Mason's Big Red secret

By AIDAN RODLEY - Waikato Times

John Mason is a likeable bloke. He's black and white, a straight shooter. But he has been keeping a secret. A huge secret.

Twenty-seven years ago, Mason had taken Tallifer to Australia with the aim of running him in the Melbourne Cup.

But the smart stayer failed to settle in at the public Epsom training facilities.

Mason was at his wit's end trying to remedy the problem when he was approached by a Melbourne trainer offering him stabling at his private property. For Mason, it was an offer too good to refuse.

The trainer was Tommy Woodcock, then 76, but still as much as an Australian icon as cricket's Dennis Lillee or Rod Marsh, who were doing their best to forget the infamous underarm incident in the same city the previous year.

Woodcock's fame was a result of his association with the champion galloper Phar Lap.

As the horse's strapper and inseparable companion, Woodcock was part of the Phar Lap phenomenon which raised the spirits of a nation in the depression of the early 1930s.

The New Zealand-bred galloper, affectionately known as Big Red, won 37 of his 51 races and the adulation of an adoring public.

He survived a shooting attempt and three days later won the 1930 Melbourne Cup.

Sent to America, Phar Lap won the Agua Caliente Handicap in Mexico, in a track record time, before heading to California.

There, on April 5, 1932, Phar Lap haemorraged to death, many believing the horse was deliberately poisoned.

Others speculated that he had eaten grass made toxic through spraying, while contemporary theories include that arsenic in a tonic regularly given to Phar Lap had reached fatal levels or that he died of acute bacterial gastroenteritis.

Having just taken North America by storm, the Australian champion was expected to sweep all before him in the United States and there were plenty of bookmakers nervous about the prospect of heavy losses on him.

Having been shot at already in Australia, it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility that there were some in American who wanted him dead too.

Either way, Phar Lap's death has remained a mystery and the source of fodder for conspiracy theorists.

Phar Lap's story has inspired books and movies and he was inducted into both the Australian and New Zealand Racing Hall Of Fames.   There was already a link between John Mason and Phar Lap, albeit a distant one.

Mason's great uncle was RJ (Dick) Mason, a New Zealand turf great who in 2006 was an inaugural inductee into the Racing Hall Of Fame.

Dick Mason's training achievements up to his death in 1932 were legendary.

He dominated New Zealand's best races and was a pioneer for New Zealand trainers making successful trans-Tasman raids on Australia's best races.

He prepared a true Kiwi champion galloper in Gloaming, a winner of 57 of his 67 starts, many at the highest level in Australia.

But as well as mentoring great horses, Mason was responsible for the tutelage of Harry Telford, who served his apprenticeship in New Zealand before setting up his own stables in Sydney, where he would become the trainer of the great Phar Lap.

It was during Tallifer's time in Melbourne in the spring of 1982 that Woodcock would confide in Mason with a story he had never told anyone in the 49 years since Phar Lap's death.

Mason didn't ask about it; Woodcock merely chose him as the person to tell.

"I don't know why he told me," Mason says.

"Telford and RJ Mason had a connection and we were probably broaching on the subject when he decided this is the guy I'm going to tell."

Woodcock told Mason that he believed the real reason Phar Lap had died was that he had eaten a fatal amount of fresh lucerne during the float trip from Mexico to California.

Phar Lap had not eaten green feed for the previous two weeks and the lucerne had a dire reaction, causing the horse to fall sick and die.

"He said they were coming from Mexico and [Phar Lap] hadn't had any grass for a couple of weeks," Mason says.

"Driving down the road they spotted this paddock of lucerne. He got a crook guts that night and died. They panicked so they came up with the story that the horse was poisoned to cover their butts."

Waikato vets, canvassed by the Times, said Woodcock's explanation was a credible reason for the cause of Phar Lap's death.

The concensus of opinion was that if Phar Lap had consumed a significant amount of fresh lucerne, having not eaten any fresh grass for the previous two weeks, it could have initiated the illness which led to the horse's death.

Mason adds "I can see the common sense in that because lucerne is pretty violent in dairy cows and certainly in a horse that hasn't had any green feed for a while."

Woodcock specifically asked Mason not to recount the story until after his death, and Mason remained true to his promise.

Woodcock died in 1983 and Mason said the time was right now for the truth to be told.

"Tommy was very sincere in what he told me and very positive that he wasn't going to tell anyone else."

Mason says the time was right now to make public what Woodcock had told him 28 years ago.

The revelations come the same week that a life-size statue of Phar Lap was unveiled in Timaru and a new book Phar Lap - The Untold Story was launched.

Mason says he expects to receive "flak" for his revelations, especially from Australia, but he feels relieved to have finally made public the amazing story Woodcock told him in 1981.

Mason grew up on a dairy farm in Carterton and was always drawn to horses.

His grandfather was a trotting trainer but to him thoroughbreds had always appealed more, perhaps through his link to Dick Mason.

"When I was a young fellow, there was a quite a few books around on him and I'd read about the amazing feats that he was able to achieve. He was a superman. The used to call him The Wizard,'' Mason says.

"At one two-day meeting at Riccarton he won 13 of the 16 races. And the black-type races he won at the Sydney Easter carnival was incredible.

"He was a real horseman. He used to cut the shoots off gorse hedges to feed the horses for the vitamins, little things like that.

"The old guys I used to listen a lot to like Percy Burgess and Cecil Humphries would talk about him as a great trainer. It's a pity he's not recognised more."

John Mason moved to Waikato in the mid-1980s to manage Denby Lodge [now Cambridge Thoroughbred] before going on to work at Chequers Stud.

He temporarily left racing to pursue a silage contracting business in the central plateau with his sons Richard and Jamie - he also has three adult daughters - Dinah, Felicity and Patricia - but soon afterwards bought a small holding at Whakamaru and trained his horses along the fire breaks in the forest.

He moved to Tokoroa two years ago where he lives with his second wife Andrea - a national endurance riding champion - and trains across the paddock at a track currently getting an overhaul from the South Waikato Racing Club.

"I still train the old way - plenty of work, plenty of feed," Mason says.

"I always had a bit of luck because racing is a fitness thing. I was a shepherd early on so I was always on a horse and I've always found that fitness was the key.

"I don't gallop them, just lots of three-quarter pace and than a short sprint at the end. I spend two hours working two horses. In the big stables you couldn't do that, if they spent that much time on each horse they'd go broke."

Tallifer, who injured his knee and didn't start in the 1982 Melbourne Cup, won a Hawke's Bay Guineas as a maiden at just his third start, while Grand Poppa was another flagbearer.

In recent years, Real Vision and Danzaman were both stakes winners in Mason's orange and white quartered silks and earned close to $200,000 each.

Danzaman was a six-year-old maiden with navicular disease in both his front feet when he joined Mason, and he won on to win an Easter Stakes at Riccarton and a Taumarunui Cup at Te Rapa.

These days, Mason has a stable of two horses and he is at his most content spending time with the pair. In 1983, Woodcock told Melbourne's Herald-Sun newspaper that he had a theory as to the real reason for Phar Lap's death but he refused to reveal it.

"There was another possible way he died. But I don't want to say because I don't know for sure," Woodcock told the paper.

Mason says he never felt carrying Woodcock's secret around with him for so many years as a burden.

In part, he felt privileged that Woodcock would confide in him but he says he is relieved to now get the real reason for Phar Lap's death out in the open.