Sir Patrick Hogan among the sires

Sir Patrick Hogan

Sir Patrick Hogan's life can be told in the horses, railings and stately Hollywoodesque manor of his 404ha Cambridge Stud.

They tell of a life of absolute, unswerving dedication to success and a proud desire to demonstrate the rewards from the master horsebreeder's uncanny 30 year stint at the top of his craft and district.

There's no easy path to becoming leader of the Cambridge pack. Passion will get you so far, but it's a competitive, cut-throat, horse-mad industry where only a few find their fortune.

Four legs get you priority here. While the Cambridge township celebrates its international sports stars such as Mark Todd and the Evers-Swindell twins with bronze footpath plaques, they're relegated to a sideroad so the handcrafted mosaics of their most lucrative nags can enjoy pride of place on mainstreet and keep the dream alive.

An ageing Japanese import was spotted quietly rusting outside a service station, but that was as close as they get to recognising one of their most recent famous exports, hair-metaller band The Datsuns. Instead, Cambridge's "past, present and future" is officially represented by a statue of a mare and foal outside the Town Hall.

Looming over all this enthusiastic horseplay are the green racing colours of Hogan, the Kiwi-Irishman with enough clout to get Helen Clark to hold up a Qantas flight after his Wellington Cup victory so he could get to the Karaka sales on time, and who delivered a cheeky "no" to the Queen when she tried to borrow one of his prize studs.

Locals say sightings of "the commander" venturing into town are rare, but they are highly protective of the man who seems to have put money into half the pockets in town on his way to assembling his own nest egg, estimated to be in excess of $65 million.

It's a loyalty he likes to return. Several of his stable hands have been with him for 20 years. He has used the same accountant since he was 16, and he would rather shake hands on a deal than sign a contract.

So, little surprise then when the blokes propping up the Group One Turf Bar offer little more than a shuffle of their feet and carefully considered sips of Waikato's finest before venturing a "but I wouldn't want to go into that any deeper".

It takes one of his oldest mates, Graham "Wriggles" Wrigley, to prick the merest of holes in the mystique surrounding the Hogan name: "Oh yeah, Pat's always been a shrewd judge of a horse. I remember one mare of his, it ran last in its first start and second to last in its second. Then its sister, who had won a couple of group one races, died, so he said, 'hmmm, this horse is too valuable to race now' and retired her."

The yarn is harmless enough but just in case there was offence to be taken, Wrigley later called Hogan to give him a heads-up of the journo poking his nose about.

It's indicative of the respect offered up by the entire racing industry, here and in Australia.

Last night he was honoured with a place among the first intake into the New Zealand Racing Hall of Fame, a hearty slap on the back to rank alongside the knighthood and his induction into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame last May.

But he's certain none of the plaudits would have been possible if it hadn't been for the day he climbed off his school bus from Marist College, caught the eye of a winsome maiden and with his icecream melting behind his back in case she didn't think cones were manly, fumbled out a line convincing enough to have kept them together through 45 years of marriage and hard work.

He gets misty-eyed when considering the sacrifices, effort and support Justine, now Lady Justine, has provided. Not that she probably had any choice, Hogan is regarded as a born marketer who will hammer away until he gets what he wants with an intense, competitive edge that was honed well before their teenaged encounter.

As a child he carefully chose from the pigs and calves on Fencourt, his parents' mixed dairy farm, to parade at his school's pet days. This wasn't fun, there were ribbons at stake.

"I was competitive, enormously competitive to win. Then once I got a little bit older, 11 or 12, I started going down the road to where there was a pedigree jersey herd and each year I'd borrow a bull calf off the owner and rear it and prepare it for the district shows, not just school shows."

He was learning what it took to prepare young stock for the show ring while devising his own tricks to attract the judge's attention, prime Disney movie fodder for sure but also an ideal training ground for the day when he began leading around his own multi-million dollar yearlings.

But fame and fortune were still to come.

He had to face ruin first.

