Something for the Pain (11 page)

I seem to recall that the advertising of betting systems was made illegal at some time since the 1960s, which might explain why no such ads appear nowadays, although some tipsters are apparently free to offer their services. In the late 1950s, when I saw the first ads for Form-Plan, not only the
Sporting Globe
but
Turf Monthly
and other racing publications published ads for systems, mostly boasting results that defied belief and always having as a business address a post-office box in a capital city. I can recall only one system that was advertised continually for year after year; the others disappeared, so to speak, after six months or a year, presumably when disgruntled purchasers had spread the word that their own results failed to match those claimed for past years. Failures of this kind need not prove that the marketer of the system has been downright dishonest. Several times, when looking through past records to check the worth of one of my own systems, I've decided to vary one or another rule so that the system would have selected a certain winner at long odds. I might even have done this more than once, only to learn later that the new rules obliged me to include so many losing selections that the profits from the long-priced horse were wiped out. As financial advisers remind us nowadays, past results may not necessarily be repeated in the future.

I do recall one instance, however, of deliberate deception. The promoter of the system, so I was told, provided purchasers with a plan for backing one or another of the three horses uppermost in the so-called newspaper poll. In those days, several newspapers in both Sydney and Melbourne provided detailed coverage of racing. This included selections from up to ten tipsters and a poll ranking horses according to their popularity with the tipsters. If the deviser of the system had told purchasers which of the various polls he had used to obtain his lucrative past results, then the results could easily have been checked from old newspapers. But the deviser of the system claimed that each user should make up his or her own poll, using the selections of six or seven so-called leading tipsters. This, he assured his hopeful clients, was what
he
had done in the past. In other words, no one testing the system could claim that certain winners supposedly backed in the past had not been among the top three in any popularity poll; the deviser of the system could simply claim that his own privately assembled poll had most certainly included the said horses. Likewise, if the poor purchaser failed to show a profit from the first few months of betting, he might be told, or he might himself believe, that his choice of tipsters was at fault.

I had been following the races for nearly ten years when Form-Plan was first promoted. As nearly as I can recall, this took place in early 1957. I had seen nothing like it before: a whole page of the Wednesday
Sporting Globe
was given over to advertising a betting method alleged to select about fifty per cent winners and seventy-five per cent placings, and to have turned a modest starting bank into a small fortune during the past five years. Apart from the lavish advertising, what distinguished Form-Plan from all other systems that I had read about was that the man selling Form-Plan was doing so under his own name and from his home address. Well, being somewhat older and wiser now than in 1957, I suppose I should write that the promoter of Form-Plan claimed to be named A. T. Maclean and to live at a stated address in Batman Street, West Melbourne. As further evidence of his trustworthiness, he provided a likeness of himself—or certainly of a nondescript man looking studiously through horn-rimmed spectacles.

I may be writing ironically now, but all this caused something of a stir among my racing acquaintances, who were used to reading about systems peddled from Sydney post-office boxes. I tried to keep an open mind. I would have liked to believe that someone had at last discovered what I had searched for in vain for nearly ten years. My chief query arose from my frequent daydream of what
I
would do after I had discovered my own equivalent of Form-Plan. The very
last
thing I would do would be to advertise my discovery to the racing public of Victoria and to provide them with a likeness of myself, with or without horn-rimmed glasses.

Connected with this was my fear of what might happen if punters in their hundreds or their thousands bought Mr Maclean's foolproof system and set about using it every Saturday. In fact, part of my concern was that the system could
not
be used every Saturday. It was clear from the summary of results in the advertisement that Form-Plan selected hardly more than twenty horses each year. If someone following the system were to make more than pocket money from it, he or she would have to bet very large sums indeed on each of the small number of selections. The economics of the system, and even of racing in general, might be altered if hundreds, or even thousands, of Form-Plan followers rushed at the bookmakers whenever a selection was about to race.

