Andrew Rule: Al’s got them jumping for Joy
Joy Endresz is doing it hard battling cancer but a combination of husband Allan, his Sinatra renditions and a brilliant horse called Al is backing her all the way, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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If Alligator Blood is not the best three-year-old racehorse in the land, he comes close.
He sure has the most ear-catching name. A story comes with it and a song as well.
What “alligator blood” stands for, says the man who named the horse, is the quality of not giving up.
To be resilient and persistent. To hang tough.
It is American poker slang used to describe the last player standing, or sitting, when the chips are down.
No surprises, then, that “alligator blood” describes the gritty temperament of the Queensland horse likely to start favourite in the All-Star Mile at Caulfield next month after winning eight races and carelessly losing one by the bob of a head.
The northern raider, “Al” to his friends, chews up smart fields by charging to the line like an apex predator.
But “alligator blood” also describes his trainer, David Vandyke, who has survived extreme ups and downs to become a runaway success since moving to the Sunshine Coast around the time he set the $10,000 filly Yankee Rose for a Group 1 win.
He’s the Cinderella man and now he’s back with an even better one.
Then there is the horse’s managing owner, Allan Endresz, who fell for the name after hearing it from a poker-playing friend.
It turns out that Endresz has also needed alligator blood to get to where he is.
The short version of a long story is that he has survived 20 years of litigation against government lawyers who have tried, he says, to bankrupt him over a dispute over a government loan.
Suing Big Brother is no picnic.
So when the newly-named Alligator Blood won his first race — and a substantial plunge — like a latter-day Bernborough, Allan Endresz could have been forgiven for thinking his luck had turned.
It had, but only in one sense.
The Albury accountant-turned-businessman loves the horse so much he has knocked back $3.2 million for him.
But he would swap him in a heartbeat to anyone who could cure his wife, Joy, diagnosed with a life-threatening illness last spring.
Not all love stories end in tears, but many a tragedy begins as a love story.
Which is what it was when Allan Endresz, the bright young accountant, met Joy Arnold, a farmer’s daughter from Berrigan.
They married in Albury in 1986, set up house and had three children, now young adults.
Allan had grown up with the family legend that his grandfather had backed a horse called Belmont Park to win two races on the same day in Sydney in the 1950s, a coup that could never be repeated these days.
Allan admired Pop’s punting prowess but he didn’t have much to do with horses until Joy obtained Speedy the shetland pony for the kids.
One pony led to another and soon the accountant found himself with an extra chore: feeding Laddie the dressage horse, apple of Joy’s eye.
Laddie’s paddock manners weren’t as polished as his looks. He liked to take a nip when he was hungry.
It was then that Allan, a former schoolboy drama performer with a handy voice, found that singing a little Sinatra worked wonders with Laddie’s behaviour.
The horse would relax and stop biting him at feeding time.
Why be a horse whisperer when you can sing to them?
The switch from show ponies to gallopers began in 2008, when the energetic syndicator Brad Spicer got them into a share of Fernandina, a promising sprinter.
If Fernandina had not won a Vain Stakes and a Guineas Prelude and then been sold to Hong Kong at a handsome profit, the Endresz racing ambitions might have ended there.
But that early success hooked the Albury accountant-turned-entrepreneur on the intriguing idea that horses can pay their way.
He started researching pedigrees, looking for the magic blend of bloodlines he is convinced is hidden somewhere in thousands of pages of fine print.
Meanwhile his uncle and aunt, Jeff and Robyn Simpson, joined the Endresz syndicate because they had always loved horses and knew a bit about what they should look like.
So much that they sold their house to put into gallopers.
The syndicate started buying young horses in 2014.
And Allan started “auditioning” the youngsters by singing to them to see how they reacted. Not all stable hands took to it but some horses did.
The idea was that confident, friendly horses responded positively to singing, pricking their ears and walking forward to be patted, while more timid ones retreated.
Of course, musical appreciation wasn’t the only criteria: candidates also had to pass endless pedigree analysis and Uncle Jeff and Auntie Robyn’s eagle eye for conformation faults.
They bought three useful horses in their first couple of years and came back for more. In 2018, they spied a colt at the Magic Millions sale by All Too Hard from Lake Superior, bred by bloodstock and white goods tsar Gerry Harvey and partner Katie Page.
Getting the colt to the reserve was all too hard. After Harvey passed him in at $50,000, the Albury trio made a lowball offer.
Pay the GST and he’s yours, said Harvey the salesman.
That’s how they got Alligator Blood for $55,000 at a sale where some lots made more than $2 million.
At his first start, Alligator Blood was sitting second last 10 lengths from the lead, then launched at the leaders in the last 400m.
No normal horse had any chance of making up that much ground.
But he did, winning in the last stride.
It was like watching the young Winx round up a field like a kelpie going past a mob of sheep.
That’s when they knew they had a freak galloper as tough as his name.
Last November the family got good news and terrible news.
The good news was that they won the latest round in the long-running litigation that had threatened them with bankruptcy.
The bad news: Joy was diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer.
Since then they have rejected multimillion-dollar offers for the gelding because mere money doesn’t really interest them much these days. They would rather savour moments of joy together.
Along the way, they have gathered 23 other horses, which are shared between Vandyke and two other Sunshine Coast trainers, Natalie McCall and Billy Healey.
After Alligator Blood, the best of the rest is a two-year-old named Crypto Tycoon.
He smooches up to the stable door when his owner croons to him and is shaping as a Golden Slipper contender.
Allan Endresz was interviewed about some of this at a glittering racing industry lunch to promote the All-Star Mile in Melbourne last Thursday.
“Watch this,” said Endresz’s friend Pat Scammell, an Olympic runner who knows a bit about all-star miles, given he won plenty of them in the 1980s.
“Watch him. He’ll start singing.”
Sure enough. Part way through the promotional patter about “Al”, Endresz broke into the Sinatra standard Fly Me To The Moon.
The lyrics include the line “You are all I long for, All I worship and adore”. It wasn’t really the horse he was singing for.
There won’t be a dry eye in Albury if the ’Gator wins the big race at Caulfield come March 14.
They’ll be jumping for Joy.