5,000 – ‘and that got stuffed!’ However, since he
quit his job as a stockbroker in 1980 he has had thirteen consecutive winning years as a
full time professional backer.

The majority of Jack’s bets are on outside horses and the result of diligent work on the
form book. He gets the Timeform newspaper twice a week, makes some adjustments to
their renowned time figures, and then his personal assistant logs the ratings in the
Ramsden computer. A weights-adjusted print-out is then produced for Jack each
morning.

‘I cannot stress too strongly the importance of race times. They bind my whole approach
together. There are fewer good times recorded over jumps but everyone seems to know
about those horses and they are too short to back. Even cutting out the endless looking
up of form books, I still spend two or three hours every day working out my bets.’

Jack continues, ‘I’m constantly on the look out for the 3/1 chance that starts at 8/1. There
are 30 or 40 of them a year and they are there to be seen. At those prices you don’t
have to be right all the time!’

Rather surprisingly, Ramsden is an advocate of multiple bets – doubles, trebles, and

accumulators – the sort considered the province of the mug punter. ‘I can’t see why
people knock multiple bets. They are an extension of my philosophy to go for big prices.
On a busy Saturday I might average seven or eight selections which I pool in trebles or
accumulators – I drop the doubles to cut down on the stakes because I’m only looking
for major returns. I usually manage about ten nice touches a year and on four occasions
in my career I’ve won over £200,000. That pays for an awful lot of losers.’

That other staple of the mug punter, ‘the each-way bet’, is frowned upon by Ramsden. ‘I
analysed my betting a couple of years ago and found that if I had doubled my win stakes
instead of having each way bets, I would have been much better off. I think all punters
would benefit by cutting out all each-way bets and sticking to singles.’

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 Clive Holt

’This man talks so much sense that all punters should be made to listen to him.’ Was
how a racing journalist described the ledgendary Mr Holt. He goes racing at least four
times a week in the north, prefers midweek to a Saturday, (‘a bookmaker’s day, though I
don’t really know why’) and bets on the racecourse only. William Hill closed his account
in 1978, and Coral soon followed suit. He admits it is very difficult to get on these days.

Clive has come a long way since the day in the pub when a friend told him that The Holt
was running at Ally Pally and he ought to back it. Ten bob on the nose at 9/4 - and it
obliged. In the 30 years since then he’s earned a good living from backing horses,
mainly on the northern circuit. In all that time caution has served as his watchword,
allowing him to survive and prosper in what he calls: ‘a game that is fraught with danger.’

Holt traces his interest in betting back to his father who kept a few greyhounds in the mid
1960’s and showed his son that betting was a way of making money. Early on he saw
that betting in singles was the way forward and explained: ‘This was the first business
principle I learned.’ ‘By March ’75, Holt was ready to earn his living as a full-time backer.
‘I started betting simply because I needed more money to go along with all the
commitments one takes on with getting married and having a family. Initially, I used
betting in doubles, trebles and suchlike. It was a haphazard approach dictated by my
pocket but nevertheless I was sure I was well in front.’

In the beginning I had no proper record of my bets. I worked on a week to week basis -
being paid weekly and having regular outgoings - I was left with about the same amount
every week to bet with. There was no way I could work out what sort of percentage
return I was achieving, so I decided to do the job properly and record all my bets. This
was the first application of a business technique to my emerging betting enterprise and it
was to point me in the right direction. Looking back, it probably had the greatest
influence on my future success.

As the figures and the percentages built up before me, it was clear that I was becoming
more and more analytical. Having the figures before me allowed the easy calculation
that betting in multiples had yielded me nearly 50% clear profit on total outlay, whilst
betting in singles would have yielded slightly over 60% profit. As there were fewer single
bets compared with doubles, trebles and so on, increasing the outlay on single bets
seemed a more lucrative and less time consuming option. Importantly, the losing runs
were shorter and I was more in control of my money.

