Ken Browne - Determined horse-aholic

By TIM WATKIN

The Ellerslie stables are dimly lit, even on raceday. The smell of horse and hay is strong. Handlers, mostly girls in fleeces, lead the horses round in circles. Hooves click on the concrete while the owners, mostly balding men in suits, mingle.

Outside, the rain falls straight and hard like prison bars. The track is heavy and getting heavier. The big race is less than an hour away.

In a dark corner like a back alley, Ken Browne leans his head conspiratorially towards his riders and talks tactics. It's one of the biggest days of the year for this owner-trainer-rider and there are a hundred and one demands on his time.

There are a hundred and one reasons to celebrate as well. That's how many steeplechase winners he's ridden in New Zealand, becoming just the second person to reach the steeple-century. (Bill Hillis won 132 from 1943-78). The 100 mark came on May 13 at Trentham, in this, his 50th year of racing, when he won by a short neck.

"It's much more important to a lot of people than it is to me," says Browne, who gained most pleasure by proving, again, that "you might be old but you're not bloody useless."

A 66- year-old jumps jockey is probably unheard of elsewhere in the world, let alone one with Browne's record. He's survived 14 broken collarbones, broken ribs in the tens (five at once, one time) and a good few concussions.

His riding record includes four Grand Nationals, three Great Northerns, and being the first to own, train and ride a Great Northern winner. After riding just 16 winners in his first 20 years, his best season was in 1984 when, incredibly, he rode 17 winners as a sprightly young 50 year-old.

When you read stories written about him through the decades, you'll come across descriptions like "talented", "maestro" and "icon." And though "icon" is an overused sporting monicker, Browne wears it better than most, despite the seemingly contradictory fact that he's regarded as only an average jockey.

He has repeatedly won big races, including one each at Sandown and Ascot in Britain, and, mostly, it comes down to this: he has the best horses prepared best. He's arguably the greatest trainer this country has produced, his longevity is unrivalled, and his career has touched every part of the racing world - breeding (many years ago) and trading as well as training and riding.

What's more, in recent years his lobbying of racing administrators and the sheer quantity and quality of horses has led a resurgence in jumps racing at a time when it could have died altogether.

Browne has played polo for New Zealand, and his wife and business partner Ann has represented the country in showjumping. There's little you can do with a horse that the Brownes haven't done.

They live where Ken has always lived, just out of Cambridge where his mother's father arrived and planted some oak trees 100 years ago, although the 94ha Ken bought from his parents is now 364ha.

It's pure bluegrass horse country. Nearly nude poplars line up beside stained wooden fences and escort you down long driveways to immaculate stables. Mark Todd learned to ride just a horseshoe's throw from the front gate in a paddock Browne has since bought from Todd's grandfather.

Yet the Browne's property on Redoubt Rd remains a good ol' farm, running 400 cattle and 800 in-lamb ewes.

Leaning against the rails in his stables, Browne says that though the big race itself was not to be his this year (his horses took third and fifth), the Great Northern campaign went well and brought home $108,000 in stake money.

"We've still got to pay a certain amount of that to the jockeys and that sort of thing, but that was the gross income for the weekend, which makes it very attractive," he says. "And that's tax free. So you try to be successful out there."

That success is a horse the Brownes' ride so regularly is testament to the couple's experience, meticulous preparations and stubborn competitiveness.

Browne doesn't gamble on races. "I've bet only once," he says. "I put sterling 5 on a horse and I rode it so badly because I was more worried about my $5 than anything else." And he doesn't gamble in business, minimising risk through precise planning.

Pinned to a door in the stables is a sheet of paper detailing every horse's daily workout. It's constantly updated based on information gathered during the day.

Every staff member has a stopwatch and times how much work the horse does and takes its heart-rate. Ann and Ken check the horses' blood, skin, gums ...

"Everything is planned out," Browne says. "It's the difference between winning and losing."

As to resolve, Wanganui trainer and friend Kevin Myers remembers Browne as a young jockey with a unique way of planning race tactics.

"He'd sit down with an egg at breakfast, cut the corners, and draw the racecourse on the egg. That's how determined he was."

The Brownes practise a philosophy of "doing," and horses are all they do.

"I can never see any common sense in wasting energy," Browne says. "If you are going to do something, you may as well do something that brings some gain - dag a sheep or dig post-holes.

"To go and run a mile on the road at the end of the day has achieved nothing. I like to think that everything I'm doing is being done for a reason. I'm an achiever."

The focus on horses and achieving came early in life. Browne was handling his dad's racehorses by the time he was nine, riding to school and setting up hurdles on the side of the road with the other kids. At the Cambridge Spring Horse Fair he rode for dealers in the show-ring.

