DAYBREAK LOVER - Talk of a Straddie Season Story!

Everyone has got their favorite punting stories. As being Brisbane born and raised, thankfully mine is about its best race, the Stradbroke Handicap, run this Saturday at Eagle Farm for the 132nd time.

No, it’s not the year I had a share in the 2004 topweight True Glo, we had a horror barrier for Darren Beadman, a brave fifth which was good enough to just be part of it.

No I go back 40 years, yes I was young once too, when Daybreak Lover won his second Stradbroke, in Australian record time, but it’s as vivid as today, the punting tale was boys own for an unencumbered young journalist and fan, but to be so entwined in the tale and able to tell it, well any punter would get it. Hopefully.

The well-orchestrated win, the early bets when pre-post wasn’t the norm and then the field-field trifecta had the brain thinking and the numbers recalled were 8-20-24 and some $10k on top of the original plonk at 10-1.

Naturally the celebrations lived larger than the returns as it did for younger players, but it was the win that mattered most and the story behind it.

The cast of characters start at a then very barren Deagon almost backwater racecourse, training facility, south of Brisbane.

A young John Size was kicking off in those backstreet suburban streets. Wily genius horse men like Gordon Williams would peddle a Malvern Star bicycle to what we called the clocking tower, a plain Besser brick edifice, some suggesting he may have reeked of white rum.

A long list of rogues and scoundrels and dreamers, Sammy Strazzieri the carpet layer, Fearless Freddy Adams, tough Geoff Burns, who’d have El Laurena run second in a Melbourne Cup under Glen Killen, Jack Pollock, a dead ringer for Steptoe, he’d win a Derby with a filly (Princess Gracious.)

My first boss at The Courier-Mail, Jimmy Anderson, dispatched me to Deagon Tuesday and Thursday mornings, to learn - be “the clocker" in real clocking days too, stopwatches, to go there to listen, report and build relationships. I don’t know how many horses were called “Gully Ghost.” That was their tried track.

That old Williams had Brisbane Cup winners like the mini mare Mode, Gordon, he’d ask you to clock his horses and then to listen how they breathed coming back and ask what time you had gotten - “add two seconds son and you have something on it Saturday,” he'd say.

Invaluable experience and education. Trust, relationships. That was Deagon, early 80's.

Then there was Danny Duke, a young trainer from Gladstone, but I could always sense a brilliant horseman. I can look back now and think of a Darren Weir persona. He wasn’t much for the media. To call him on his landline (3269**** - no mobile era back then) as it was then, was to ring the number twice, hang-up and ring back. Code! 

But to train a horse, he was squeezing the best of everything until along came Daybreak Lover. It upstaged Sir Dapper in the Todman Slipper trial before it would win that year’s richest feature in Sydney. 

As a three-year-old Daybreak Lover won the Stradbroke under Gary Palmer, he was supposedly upset that a case of their select Stanthorpe apples from owners John and Jan Dean’s sling was less than expected for such a triumph.

Gary Palmer on Daybreak Lover after 1984 Stradbroke

Palmer won the “Straddie” on Daybreak Lover as a three-year-old, beating John Size’s Prince Hervey as an 8-1 chance.

Daybreak came back and won the Lightning the following the year, then a traditional lead-up to the Stradbroke, but would run only 11th before in Kiwi filly's Canterbury Belle Stradbroke and was sent off to retirement to the Dean’s Springfield’ Stud.

Daybreak Lover at stud Stanthorpe

"I was never happy with the quality of mares he got, I bought nine mares myself for

11 grand to send to him, I got some black type winners from them but being a stallion resurrected this horse," John Dean said.

"I rang Daniel (it was full first names terms, Daniel and Johnathan) and said come and look at him, I want to put him back into work and win another Stradbroke, everyone thought we were mad, but we couldn't believe how much stronger he'd become."

So, the trainer and the horse were back, and now comes the first of a few twists.

Dean gifted Duke two shares in the valuable stallion prospect, not bad when the son of Namnan, a half-brother to Melbourne Cup placegetter and John Singleton and Larry Pickering's top-class performer Rising Fear, was standing for $5500 and could only enhance his value with another Group 1 win.

"Not to my knowledge at the time Danny had knocked money off to the bookies and they came after him chasing it. In the end I had to buy them back (the shares) for about twenty-five grand to settle the debt," Dean said.

But in the meantime, he had called in the former Minister of Defence Sir James Killen – ("I knew Jim when he was a jackaroo at Surat" said Dean) to "arbitrate the matter."

"Jim liked a drink, and the punt and Daybreak was getting ready for the Lightning first-up and Daniel told him there wasn't a horse in Australia that could beat him, that is how good he was going, Jim had a grand on him at 16-1, I had a good bet and we all got out of trouble."

Still clocking at Deagon, I saw Daybreak’s impending return to the track. If he ran to my watch, he was a moral in the Lightning. He was and at 16-1 he walked in. 

Maria Pennisi was the long-time strapper and knew the horse as well as Daniel (Danny) and we were all on board for the Stradbroke sting.

I remember coming home to our Charteris St Paddington home in Brisbane after trackwork, which I shared with lifelong schoolmate Michael Sullivan, then a penciller with Brisbane ‘s biggest bookie Brian Ogilvie, before aspiring to be boss of SportingBet and Bluebet, Betr.

We’d run the book at Brisbane Boys Grammar School with many twists there, (Michael lost his prefects badge leaving school one day in his powder blue Ford Escort to bank our winnings.)

I suggested we pool our resources to have our maximum on Daybreak Lover, we found $1k each and found bookie Tom Carroll. After its final piece of work, I said let's double down and take the field and the field in the trifecta - “this is unbeatable” I said. It was. 

Michael Kerr was the jockey, he drew a perfect barrier, and it was a painless watch before the placings fell the right value way.

John Dean Michael Kerr and Danny Duke

I’ll never forget the day and more so the night, I’m not sure how many we shouted for dinner at an Italian restaurant in The Valley.

I had already reminded my journalistic professionalism first though and the Danny Duke story lying in a hospital bed as the coup took place, a “supposed” kitchen knife accident laying him low. I know too much here, but the Sunday Mail ran a picture the following morning of Duke listening to a Tandy radio I had bought.

None have won it twice a year apart. Black Piranha was the latest to do it consecutively in 2009/10.

But I’ll never forget Danny Duke or Daybreak Lover.

"He didn't die well," Dean said to me.

"He didn't look after himself, but we were great friends to the very end. He came from the wrong side of the tracks and you wouldn't have expected us to become close friends, but he taught me a lot about life, and it all came through this horse.

"When Daybreak (Lover) died, Daniel was here on the farm, we gave him a great send off, it was the least we could do, what a story, reckon we had a dozen bottles of red and a carton of beer."

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