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Setting up a definite betting bank was the second business technique that I applied to
my betting that made a real difference to profits. Seven years on from the first day that I
stepped inside Haydock Park, I eventually felt confident enough to go full time and gave
my notice to quit my day job. I set off for Chester on the 6th May 1975 in a new Ford Ghia
Capri, in a new suit and in a new job. My first bet was £67 to £30 on Western Jewel with
Roy Christie on the rails down to a ticket number. The horse won by two lengths and
was never in any danger. That good start got even better and I made more money in six
weeks than I would have earned in a year working with the Electricity Board.

Betting has been a rewarding career for me. I’ve never been a big hitter, even now I
rarely win more than £1,000 at one go, but from the modest start I’ve derived enormous
satisfaction from being successful in such a high risk occupation. The trappings of
success seem almost incidental to that, but hard work has to be rewarded, after all why
work in the first place – you only have one go at life and it’s a short one.

The betting game has provided me with the pick of fast, luxury cars, Lotus, Jaguar, De
Tomaso, Pantera, BMW’s, etc. Winter holidays in the Caribbean, Africa, Australia,
America, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Canaries – plus the Mediterranean of
course. It has provided my wife and four children with a Listed Georgian Country House
complete with Coach House and Stables, set in acres of parkland, close to the north’s
major training centre.

None of that would have come my way if I was still jointing electricity cables for a living.
This is much harder work obviously, but first past the post, predicted in advance still
gives me a buzz and easily outweighs the disappointments that are part and parcel of
the operation. I’ve never felt the urge to bet purely to have an interest in a race per say. I
bet purely for profit only when that’s possible and it wouldn’t bother me one bit if I never
had another bet – provided I found another suitably rewarding challenge.

What advice can Clive give to the professional’s apprentice? One vital ingredient for
successful punting is that you’ve got to be confident that your selection can win. Horses
with good recent form, preferably winning form, running against limited opposition within
their class, when at their peak, progressing or improving – do win the majority of races,
all year round. They are a constant source of winners for anyone to exploit. Almost every
winner worth backing falls into this category which is broadened even further by the four
pros: PROVEN, PROGRESSIVE, PROMISING and PROFITABLE.

If you get the chance pick up and read Clive Holt’s book, ‘Profitable Winners Always
Back Winners’. It’ll give you a unique insight into a successful betting professional’s
determination to beat the bookmaker – and earn a substantial income from the Sport of
Kings.

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 Sidney Harris
Sidney Harris became interested in horse racing in his mid-forties. Prior to becoming a
full-time, professional gambler, Sidney was involved in the Stock Market - trading in
options. Although Sidney’s biggest gamble netted over £300,000, it was his acumen on
Black Monday, 19th October 1987, that proved his business credentials.

As the market crashed around him and his ‘financial advisers’ sat frozen at their VDU
screens losing their fortunes, Sidney was quietly amassing his profits. Sidney had a bet
at mid day on the 19th that the market free-fall and public panic would continue. He made
over £60,000 that afternoon and was one of the few to spot the continuing opportunity
for profit in adversity.

Since retiring from the Stock Market, Sidney has devoted his life and time to horse
racing and has developed some exceptionally good contacts in the trade.

When he wrote his book, ‘Horse Racing, The Essential Guide To Backing Winners’,
Sidney was in his 7th year as a professional gambler. He recalled how he became a
professional on the 26/8/93, one day after the ‘Largest Bookmakers in the World’
decided to prohibit his betting. They believed wrongly perhaps, that Harris was winning
too much!

Most punters rely on luck, and in no instance is the saying ‘the harder you work the
luckier you get’, more applicable than in horse racing. According to Harris, ‘each punter’s
journey is quite different, travelling an uncertain route without the benefits of a signpost.’
‘Entrenched, misguided ideas, lead punters to repeat mistakes that eventually become
debilitating and regularly indulged habits.’ ‘Without a definite strategy, pinpointing
mistakes becomes impossible’. ‘An aspiring professional must develop a common sense
strategy that takes many, not so obvious, winner finding options into account.’

What are the ‘essential criteria’ required of a professional gambler? Sidney suggests that
the following are critical rules and shouldn’t be broken if at all possible –

1: Never back a horse unproven on the going.

