One of the best things about racing is that nothing is inevitable.
It continues to throw up stories like Socks Nation winning an elite level Oaks in Brisbane last week at 100-1.
Ok, so you tell me about Black Caviar and that impeccable 25 run unbeaten, or Winx, her last 33 in succession. For sure, but who would have predicted that, let alone say it was all inevitable?
On Saturday in Brisbane, they run the Group I Stradbroke, my home state’s most identifiable race, run as a handicap: meaning young or old, male or female, topweights and lightweights are supposedly all in with an even chance.
A touch strange that race name comes from Lord Stradbroke (aka Robert Keith Rous) farmed sheep for years in Victoria which was his excuse as for being a long-term absentee member of his British House of Lords, but yes you might know the surname.
He is a relation of (Admiral) Henry John Rous, who served in the Napoleonic wars, yet had time to devise what we now know as the universal weight-for-age scale when he was handicapper at the Jockey Club in Newmarket. The scale has stood the test of time since 1855 and inevitably applies to races for the best of horses.
There is a horse in Saturday’s Straddie (yes, when you come to Queensland you get a shorten – think Ekka for Exhibition etc), it’s called The Inevitable. It’s won at weight-for-age, sure that was back home in Tassie, but this would be some tale of overcoming many a handicap if he were to win on Saturday with Scott Brunton as the “strapper.”
That’s the same Scott Brunton who once was listed as the trainer of The Inevitable, bought by Scott’s father David for $90,000 as a yearling for mates including Richard “Bear” Robinson and a diverse group of partners including the “We Deserve This” syndicate, starting a long and bumpy ride that was and has been anything but inevitable.
That’s Dave Brunton by the way, once foreman to legendary Caulfield trainer Angus Armanasco, before moving alongside Noel Kelly at Ballarat. He was there the day Plush Embassy, carrying the same green, white sleeves and cap colours that The Inevitable will wear on Saturday, landed a massive plunge in the 1990 Stradbroke (under Gary Murphy, whose son Sebastian would win also on Mr Baritone in 2008.)
That’s Scott who still remembers the amount of “grey nurses” Dad dumped on the family home double bed (yes, they were grey back then those old $100 notes,) when Plush Embassy won - Scott was only eight.
None of this makes The Inevitable anywhere near a good thing in the Straddie. Being a $20 betting chance tells you that.
No horse as old as the one the kids once called “The Vegetable” because they couldn’t say his race name, has won it. "Neville" is rising nine - despite just 37 starts and near on $2m in Stakes from 16 wins).
But then he is stabled at Bevan Laming’s stables at sand-rich Jacobs Well property near all those movie world, wet n wild like tourists’ attractions that have moved in on him. Bevan trained St Basil to win the Stradbroke from there in 2005, noting he bought him by mistake when the auctioneer caught him waving to someone in the Magic Millions crowd, but he paid up and his horse remains the equal oldest winner at seven.
His joint is called St Basil Lodge, St Basil being the equal-oldest winner of the Stradbroke, along with a few old timers of times gone by like Abbeville back in 1946. They were all seven.
There is another Tassie connection too with the Straddie. Devonport kid Craig Newitt rides, he's already won one with La Montagna back in 2006, back the Froggie had hair and no kids, now there are five kids and no hair, but he still has an assassin's approach to his trade.
These are all sidebars to Scott Brunton’s story, one that has written itself with many an alarming headline, but one that has formed an opportunity for his current redemption tour into the Stradbroke, but more so in life, it's he has been courageously and honestly open to tell and share.
No matter the outcome on Saturday with The Inevitable, Scott, his partner Tegan, children (there's Charlie and Archie, the older ones Angus and Billy), family, both close and extended, (father-in-law John Keys is now the trainer of The Inevitable), but they are already Group I winners in The Life Stakes. (Admiral Rouse never factored that in.)
You can’t always win, but Brunton has seen off his greatest nemesis, not a horse, but a drug called Crystal Meth otherwise known as Ice. A society scourge. A spiralling addiction cost him almost everything, so much it consumed his life.
But his new addiction is to family, recovery and respect. Yet he knows the ongoing challenges.
Just search Scott Brunton for headlines. Up comes firearm charges (dropped), drug allegations, Racing New South Wales and Racing Victoria problems and eventually Australian Taxation Office issues that saw his business gone and licence revoked. His racing and personal life turned upside down.
Not that he shies away from any of the self-inflicted wounds.
And this was never easy for Scott Brunton, or inevitable.
Always a “felon”? Maybe - pinched for stealing potatoes from a paddock when the family moved to Warrnambool and were “eating paint off the walls, we were on the bones of our arse.” He was 12.
“I thought I was going to jail, but they just made me work on the potato farm.”
David Brunton moving the family to Tasmania after losing the Noel Kelly link and struggling at The Bool, finding “heavenly” Seven Mile Beach, just south of Hobart, a string of local premierships, Dave was soon inducted into the Tasmanian Hall Of Fame.
Scott, always a horseman, always troubled, but always a father and always human. Hall of Shame admitted.
Let him take this over.
“I hid behind the facts of my own health and drug problems, I don’t know maybe three or four years,” he said.
“Yes, it cost me my licence, but it almost cost me life. To fight out of it is of massive importance to me and hopefully to others.
“People do keep things hidden, I did, hopefully talking about it is not just good for me, but good for others,” Brunton said.
For the record, the ATO secured a court order to wind up Brunton’s business after rejecting a proposed payment plan to settle a near on $1m debt. Obviously, what followed was Tasmanian Racing revoking a trainer’s licence, but issues in NSW and Victoria accruing but merely references point in grater life issues around Ice.
“I suppose the low point was in Sydney when Teagen got caught with me helping her, she was rubbed out and we were both disqualified.
“I knew then things needed to change. I was dragging everyone else down my own decisions, I couldn’t find a lower point than that,” he said.
“Look you sometimes find yourself in dark holes and dark places in your life, mine happened because of me, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, there is no easy way to explain it and I have no-one else to ultimately explain it than to myself and deal with it.”
“Your wealth is your health and your family.”
Brunton says he took a complete three months away from horses: “I had to do it for my family” – he was relicensed (as a stable hand) in February.
“I won’t be going back down that path. I’ll talk to anyone about it. I made decisions that snowballed, I lost track of everything, my motivation, I know my mistakes and where I went wrong, it’s an ugly drug, but I’m clean now but always working on it.
A critical point?
“Yep, that’s easy, I asked Teagen why she was still with me and I sat down and asked why she still loves me – when she said I was the father of our children, that was enough,” he said.
“It was that conversation.”
“And then you think of your best achievements, your kids.”
A Stradbroke, well yes, and he is keen to talk up the horses’ chances, but then nothing is as inevitable as that. Such is the nature of a Group I Handicaps on the track, that he's beaten the handicapper off the track, will remain in the record books forever, Brunton thankful, inevitably.