Yes, I had my doubts, and yet a time came when I could hold out no longer. The ads had been appearing in the
Sporting Globe
every week for much more than a year and yet the economics of racing had seemed unchanged. Mr Maclean would have had to sell thousands of copies of his system to pay for his ads and to make a profit. I could only assume that his clients were satisfied with what they had been sold. The horn-rimmed visage still appeared week after week, and I had read no newspaper account of bricks having been thrown through windows in Batman Street, West Melbourne. Perhaps the followers of Form-Plan were content with modest profits and not yet eager to give up their day jobs, as we say nowadays.

Form-Plan cost ten pounds. About a year after I had bought my copy, I began work as a primary teacher near the bottom of the salary scale. My first fortnightly pay cheque amounted to thirty-four pounds. A better comparison might be the cost of a good-quality hardcover book at that time: about one and a half pounds. Mr Maclean's product was at the top end of the market, to use another present-day expression.

I didn't actually pay the full price for Form-Plan. In September 1958, I went halves with a fellow student teacher named Graham Nash, whom I haven't seen or heard of for nearly fifty-five years. Without knowing it, we had bought Form-Plan at the right time. The system selected only two-years-old horses. Races for two-years-old in Melbourne and interstate begin in late September or early October and end in late July. That was our first surprise. From early August we would have nothing to bet on for nearly two months. Nor would our betting be frantic in other months. As the advertised summaries of results had suggested, Form-Plan selected only about twenty horses each year in Melbourne and Sydney combined. This was about one bet each fortnight. I could not easily foresee myself going for two weeks at a time without betting. But I rather admired the selection method itself. Like many other observant punters, I had noticed that races for two-years-old seemed more often won by the favourite or the best-performed horse. I had sometimes skulked around bookmakers' stands when the clerk was working out the final result for a race, and I had learned sometimes from a betting sheet that a race for two-years-old had resulted in a loss for the bookmaker because punters had wanted to back only the favourite or the second-favourite. Form-Plan selected only top weights in two-years-old races, whether or not they were favourites. A selection had to have won or been placed recently. I forget the other few rules, except that selections had to be backed each way, that is, for both a win and a place. I found this puzzling at the time, and I wonder now whether it was a result of the sort of tinkering that I had mentioned earlier: whether Mr Maclean had decided to recommend each-way betting after having noticed at some point in his past results a frustrating sequence of second and third placings.

Graham Nash and I had shared the cost of Form-Plan, but we kept our betting separate. I had decided to bet five pounds each way on each selection, which was several times more than the largest bet I had previously had. On the other hand, I intended to bet only on Form-Plan horses, saving my money for a few decisive bets. The first of them was on a filly named Snowflower (Pale blue, tartan sash) at Caulfield on the Wednesday before the Caulfield Cup. Snowflower was narrowly beaten but that was all right for a start, we thought. We had lost only a quarter of our outlay after collecting on our place bets. Our second bet was ten days later, on Moonee Valley Cup Day, as we used to call the day that is now known as Cox Plate Day. Our selection was the filly that had beaten Snowflower at Caulfield: Faithful City (Green, gold Maltese cross, striped sleeves and cap). Faithful City was at the generous odds of four-to-one. The favourite was Ritmar (White, purple stripes), a filly from Sydney ridden by Neville Sellwood. I wish I could remember who rode Faithful City. Ritmar could gallop only at top speed, and the rider of Faithful City, having seen this, held his mount together for a last run at the favourite. Ritmar led by two lengths around the turn. The straight at Moonee Valley is short but uphill. Ritmar began to tire and Faithful City to gain ground. Graham and I were in the old South Hill reserve, almost head-on to the finish. We had no idea which filly had won. The judge studied the print of the photo finish for three or four minutes and then declared Faithful City the winner.