2: Never back a horse from an out of form stable.

3: Never back a horse unsuited to a track.

4: Never back a horse ridden by a jockey with a poor track record.

5: Never back a horse whose trainer has a poor track record.

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Bookmakers and layers look for horses with at least one of the above credentials as they
make wonderful ‘false favourites.’ Let’s face it, punters who can see no further than the
favourite will find themselves backing these losing favourites.

Having eliminated the above horses from a race you’ll have narrowed the field
significantly and saved yourself looking at the form of horses that can be immediately
discounted. Statistically, horses with such negative characteristics rarely win races.
Harris comments that you should ensure your possible selections pass the above filters,
the ‘essential criteria’ as he describes them, before you consider them further.

Reversing the above criteria and focusing on the positive characteristics in horses,
jockeys and trainers leads on to the following:

1: Always back trainers who are in form. They’re easy enough to find. Just turn to
‘today’s trainers’ in the Racing Post or on their website and you’ll quickly be able to
assess if a stable is in form.

2: Aim to back trainers with a good record at a particular track. Turn to the Top Trainers
section for the track in question in the Racing Post or click the appropriate button on the
R.P. website and you’ll see at a glance which trainers are likely to be in contention.

3: Aim to back jockeys with a good track record. Turn to the Top Jockeys section and
you’ll see at a glance which jockeys regularly do the business at this track.

4: It’s unwise to look at the form of a horse first, as it could prematurely make a case for
itself and ruin your objectivity.

5: Check out horses with future ‘multiple entries’. Multiple entries are a useful positive
factor. A trainer looking for the right race will enter a horse in various races. Horses with
multiple entries deserve extra scrutiny. Check the races these horses might have run in.
If they’ve been pulled out of higher grade races and will still be running in lower grade
affairs – they start to look interesting!

Final words of advice? Horse Racing is fraught with financial danger. You can literally
lose your shirt and indeed your house on racehorses. Awareness is the key to finding
winners in horse races. Every decent priced winner you’ll ever find starts with one clue
from a repertory of hundreds of possible clues. Once you find such clues – you’re well
on your way to uncovering profit.

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 J. P. McManus
’Kingmaker’

He can count the likes of Tiger Woods among his closest friends and is a
millionaire many times over – but it all started with racing.

The Limerick native has a personal fortune of about £255m, much of it coming from
gambling and foreign currency trading, which makes him Ireland's eighth richest man.

He now lives in Switzerland and owns more than 100 racehorses, mainly for jump
racing, and has a sizeable share in Manchester United,

McManus also co-owns the Sandy Lane Resort in Barbados, along with fellow millionaire
and former Celtic's major shareholder Dermot Desmond.

He first dipped his toe in the gambling game as a schoolboy before going to work with
his family's plant-hire business.

It wasn't long before he got his own betting stand at Limerick's greyhound track and his
explosive early exploits in the betting ring earned him the nickname the Sundance Kid.

Such is his pulling power that he managed to attract some of golf's biggest names to
Limerick for his own tournament, the JP McManus Invitational Pro-Am.

Woods, David Duval, Tom Lehman, Lee Janzen, Colin Montgomerie and Mark O'Meara
were among those who took part in 2000 alongside a number of lucky locals. The
tournament itself and the celebrity auction afterwards raised a massive £13m for charity.

In fact, McManus' generosity to charities in the area he grew up in is well documented.

Many of McManus' most memorable exploits have involved his racehorses, especially at
Cheltenham. McManus is a big National Hunt supporter and his horses’ race in the
green and gold colours of his home GAA club, South Liberties. His best-known horse is
Istabraq, the triple Champion Hurdle winner. The gelding, which was retired earlier this
year, became a much-loved figure with racing fans, especially in Ireland.

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"This is my greatest moment in racing," admitted McManus after Istabraq claimed the
first of his three Champion Hurdle triumphs.

But although he has achieved success in many spheres, McManus' biggest regret is that
Limerick has not won an all-Ireland senior hurling title since 1973. It seems that there are
some things that money can't buy!

