At the 1976 Cheltenham Festival a story circulated about an Irish punter walking into a betting shop in the town carrying cash in a duffel bag and emptying £6,000 on to the counter. When the bookie swallowed hard on this opening gambit, the punter increased his stake on Brown Lad in the Gold Cup to £10,000, or so the story went.
Without any names, the yarn was relayed on that Wednesday evening’s television news. A day later, Hugh McIlvanney traced the audacious wager to JP McManus, a 25-year-old Irish punter and rails bookmaker whose reputation was already a vessel for tall tales.
“Among the Irish at Cheltenham there are always at least 100 punters with the nerve to play snowballs in an avalanche,” wrote McIlvanney in the Observer. “There was one such player in action last week, one remarkable enough to be clothed in instant legend as word of his deeds spread through the National Hunt Festival and beyond.”
McManus agreed to a brief chat, and to be photographed, wearing a dashing raincoat with giant lapels and a belt tied at the waist; on his head was a Cossack-style fur hat. Brown Lad finished second in the Gold Cup and McIlvanney asked McManus if he had suffered a “five-figure” loss.
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“Oh yes,” he said in typically economical fashion, “you can say that alright.”
The only part of the story he denied was the duffel bag.
It was the first time that McManus had been referred to as “The Sundance Kid” in print. The nickname had originated in Irish betting rings where McManus hunted with the hounds and ran with the hares. During one race meeting in the 1970s, McManus had allegedly run up £15,000 in losses, forcing him to step down from his bookmaker’s pitch and punt his way out of trouble; he ended the day £30,000 in front. Or so the story went.
The betting ring is a different arena now, shaped by betting exchanges and digital transactions that would never materialise as racecourse rumour, no matter how large the bet. When McManus made his name in the ring, the markets were often shaped by late plunges at the track and the biggest bets would be recorded on the results pages of the trade press the following day; just numbers, no names.
About McManus, people were always more inclined to believe the outlandish yarns than his demure deflections. Those stories were more in line with his stage name.
It has been reported a million times that he took £250,000 out of the Cheltenham ring after Mister Donovan won the SunAlliance novice hurdle in 1982, the first festival winner in his colours. McManus has heard that figure a million times too, but he has never confirmed it or denied it. The figure had a life of its own. For context, the prize money was less than £16,000.
To flourish as a yarn it only needed a ring of truth. Mister Donovan didn’t have the form in the book to win a race of that nature, so the bookies didn’t run from McManus that day.
“Bookmakers didn’t panic if JP was punting,” said bookmaker John Christie years later. “They would all want to accommodate him and lay a bet. JP would have good days and bad days. As he was invariably backing his own horses, you would think he would win regularly, armed with the information he was privy to, but JP would back his losers as much as his winners. That’s another reason why bookmakers in the ring were prepared to take the bets [on Mister Donovan].”
However much he won on the horse, that was the year when he bought Martinstown Stud outside Kilmallock, where his mansion and his massive home-breeding operation are situated now. The timing might not be a coincidence. He hasn’t said.
Estimates of his current wealth start at €2 billion. The fortune that made him a billionaire was built on currency trading in the mid-1990s and since then on a wide portfolio of other business interests. But his first fortune came from gambling.
He was just 20 years old when he first took out a bookmaker’s licence. He went to the wall twice, returning to his father’s earth-moving business, broke and chastened and undeterred. On the second occasion his mother bailed him out with a loan of “a few hundred pounds”, without his father’s knowledge.
During one turbulent spell, McManus wrote to the big English bookmakers and told them he did not want credit. “It meant he didn’t leave a racecourse owing any money,” wrote Raymond Smith in his 1992 book, High Rollers of the Turf. In casinos he limited himself to cashing one cheque for chips. “The casino manager will have received a letter to this effect,” wrote Smith, “and in no way could more credit be extended”.
“Once you’ve been skint in life and come through it, you come to respect money,” McManus said. In his 20s, some of his punting was harum-scarum. What he gained, he says, was self-control.
“I gamble but I think I am disciplined,” McManus said, trying to explain himself to Brough Scott 15 years ago. “If I lose my money I don’t have a bet for two weeks – it doesn’t bother me. Gambling is a gene. It’s not your fault if you gamble. It’s like an addiction, but I had a friend who had a problem, and I said I wanted to teach him not to be an addicted gambler but an addicted winner. We don’t bet to gamble, we bet to win. Winning is the addiction, not gambling.”
Being a racehorse owner is not a path to wealth; it is an expensive indulgence. Cill Dara was the first winner in his green and gold silks, nearly 50 years ago, and since then he has had more than 4,000 winners.
Since 2008, his horses have won more than €36 million in prize money, but that wouldn’t come close to covering his outlay on young stock and training fees. Unlike other big owners, McManus is not averse to buying slightly older horses with proven form at a high level; The New Lion, second favourite for one of the novice hurdles at the festival next week, is the latest high-profile example. Those horses always come with a surcharge.
For many years the size of his string has been staggering, dwarfing every other owner in jumps racing. This season alone 167 different horses have run in his colours in Ireland and 70 in Britain. And because his policy is to leave horses in the yard where he bought them – no matter how small – 57 different trainers have saddled horses in his silks this season alone.
In his office at Martinstown all his horses are listed on a giant whiteboard. Marian Finucane asked him once how many he had, and with typical coyness he said he didn’t know. “But,” he said, “I’d know if one was missing”.
“When he’s gone there’ll be some hole in racing,” says Ted Walsh, who has trained horses for McManus for the last decade or more but has known him for nearly 50 years. “People won’t realise it until he’s gone. When you train a horse for him, he’s very much involved. He has a strong opinion. He knows it inside out.”
McManus’ intoxication with Cheltenham is undiminished. In his first 20 years as an owner he had just a handful of festival winners, but he has 78 now, miles ahead of any other owner in the history of the meeting.
His tilts at the ring continued, no matter how great his fortune had become. In 2006 he hit Fearless Freddie Williams for £925,000 on one day at Cheltenham after McManus backed two winners in his own silks. Or so the story goes.
“He’s more competitive than me or [former rugby player] Paul O’Connell,” said AP McCoy, who was his retained jockey for many years. “If you are playing golf against him and you have a bet for a pound, then he wants that pound off you. He’ll have his hand out on the 18th green, waiting for the pound, with a smile on his face.”
This year, he probably has the strongest Cheltenham team that he has ever assembled. On the ante post lists he owns about half of the favourites. McManus will be 74 on Monday. The presents will start arriving on Tuesday.
