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THE HOUSE THAT JOHN BUILT Andrew Rule discusses
by Inglis
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 winner. In two words, a message about the wisdom of buying well-bred fillies with proven ability and an attractive “page”.
“I made a ton of mistakes the first few years,” Messara admits cheerfully, four decades on. But as the breeding bug bit deeper, he studied harder, invested more.
First he and partners bought a boutique property, Middlebrook near Scone, to house a growing broodmare band.
They thought they would stand a stallion, so Messara got two that had been track rivals, the flashy juvenile sprinter Rancher and the more “classic” Grosvenor. Then the established French sire, Kenmare. In 1989, Messara got serious. What happened next is breeding folklore. Northern Dancer, Genghis Khan of the breed, was the greatest sire of all time in prepotence and sheer numbers.
There had been dominant breed shapers in other eras, from the Darley Arabian to Eclipse to St Simon, but their worlds were smaller. Northern Dancer’s offspring caught the modern era of swift air and road travel and veterinary science. He could sire more progeny than any breed shaper before him and they spread across the Thoroughbred universe with ease.
It was too late to corner the “right” son of Northern Dancer: they changed hands for millions in a war between oil sheiks and the bloodstock barons of Coolmore and Ballydoyle.
It was time to identify the right Northern Dancer grandson. The field was huge and scattered. Messara targeted sons of Danzig and Nureyev: they could handle grass and tended to have speed.
“Danzig was the better option,” Messara says, not only because of the horse’s robustness and bone but his lower profile: his progeny were split between America and the UK.
Messara combed Danzig’s better two- and three-year-olds. Danehill caught his eye on pedigree as well as performance: he had two crosses of Northern Dancer’s dam Natalma. And he was a good miler who could sprint. He was strong, tough and fast.
Messara did the deal with Coolmore
Alice, John, Kris, Fred and Paul Messara
and started to “shuttle” Danehill to the Hunter. The rest is history. So many horse generations later, Danehill’s influence in both hemispheres is a given, his sons and grandsons so successful that avoiding inbreeding to the “granddaddy of ’em all” is the conundrum breeders now face.
Meanwhile, Messara’s “hobby” has grown into one of the world’s great bloodstock enterprises, Arrowfield, which he and his partners bought in 1985.
“We are the House of Danehill,” he says. Danehill “subsidiaries” include famous names, notably Redoute’s Choice but also Danzero, Snitzel, Flying Spur and Not A Single Doubt—sire of the latest Everest winner, Classique Legend.
A few “outsiders” have been admitted to Arrowfield over the years, notably Snippets and the Argentinian import Hussonet—sire of the terrific Weekend Hussler—but the stud is actively diluting the Danehill dominance before the gene pool gets dangerously shallow. This is why Messara has grabbed the chance to stand Written Tycoon at Arrowfield.
There are three other stallions whose presence shows how keenly the Arrowfield brains trust has picked out new blood.
Dundeel springs from another branch of Northern Dancer—High Chaparral by Sadler’s Wells. Beside him is his brilliant son Castelvecchio, fresh from a string of wins in the best company.
It all means that the Arrowfield team is concentrating on finding the next big thing, the dominant force that can do what Danehill did ... by not being related to him, at least not closely.
It is, says the master analyst, a matter of analysis but not only that. He has learned over the decades to value more than logic and data in the search “to find alternative outcrosses that work.”
The Mr Prospector outcross is a well-ploughed field but that doesn’t mean it is exhausted. There’s the potential of the Japanese gene pool descended from the Sunday Silence branch of the Halo line. It’s no secret that Arrowfield have collaborated with the powerhouse Japanese breeders of fast stayers.
And, just maybe, something else is out there, waiting to “step up”. Could it be the fact that Australia and New Zealand have the world’s only elite Sir Ivor sire line, through the great Zabeel, that might flourish if exactly the right colt turns up? A “Daneheel” for the 21st century?
Messara likes to have pedigree experts on his team. But he never forgets the fact the late, great Percy Sykes took one look at Danehill and said to buy him.
Getting his fellow industry participants to buy Arrowfield products at the big Inglis sales each year is something Messara knows all too well comes down to results.
And there’s sure been plenty of positive ones in recent years to come out of the Arrowfield drafts—The Autumn Sun, Estijaab, Castelvecchio, Super Seth, Alabama Express, Pariah, Maid Of Heaven and Doubtland to name just a few.
And with offerings by all the farm’s leading stallions in 2021, there is every reason to believe there will be more to add to the above list in years to come.
As for himself and Arrowfield, “all we want to do is to keep getting better,” he says. “We shall continue on the chase for breed-shaping stallions, working with our international network of friends and associates who share our passion for breeding great racehorses. It’s what we love doing.”
But Messara’s analytical mind is not turned only to Arrowfield and family racing interests. As a racing insider with an outsider’s skill set shaped by market disciplines, he has views widely valued in the global quest to improve racing by lifting the standard of horses and the facilities used to train and race them.
Messara quotes another “insider outsider”, Kentucky lawyer, journalist and bloodhorse aficionado Kent Holingsworth, who wrote something in 1974 as true tomorrow as it was then:
To that end, Messara has applied himself to the “selfevident truth” that class matters, and so fostering it and measuring it matters. He is concerned that the concept of Pattern (Group) racing is threatened “by a mindset that undervalues the quest for racing excellence … in favour of prizemoney, wagering and entertainment KPIs.”
Protecting and refining black type races in Australia and around the world “enables owners to benchmark their horses against others in their generation as well as against horses of the same age in previous generations,” he writes.
But he is no hidebound traditionalist. He applauds efforts to make racing more attractive and competitive, such as The Championships and The Everest. But praise comes with a caveat: that events based on prizemoney and publicity need to mesh with the established pattern of Group and Listed races rather than disrupting them.
Racing in Australia faces the same future challenges it does everywhere, he warns. It needs “collaboration between state, national and international racing administrators willing to work in the fertile space between innovation and tradition.”
Messara is just as concerned with performance and economies of scale as he is with pedigrees. Circumstances alter cases in different countries and jurisdictions, he says, so “there is not one solution that fits all” but “financial sustainability is crucial for long term success.”
Meanwhile, at home in the Hunter Valley, the search for the perfect racehorse goes on.