J.P’s success in gambling is more than a small part due to his partnership with a
celebrity bookmaker from Ayrshire, known as ‘Fearless Freddie’. In the next section
McWilliams describes his relationship with the big hitter and how it benefits them both.

‘Fearless Freddie’

Cheltenham's favourite bookmaker tells about his skirmishes with JP McManus,

risking £1m on ONE bet and how he fell in love with racing.

Its November 2005, Cheltenham racecourse, about an hour before the first race, on the
opening day of the Paddy Power Gold Cup meeting. The sky is grey and the
temperature's falling, but that hasn't deterred the crowds flocking through the gates.

Down in the betting ring, the bookies' pitches - the time-honored mixture of boards, bags
and boxes that make up their joints - are being assembled. Bombastic men such as
Barry Dennis, conspicuously leaving the preparations to his minions, fling louder
enquiries back and forth. Gregory and John Hughes are there; Andy Smith and John
Christie are there; Mickey 'The Asparagus Kid' Fletcher, face like a 'Wanted' poster,
scowls from the sidelines.

But one man, 62-year-old Scotsman Freddie Williams, one of the most important actors
in the drama, hasn't yet arrived. Relatively diminutive in stature he may be, but he is
without doubt the biggest boards’ bookmaker at Prestbury Park.

Freddie, like a boxer delaying his entrance, is still sitting comfortably in his Jaguar
several hundred yards away in the members' car park. His attractive, dark-haired
daughter Julie and other members of his on-course team are already in place on the
pitch. The softly spoken boss confers with them by phone, also taking calls from other on
and off-course associates as he monitors the early activity and estimates the plays the
day may bring.

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At the Cheltenham Festival in March 1999, the Scotsman laid JP McManus, the
Sundance Kid of racing legend, a colossal £100,000 each way at 7/1 on his own horse
Shannon Gale in the Pertempts Hurdle Final. This wasn't some colourless transaction on
a computer screen or in a remote corner of cyberspace. This was hand-to-hand combat
in the heat and gun-smoke of the Festival. Shannon Gale, trained by the wily Christy

Roche, finished fourth and JP collected £175,000 from the each-way part of his wager. If
the gamble had won, Freddie Williams would have been on the wrong end of a payout
approaching £900,000.

What makes his story so interesting isn't just his wholehearted embrace of traditional
bookmaking and disdain for the cautious, corporate approach of the big betting-shop
chains. There's also recognition that this is a man who didn't start out with too many
natural advantages and who has earned the right to be a player on the greatest racing
stage of them all.

Freddie was born in 1942 in Cumnock, a former coal-mining town in East Ayrshire. His
father was a miner, like his father before him. Freddie, like the rest of his male relations
and contemporaries, would have gone down the pit himself had he not failed the
medical. 'I was only 15 at the time,' he recalls, 'so instead I became a mining engineer.

A few years later, I went to work for a soft drink company called Currys in Auchinleck,
another little mining town nearby. Everyone I knew liked a bet in those days, and the
backbone of gambling in the mining communities was ‘pitch and toss’. It seemed as if
every village had its own pitch-and-toss school, and you'd see men there from dawn to
dusk.'

Even then, horse racing, especially jump racing, was exerting a far greater allure. 'One
of my all-time favourite horses was Pas Seul and I remember backing him in the Gold
Cup the year before he won. It was 1959. I was earning about a pound a week at the
time and I kept my money in a tin box. There were illegal betting offices all around
Ayrshire and I put everything I could on Pas Seul. He came to the last full of running but
then he fell.' Williams laughs ruefully at the memory. 'Kerstin stayed on to win the race.
Pas Seul made no mistake the next year, though.'

Freddie's love of a punt was shared by his workmates at Currys, all of whom studied the
racing form each day. They also combined in a workforce buy-out of the business and
the subsequent return enabled Freddie to branch out. He bought his first bookmaking
pitch at Ayr in 1974, followed by one in Hamilton and one in Musselburgh. He would go
on to own seven betting offices, now cut back to three. After Currys was bought out
again in 1991, Freddie, now a millionaire, started his own bottled-water business called
Caledonian Clear.

