By Andrew Rule ANALYSE this. That was the task the young financial analyst set himself when he turned serious about horse breeding. Forty years later, John Messara AM is still looking forward, still analysing. Like the best forecasters in all fields, he looks to the patterns of the past to help map the future. The young Messara was an analyst before he ever bred a horse, so he applied the discipline of his profession to his hobby instead of winging it with glorified guess work, clashing advice and the mixture of popular science and superstition that can drown a cool, rational approach. Because racing is a passion that plays on emotion, it’s hard to be consistently dispassionate about it. Messara grasped that early in his quest to breed better racehorses—and, later, to promote Australian Thoroughbreds to the world and improve racing. Time
and
experience
have
added
an
encyclopaedia of knowledge but have not eroded the rational attitude he applied back then. At 31, Messara had been interested in racing since he was a boy because his family and friends raced a few horses. But the punter’s and owner’s view of racing, no matter how astute, is as different from breeding horses as watching football is from coaching one of the teams. Messara understood the truth of the saying, often quoted by the late C.S. Hayes, that the future belongs to those who plan for it. Successful enough at stockbroking to transform his hobby into the new phase of his life, Messara tapped the wisest racing brain he knew: Bart Cummings. Bart was cryptic. “Buy Scomeld,” he said about the 1978 VRC Oaks
INGLIS
winner. In two words, a message about the wisdom of buying well-bred
16
fillies with proven ability and an attractive “page”.