Hogan's dad, Thomas Hogan, who emigrated from Ireland to raise Clydesdales in Taranaki, introduced the family to thoroughbreds in 1956 after taking a 50 per cent stake in a stallion named Blueskin who was kept on a friend's property called, funnily enough, Cambridge Stud.

Patrick, then 15 and the youngest of seven children, had already dropped out of school after failing to shine at anything other than maths and religion. In theory he was now working on the home farm, in practice he was usually up the road messing about with the horses.

Blueskin was successful enough to encourage Hogan snr to buy another stallion and this time he bought it home to their renamed Fencourt Stud. "The pigs and cows began going out the back gate and horses started coming in through the front," says Hogan. "We were now a thoroughbred stud farm."

Dad then retired and handed the farm over to Patrick and John, his oldest brother: "This was fantastic for me," says Hogan, "because now life was just horses, horses, horses.

"We chugged away for about five years, but we were really at the bottom of heap as far as breeding and putting horses up for sale were concerned."

Then the break they were hoping for arrived, a quality Irish stallion, Hermes.

Patrick was only in his early 20s, but he convinced his contacts to take shares in the horse. This not only spread the financial load, it also locked shareholders with quality mares into giving the horse access to them for breeding.

After five crops his progeny were beginning to show good race form on both sides of the Tasman, then the 10-year-old contracted colitis, a deadly inflammation of the membranes lining the intestine, and dropped dead within 24 hours. Four of their five new foals followed.

"That was a heavy blow, a heavy, heavy blow, to both of us. John was married with a family, I was married with two daughters."

With their hopes all but dashed, the calamity caused much soul-searching.

"We decided that it was probably an opportunity to split our partnership up and go our separate ways. It was amicable, we'd always worked side by side and we're still great mates. John would keep Fencourt and get back into farming, and I'd move on, take the horses with me and have a go at finding a property."

In 1974, after managing to pull together $90,000 in cash and a bank loan, Patrick and Justine purchased the 52ha block that gradually grew into the 404ha Cambridge Stud. They spent a year planting and preparing the land, with the girls Erin and Nicola working two hours every day after school, before moving in with the intention of giving it a crack for three or four years.

That early disaster was just what the young couple needed to set them on their way, says long time mentor and friend, Cambridge breeder, Bob Morris.

"Everything had sort of gone wrong. But to me, that's the great thing because I've seen too often that if things go too sweetly too soon, that's when people eventually stumble and fall.

"But if you have a big setback and survive, that makes you realise that it's not all beer and skittles and you've got to work bloody hard.

"So Patrick kept buying horses, he was young, energetic and cheeky. You couldn't tell him anything, he was an expert without ever being an expert, but he could market anything. That's why he's been so successful. They weren't high priced or high quality horses, but he was able to talk his way into getting people to put their money into them." Including Bob Morris.

Then in 1975, Hogan dug up the nugget that set him up for life: Sir Tristram.

His is a story that's been told many times. He was a brutish Irish stallion bought sight unseen, with potential in his pedigree, but got trapped in a burning stable and survived only after a mare kicked out a door. Sir Tristram arrived from Britain looking and behaving so shockingly that several wannabe investors dropped out, among them, the late Fred Bodel who escaped becoming racing's equivalent to the man who said no to the Beatles only when Empire Rose won the Melbourne Cup.

"[Sir Tristram] wasn't capable of doing a hell of a lot on the racetrack," says Morris. "He was what I'd call a New Zealand racehorse because this is where he had to come, no one in Europe or anywhere else would have taken him. But Patrick worked very hard to get the best mares he could to come to his horse."

Sir Tristram, or Paddy as Hogan still calls him, eventually sired a world record 45 group one winners, the biggest jewels in the racing crown. Along with supermare Eight Carat, Cambridge Stud had a champion production line on their hands.

For investors such as Bob Morris it was like their Lotto numbers coming up. Not only was he making winners, he kept on making them, until a broken shoulder led to his death in 1997.

"It's been an incredible ride," says Morris. "And he just kept coming back. You'll have a big race come along and all of a sudden a Sir Tristram [progeny] would jump out of the ground with no record to speak of and win it."

