An unlikely pony tale
Posted on 04/04/2010As the Grand National looms, Marcus Armytage in The Sunday Telegraph takes a look at the story behind outside hope Dream Alliance, a real rags-to-riches tale.
A horse reared on an alotment above an old slag heap and owned by a group of amateurs, including an Asda cleaner, a pub landlord and a retired noodle maker, is in the running to win Britain's biggest horse race.It is the unlikeliest of Grand National stories.
But when the tape rises on Dream Alliance and the 39 other starters at Aintree on Saturday, thousands of punters will be hoping that the nine-year-old gelding will rip up the form book once again to provide the fairtale ending the script requires.
Dream Alliance will be cheered on in Liverpool by a syndicate of twenty-three friends who have spent £10 a week each to bring him to the point where he can compete with racehorses owned by some of the sport's richest patrons.
Born at a local vet's, the horse spent his first formative winters on a tenth of an acre mud patch with his mother and chickens and ducks for neighbours.
The view from his 'stable' was the rear of a terrace of old, grey council houses and keeping him in were various types of chain link fence, an occasional rail and six-foot high steel mesh more commonly used to keep people out of building sites.
His summer turn-out was an acre of grass next to some playing fields.
Tiger Woods will return to centre stage at the Masters this week, and it remains to be seen whether the world No. 1 can still attract the affections, and spare cash, of middle America will become evident in Augusta, writes Lawrence Donegan in The Observer.
The humble golf hat is a long way down the billion-dollar food chain of American sports marketing, but when it carries the logo of a certain fallen idol then people pay attention. They did last week when a retail chain called Golfsmith announced that sales of Tiger Woods merchandise had risen in the face of the mostly singularly destructive celebrity scandal since Bill Clinton "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky".Woods, by his own admission, did have sex with that woman – and that one, and that one, and on and on. Over the past four months he has paid a heavy price: financially, he has lost an estimated $40m (£26m) annually in sponsorship deals; personally, he has spoken publicly about his efforts to repair his marriage; and, perhaps, competitively, for Woods's peers will surely be less inclined to view him as a flawless, unmatchable deity.
Yet where there is headgear on the shelves there is hope, as Golfsmith's chief executive officer, Marty Hanaka, made clear when announcing that the company's 74 retail outlets had sold 9,564 Tiger Woods-branded products in the five months since last October, compared to 8,855 over the same period last year. The biggest number of sales came in early December, when the Woods scandal was at its most toxic.
Was this a salutary lesson for the misguided few who continue to believe there really is such a thing as bad publicity? Or a small but significant sign that all is not lost for the most lucrative personal brand in the history of sport? Hanaka opted for the latter, declaring: "People have not abandoned Tiger Woods."
He would say that, of course. Golfsmith's future does not rest entirely on one golfer but a successful, and popular, Tiger Woods is good for business. Yet more dispassionate observers, or at least those who have little stake in the financial fallout of this Shakespearean drama, could be forgiven for missing signs of resurrection in a few hundred hat sales. Tiger Woods is returning to competitive golf at this week's Masters at Augusta, but will he ever find his way back into the affections of his once adoring public?
On the face of it the answer, surely, is no. Too much is known now about the double life he once led and too much of his behaviour has gone beyond the comprehension and tolerance of his principal constituency, middle America. Yet this is a country that loves a redemption story and, as Woods has proven through the course of his professional life, nothing spurs him on as much as a challenge, except perhaps the desire to make fools of his critics. After the carefully plotted machinations of the last six weeks, when a "humbler" Woods has emerged from rehabilitation treatment to reintroduce himself to the world, one tiny and evasive step at a time, he is not about to go quietly into the night.
A victory, surely, is beyond a man who has not played competitively for more than four months, but should it happen the very least that could be said is that the $1,999.99 signed Nike shirt will be one of the biggest bargains of all time.