"I just loved doing that sort of thing. If a pony was a bit rough and that, it didn't worry me.

"I was dedicated to see that things were well done and that has followed me on through life," Browne says, not with pride, but with grit. "Everything that I had to do with horses has been done well."

As a young entrepreneur he would buy unbroken horses on day one of the Cambridge fair, train them and sell them again on the last day.

The closest Browne has come to leaving the area was when he was sent to board at Kings College, Auckland. He stayed a week.

"It wasn't my scene so I came back home. Mum said 'he's got to go back'. Dad looked at me for a minute. 'No. No he doesn't go back. I want him here to work my horses'. My dad was from a very well-off family, but he was the renegade. He was much more interested in horses and riding than he was in the things that they thought he should be interested in. I'm more like my dad."

Browne doesn't regret his lack of formal education. He turned his able mind to the business that has consumed his life ever since.

As a polo player he took teams overseas, played a series, then sold his ponies for a profit. The commerce expanded as he bought horses, trained them and sold them around the world - 500 to the Philippines, 700 to Korea and more to Britain and Australia. Up to 300 a year. He's become a millionaire, travelled with them and collected the stories.

I've only been on the farm a few minutes when he launches into his first tale. Browne's coming up from a bottom paddock after schooling some horses over jumps in the crisp, calm quietness of the morning. He rides and talks, I walk and listen.

Unknown years ago he boldly took a plane-load of horses to Queensland to sell on spec and had the buyers eating and drinking 500 bottles of champagne as they bid.

"The further the sale went on the better the prices. The last horse, there were two people who would just not stop bidding on it."

He doesn't sell as many horses as he used to. He's tired of seeing them mishandled and would rather train them himself. A good horseman is a benevolent dictator, he says. Central to his success is the conviction that the horse is "a mob animal. He likes to be out in the paddock with his friends. That helps terrifically."

Run through the racebook at any jumps meetings these days and horses owned and trained by A. and K. Browne can make up half the field.

He makes no apologies for his domination.

As Myers says, "He's just a horse-aholic and he makes it pay." Or, as he and others are quick to amend, they make it pay - Ann is an equal contributor to the Browne success and obsession.

"The whole thing is that we work together," Ken Browne says. "We're a unit. I've always relied on her."

But for all that they've gained from lives with horses, the Brownes have also paid. In 1982 the younger of their two sons, Roger, died during a polo match in Canberra when his horse rolled on him.

"We will always feel there's one thing missing in our lives; that's Roger," Browne says. "It's one of those things. It can happen."

"It was a human error, not a horse error. It was an accident and that's all there is to it."

His eldest son, Allan, who is captain of the New Zealand polo team, lives next door and is a leading sheep and cattle trader. He's expressed an interest in getting a racehorse but his timing is not too good. His old man is feeling a bit grumpy about racing.

"As long as I'm able to do it, we'll be doing it. But if there's no change in racing administration and the enjoyment stays out of it, well, it won't be as long."

The problem?

"I've seen it go from a stage where people with practical ability managed it to where modern people manage it with no idea of the industry they're trying to manage," Ken says. "We've lost the people at the coal-face."

Racing, once a sacred part of the New Zealand cultural trinity alongside rugby and beer, has faded to sub-culture status.

Browne drops himself onto his back steps. He's wearing a checked shirt and brown corduroys belted tightly around a 5ft 10in, rickety frame which these days stays between 57 and 59 kilograms without having to "waste" on a jockey's diet. Whatever the flaws in the business, a man who once rode with broken ribs using only Coldrex as a pain killer knows he's lucky to still be riding, lucky to be doing what he loves. Like his best horses: Ascona, Crown Star or Sydney Jones, for example, Browne's a stayer.

As Myers says: "He'll go till he dies. If he stops he'll seize up."

Nowadays Browne mostly rides to find out what's wrong with a horse so he can work out how to improve it. He admits he's not the rider he was. So here's a tip: "When I've got off them, back them the next time.

"Racing is all about reflexes. If someone thinks 'I'll go through that gap,' it's already too late. I'm not silly enough not to realise that my reflexes aren't as good as they were. That's a fact of life."

As I'm walking back to the car he points out horses galloping by in the next paddock, past the oak trees planted by his grandfather.

"That's the difference between horses here and other places. They're running around enjoying themselves in the sun.

"They love doing what they're doing. That's what I like to see. They're paying us back."

Has he ever wondered about taking the business offshore, about moving, I ask as we walk on.

"Just look around you," he mumbles. "Look around you."