Some of Williams' southern-based competitors like to insinuate that it must be very nice
'playing at bookmaking' when you've got another source of income in the background.
However, the inference that Freddie's racing job is some sort of amateurish sideline is
one he hotly denies. 'Bookmaking is my livelihood and my passion in life, although there
are weeks, let alone months, when you think you should be doing something different,'
he stresses.
The enthusiasm and nerve Freddie brings to his job is something the Southerners didn't
witness for themselves until the massively overdue reforms that allowed racecourse
pitches to be bought and sold at public auction in the late 1990s. The antiquated system
of Dead Man's Shoes, whereby the bookmaking pitches were restricted to successive
generations of the same family, was a sort of Masonic protection racket that shut out
new money and new faces from the ring.

'I first put my name down for Cheltenham in 1976,' remembers Freddie. 'It was almost
impossible to get a pitch there in those days. 22 years later, I think I was still only 45th
on the list. At that rate, I'd have been about 150 years-old before I got in.'

The bookie chuckles at the absurdity of it all, but the changes to the system very nearly
came too late for him. 'I had a triple-heart-bypass operation in 1998, four weeks before
the first pitches were put up for sale,' he explains. 'I was actually up and running again
very quickly. Shortly after that, I came down and bid £90,000 for the number-two
Tattersalls pitch at Cheltenham.'

The Scotsman was at Cheltenham bright and early on 1st January 1999 and then again
in March. McManus and his fellow Long Riders quickly sought him out. As well as
opposing Shannon Gale, the bookmaker also took on Nick Dundee, the Irish banker of
the week, in the Sun Alliance Chase. The young novice ran in the colours of McManus'
close friends John and Sue Magnier and was trained by Eddie O'Grady, who thought
seriously about going for the Gold Cup instead. But Freddie didn't fancy Nick Dundee.

'I was going 11/8,' he says. 'One fellow came up and wanted £80,000 on, and I laid it to
him, but I didn't take down the price afterwards. He looked at me for a moment and
looked around at his friends, and then asked for the bet again. So I laid him another
£110,000 to £80,000, but I still didn't take down the price.'

It was a close-run thing, and then fate intervened on the bookmaker's behalf. Nick
Dundee's legs gave way on landing over the third last fence and in Freddie's words 'all
you could hear were the groans of 65,000 Irishmen.' Plus, presumably, the sound of one
Scottish heart beating faster.

Freddie wasn't so lucky at Newbury in March 2003, though, when JP McManus had a
winning bet of £200,000 at 5/2 on a horse of Jonjo O'Neill's called An Muine Muice. Then
there was the opening day of the 2002 Festival when the McManus-owned, Like A
Butterfly, the subject of a £100,000 bet at 15/8, won the Supreme Novices Hurdle by a
rapidly diminishing neck.

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Yet the relationship between bookie and punter seems to be characterised by a striking
degree of mutual respect. 'We're friends,' says Williams, without a trace of insincerity.
'John was in business as a bookmaker for 15 years. He had a good bet on Dawn Run
when she won the Gold Cup in 1986 and that helped him to change his life. However, he
told me that if she'd lost, he'd have been skint the following week.'

Freddie admits, 'Festival trading is totally draining, which is why I stay in a nice, quiet
hotel. When you get back, all you want to do is eat and sleep. I'm afraid I'm well behind
in the entertainment stakes.' There was plenty of entertainment on November ‘04,
though: The Rising Moon, running in the McManus colours, was the medium of a
£100,000 plunge at 3/1 in the Grade Two novices hurdle. It came in fourth. Half an hour
later, JP's Spot The Difference won the Sporting Index cross-country chase. Someone
stuck on £28,000 at 7/1 for a payout of nearly two hundred grand.

Next year at the Festival? JP will be there, as will Freddie Williams. It just wouldn't be
Cheltenham without the champions of the betting ring.

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