I have always maintained that a writer achieves nothing by trying to describe feelings; that feelings can only be suggested. I will therefore report only that my feelings, after Faithful City's narrow win, were mixed. I had in my possession the key to lifelong wealth, but so too had all those numerous unknown buyers of Mr Maclean's method. How long would it be before half the population of Melbourne heard about Form-Plan and flocked to the races to get their share of the easy money?

Our next bet was on Faithful City again, in a race for two-years-old fillies on Melbourne Cup Day. I have no recollection of the Cup, which was won by Baystone (Dark-blue-and-lilac stripes, red cap), but I recall Faithful City leading all the way in the fillies' race. Her odds were short: a bit less than two-to-one, but I had increased my bet to eight pounds each way and had won the equivalent of four times my weekly allowance as a student teacher. I was even more anxious by now when I thought of all the other punters who were winning as I was. How could we all keep winning for month after month and year after year? And yet, I had not overheard at any race meeting a single conversation about Form-Plan. When I had stood in the queues to collect my winnings, no one around me had uttered thanks to Mr Maclean. Perhaps there
were
Form-Plan followers around me waiting to collect, except that they were desperate, as I was, to stop the word from spreading.

Nowadays, I speculate that most of the buyers of Form-Plan were persons such as I was in those days: workers and lowly public servants and small-time punters, all dreaming of their own versions of my leisurely life in Dandenong Road, Armadale. I speculate further that even Form-Plan, successful though it seemed for a time, was not what they had hoped for when they sent off their ten pounds to Mr Maclean. They had wanted lively betting, action, bets in every race, frequent winners at long odds. They could not foresee themselves retiring early as a result of backing twenty two-years-old horses each year at short odds. As for the real punters—the stable commissioners, the likes of Teddy Ettershank, and the bookmakers especially—if they even read the
Sporting Globe
, they would have barely glanced at Mr Maclean's full-page ads. They, the real punters, had seen systems come and go. As a leading bookmaker said to me many years later, ‘I like all punters, but I like systems punters best.'

I've given away already the end of my story. After Melbourne Cup Day, we got stuck on a plateau for several months. We backed winners, but we backed even more losers, a few of them unplaced, which was doubly costly. The last Form-Plan horse that I backed ran at Flemington one wet day in the autumn of 1959. I forget its name but its colours were All brown and it was trained by one of the famous Hoysted family at Wangaratta. Its odds were eight-to-one, the longest I had ever been offered against a Form-Plan horse. If the horse had won, the system would have been in profit again, but the horse never flattered at any stage.

It would be easy to dismiss a betting method such as Form-Plan, and most of its disappointed followers surely did so. I would be fairly confident, though, that the average small punter who tries to back the winner of every race would be considerably better off at the end of each year after following Form-Plan or some similar method than after throwing his or her money at horse after horse in race after race. I even wish I had kept my old
Sporting Globe
collection for a few years afterwards and had checked the results of Form-Plan during the years after I had abandoned it. I don't recall when the ads for the system disappeared from the
Sporting Globe
, but I recall my receiving a newsletter from Mr Maclean at some time in 1959. He had decided to change some of the rules of his method. We were no longer to back horses starting from wide barriers or on days when the track was heavy. Needless to say, these rules would have prevented me from backing several losers during months past. The last message that I received from Mr Maclean was another newsletter. He had devised a completely new method of systematic betting. Results for the past few years were outstanding. Persons who had previously purchased Form-Plan could buy the new system at a discounted price. I decided that the man was incorrigible and a rogue, but that was a few years before I read Otto Fenichel's book. Now I incline to the belief that poor Mr Maclean was truly desperate to learn how he stood with God.

11.
Lickity and the Eccentric Aunt

ONLY TWICE DURING
my long lifetime have I intercepted from someone a look of admiration for my—what should I call it?—not wisdom but sagacity, perhaps, or shrewdness. And, strange to tell, I was grudgingly admired on both occasions on account of my involvement with Lickity (Cerise, gold hoops and cap).