Baby Paris
As a boy in the dry, baking hot town of Kalgoorlie in the 1950s, Gary Bowen used to look forward to two days in particular.
One was every Sunday. His family wasn’t particularly religious, or at all in fact. “My dad’s only religion was he’d go to the pub every Sunday,” says Bowen. But that visit always came after another weekly ritual he could take his son to, which always meant horses.
Bowen’s father Tommy was the gold town’s vet. He came with impeccable qualifications: he’d taught himself. He’d had to leave school at 13, to earn a quid amid the Great Depression. He gained a job as a delivery boy for a local chemist, but was always messing around with his other obsession, not curing people but creatures great and small.
Eventually, the Veterinary Surgeon’s Board of Western Australia realised he’d been treating animals for many years and granted him official qualification. In that sense, the horse had gone behind the cart. But his vocational skill was such that he’d also be awarded an MBE for his services with animals.
“Everyone in town knew Tommy Bowen,” Gary, 72, tells It’s In The Blood. “At first he got a job at the chemist. That was back when people would take in their prescriptions, and they wouldn’t grab you a box of pills, they’d have to make it up – get the mortar and pestle and grind up the powder, and push it all together.”
Graduating from delivery boy, Tommy Bowen also became a self-taught chemist, although he never owned a piece of paper from any pharmacists’ board, and had to work alongside someone who did. In the meantime, he was always treating animals.
“He did that at night, after knocking off from the chemist,” Gary says. “Through the week he did cats and dogs and budgerigars and Christ knows what, but then every Sunday was dedicated to horses. He’d go around the town treating everyone’s horses, and I’d go along. I used to look forward to Sundays so much.
“Back then, every second house had a stable in the backyard, because that was how people got around – horses. And my dad was brought up with horses in Kalgoorlie because his dad, William, had a horse and cart and sold vegetables out of it. And their stables were rented by a horse trainer, so they had horses by the dozen.”
That other day young Gary would look forward to was not known by one of those calendar titles but something far more evocative: raceday.
“There’d be a parliamentary enquiry into it now,” he says, “but back when I was about 10, the races would come around at Kalgoorlie-Boulder race club, and dad would give me 50 cents per race to bet with. Me and my mates would go up to the tote window, and the club provided a little box for the kids to stand on, so we could talk to the tote lady and put our bets on. We were encouraged to gamble, really.
“Back then, there’d be about 50 or 60 bookies on course as well, but the kids could only bet with the tote, not the bookies.”
Heaven forbid.
And so Gary has been around horses now for almost seven decades. He’s been a trainer at Kalgoorlie for nearly five of them, whilst fulfilling other jobs. Some inevitably involved the mining industry, whilst he was also well-known for the taxi he drove for around 30 years.
“I did go away to Perth for a couple of years about 30 years ago, working for a mining equipment company, but I didn’t like the big city so I came back to Kalgoorlie,” he says. “I’ve got two kids, they went away and came back, and now I’ve got five grandkids and two great-grandkids here. I love the place.”
Over those years he’s trained a small string of gallopers. “It got up to 16 one year, and that nearly sent me mad,” he says. One of his best came early.
“Mess Fury – the third horse I ever had,” he says. “I got him as a seven-year-old bull. He’d raced up until five, did a suspensory and had two years in the paddock, and I got him through a friend and client of my dad’s.
“He won eight races but also ran 14 seconds, when I’d only just started training and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I raced him till he was 11. Took him to Perth a couple of times, and he ran a few places, and won a race at York. He was a magnificent horse.”
Bowen now has seven gallopers on his books, which he calls optimum. He hasn’t trained a winner this season from 18 starters but, reflecting Kalgoorlie itself – so awash with gold, nickel and lithium it can’t find enough workers – he’s enjoying the biggest boom in his life with horses.
That’s because he’s the owner and breeder of a mare so talented that he recognised from day one she had no place in Kalgoorlie, and sent her to Colin Webster in Perth instead.
She’s a daughter of another booming force in the West whose success rate, if not quite divine, at least inspires weekly devotion at Ascot and Belmont – Playing God (Blackfriars). The mare’s name is Baby Paris, which is at once fitting and slightly misleading.
It’s apt in that there’s not much of her, and she’s the only foal of a mare named War In Paris (War Chant). But misleading in that it belies the fact she has giant-sized courage and tenacity, shown again last Saturday in her second stakes win in her past four outings, in the Jungle Dawn Classic (Listed, 1400m).
That took her earnings to $686,000, which you’d assume makes her Bowen’s highest earner.