If some thought Cambridge Stud's days at the top were numbered, along came the sequel, Zabeel - son of Sir Tristram. And it's odds on he will eventually outsire the great sire.

Together they have helped Hogan to the top spot in terms of aggregate sales at every national yearling sale for 25 years, so it goes without saying that the fields racing in the Auckland Cup carnival which starts today will be riddled with Cambridge Stud DNA.

But that success has as much to do with the studmaster's approach to business as the quality of his bloodstock.

From the start he did everything he could to create a competitive edge, to get noticed. He approached horsetrading as a big-talking marketer not as a farmer padlocked into a mumbling gumboot mentality. So he was laughed at when he built a stable that looked more like a house, lampooned when he made his staff dress smartly and get a haircut before they paraded his pampered horses, and chuckled at when he started putting on lunches for buyers which are now so anticipated they bring the sales to a halt.

He was also the first to offer guarantees on his horses, a move that once led to him paying out on a $1 million yearling, but an innovation he claims has put "enormous" amounts of money into his pocket.

All very classy, all very calculated, so what is up with Sir Tristram Place, the family's two-tone, three-level megabach at Mt Maunganui?

From the roadside it looks like a wedge-shaped apartment block. It's a quandary even to old mates such as longtime racing commentator Keith Haub, who once interrupted a meal to administer an emergency short, back and sides with scissors borrowed from the chef after deciding Hogan's hair was parted on the wrong side.

Speaking diplomatically of the bach he decides: "It's just not Pat. It's a real statement, but it's not Pat."

The neighbours are divided, some think it's a monstrous eyesore that ignited a burst of waterfront gigantism, some say why not, if you've got it, flaunt it, and still others say they wouldn't mind so much if they saw him there more often.

For Hogan the beach house and mansion reflect an end to half a lifetime of thriftiness where every spare cent went into horse flesh and land. Australia's Mr Melbourne Cup, Bart Cummings, once bought a horse on the condition that the Hogans spent the money on a new house. They bought two mares instead.

So with the days of slog done, the Hogans are racing horses, lots of horses, and building houses, big houses.

"I guess there's a bit of the entrepreneur in me and a fair bit of Irish," says Hogan. "And I've never known an Irishman who didn't want to skite when you've got the opportunity to make a statement. I'm saying: 'We've worked hard and we've succeeded'."

You could say the homes are brick and mortar manifestations of the huge self-confidence that comes from battling your own way up from high school drop-out to getting all-expenses paid invites from Dubai oil sheikhs.

But lurking behind his good-natured bullshit and bluster is just a hint of Irish melancholy.

Cambridge Stud is credited with thrusting the New Zealand thoroughbred industry onto the world stage, Sir Tristram is buried there along with several other favourites, and, with or without permission, Hogan intends to finish up there himself, but the Hogan touch looks like being a passing phase.

"I'd like to think nothing changes while I'm healthy enough to handle it, but I am concerned for the future and what's going to happen because Cambridge Stud is looking like being a one-generation set-up, established and built up by Patrick and Justine Hogan.

"Our two daughters don't have an interest in taking up the property, and it won't be the grandchildren ... but it's been a fantastic, fantastic ride, making the hall of fame in Australia, the CBE, breeder of the year so many times and what have you, but more so in that it hasn't changed us.

"We've still got our feet on the ground. What will happen next? I'm not certain. It could continue under someone else, but as far as I see it, it won't be under the name of Hogan."


Sir Patrick Hogan: A lifetime of achievement

When Sir Patrick was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame last night, these were the words on his citation:
* Set new standards for marketing stallions and yearlings.
* Has sold the most sale-topping yearlings of any vendor in New Zealand history.
* In 2006 was the leading vendor by aggregate at the National Yearling Sales for an unprecedented 25th successive year.
* Four times New Zealand Breeder of the Year.
* Stood champion sires Sir Tristram and Zabeel (78 Group 1 winners to date between them).
* Knighted for services to racing.