“Highest earner?!” he laughs. “Think she’s won more than all my others put together.”
There was a bit of luck, cruel at first, that led to the great fortune of Bowen becoming a black-type breeder at what he’d declared would be his final attempt. War In Paris had been a $70,000 yearling. Her dam Paris Moon (Metal Storm) had had four starts, all in Perth in 2002, with two seconds preceding two wins – the second a two-year-old Listed – before injury intervened.
She lived a long life, only dying this year, and War In Paris was her ninth named foal in 11, three of them city winners.
Bowen bought War In Paris as a near five-year-old for $10,000 after she’d won four country races, including two at Kalgoorlie, but before he could tease a win out of her, fate stepped in.
“I live across the road from the racecourse, and one day she got away from the track rider, ran home and went down my driveway, slipped over and crashed into my car,” Bowen says. “She scratched herself up – and the car – and was never much good after that.
“I’d bred a few before which were no good, but I thought I’d have one more go, and I wouldn’t muck around – I’d send her to the best stallion in the state in Playing God.
“I paid $8,000 for the service. It’s $33,000 now, and a lot of people from the Eastern states are waking up to him now too,” he said of the stallion who’s had two stakes-winners on the past two Saturdays at Ascot, although just the one on each of the two Saturdays before, and is well on the way to his second straight Western Australia sires’ title.
Bowen may have thought himself cursed as a breeder when War In Paris bore Baby Paris, and died in the process. But, raised by a nanny mare at Mungrup Stud, the filly was well put-together and moved athletically.
“I decided she’d need trialling, and we don’t have trials in Kalgoorlie very often. I’ve been friends with Colin Webster for 30 years, so I sent her to him,” Bowen says. “The plan was, if she was any good, she’d stay with him, but if she was no good, she’d come back to me to train.
“She had her first trial and bolted in. Then had her first start and bolted in with that too. I was very happy to leave her with Colin.”
At just her second start, Baby Paris was pitched into WA’s major two-year-old race, the Karrakatta Plate (Gr 2, 1200m). You might say she ran into a handy one, beaten 2.5 lengths by Amelia’s Jewel (Siyouni).
She won her next three in her second campaign before returning to stakes grade for a length second to the also-highly-regarded Sniparoochy (Snippetson) in last November’s Jungle Mist Classic (Listed, 1200m) at Ascot.
Her third preparation earlier this year yielded her largest payday to date, when she won a $200,000 race called The Joey Plate (1200m), on the undercard of the far bigger The Quokka (1200m).
And this time in, she’s finally become a stakes-winner, taking the Black Heart Bart Stakes (Listed, 1200m) by a head, then hanging on by a neck when not only being stepped up to 1400 metres last Saturday, but finding herself in front throughout.
“The trainer and (the) jockey [Peter Knuckey] said she’d run the trip, but I went on the mother, who was best at around 1100 metres, so I had my doubts,” Bowen says. “She doesn’t have to lead but she pinged the gates and stayed there, and dug deep. I reckon Playing God has cut in there. He leaves everything from 1000–metre winners to 2400–metre winners.”
Baby Paris’s pedigree is fairly plain to the eye, the reasonably standard highlights being a 4m x 3m topline cross of Danzig (Northern Dancer) – via Blackfriars’ sire Danehill and the mare’s damsire War Chant. That means a reasonably close 6m, 6f x 5m triplication of the blue hen Natlama (Native Dancer). Australia breeding buffs may also be tickled by a 6f x 6f doubling of the great Todman (Star Kingdom), in the female side of both parents.
What the pedigree has ultimately produced has, like Playing God, generated interest from the East.
“After she’d won three of her first starts, I got a call from an agent for a Melbourne trainer offering $700,000,” Bowen says. “I was never going to sell. I’m 72, and this is a dream come true.
“After that, a lady from Inglis rang up one day and chatted away for about half an hour, and we had a nice chat, but then I asked why she was calling. She said, ‘I want to offer you $400,000 for her dam’. I said, ‘Thanks very much but she’s passed away’.”
With almost the equal of that $700,000 offer in her account, Baby Paris will now tackle a still bigger payday at weight-for-age in the inaugural $1.5m Gold Rush (Gr 3, 1400m) on Saturday week. Further on the horizon is a greater, even longer, and quintessential goal for a man so deeply steeped in West Australian thoroughbreds.
“I reckon the Railway Stakes is the best race in WA,” Bowen says. “It’s a mile, but with 12 more months’ maturity, she’d run it on her ear.”
The knockabout former taxi driver from the goldfields mightn’t like the city much, but it looks like there’ll be a few more trips there in his future.