A précis of Clive Smith's lifestyle could have every man in the land drooling with envy. He lives on an exclusive golf course and has the time and money to enjoy it. He has two vintage Lagondas in the garage. And for good measure he owns the two finest steeplechasers seen for a generation.
Misogynists might also delight that there is no wife intruding on this male hedonism but Smith, 67, is a reluctant bachelor. “I regret never marrying,” he admitted. “I was always trying to find the right one.”
It is probably why he found racing as an alternative focus, and why he bought Kauto Star - though that so nearly did not happen.
Whatever his other horses achieve - and Master Minded, the dual two-mile champion, has achieved plenty - Kauto Star will be Smith's racing legacy. On Friday, if he can conquer Denman, his stablemate, once more, he will emulate Arkle and Best Mate with a third Cheltenham Gold Cup. Yet Smith almost paid twice as much for an infinitely inferior horsePerched on a sofa in his ten-bedroom mansion on the Wentworth estate, Smith recalled the May day in 2004 when life could have taken a different course. Having had horses with Jenny Pitman, David Elsworth and Martin Pipe, he had switched to Paul Nicholls, who had gone to the Doncaster sales with the type of instructions trainers relish. “I told him I wanted fun out of racing. Rather than buy another house, or a boat, I would invest £1m in horses.”
Smith was in Cambridgeshire, supervising the Lagonda Classic golf tournament that he created in 1975, when Nicholls called. He was trying to buy a horse called Garde Champetre. “I stayed on the mobile and kept bidding. My last bid was 490,000 guineas before J.P.McManus came in with the knockout.”
Garde Champetre will be at Cheltenham defending a title, but in the niche sphere of cross-country chasing. As a Gold Cup prospect, he flopped. Two weeks after narrowly failing to spend half his budget, Smith paid £280,000 for a promising French horse. The rest is history.
Smith seems an outrageously lucky owner. Even his first horse, Hawthorn Hill Lad, bolted up by 20 lengths on his debut in 1987, then won at Cheltenham. “A journalist came to me that day and said it would be all downhill from then on,” he recalled. “Whatever you pay for a horse, there has to be a big element of luck. But I've always felt something guiding me to do the right things.”
This might fancifully be ascribed to his birth in Jerusalem, where his father, an Army officer, “swam out to the middle of the river Jordan to fetch the waters to have me baptised”. Still, he took a few diversions before discovering his lifetime path.
There was the young love of an Irish nurse that “interrupted my studies”, and the year spent “dabbling in stockbroking”. Then, after accountancy training, a business degree at Loughborough and a spell with Chrysler, Smith was ready. “I decided I didn't like company life and I was more of an entrepreneur,” he said.
Golf had been his game since caddying on the Surrey circuit - he still has a carefully compiled book of his clients and their payments - and Smith now had a vision. “I felt there was a gap in the market for ordinary chaps to play, so I advertised in Farmers' Weekly for 50 acres of land to build a public course,” he said.
This was groundbreaking in the mid-1970s. It was also brave. “I sold my house, my car and some shares and borrowed money from the bank,” he said. “I was £70,000 in debt. But we opened a nine-hole course near Woking in May 1978. I had a caravan as the clubhouse and I sat there taking the green fees. It was extraordinary how it took off.”
Two more courses followed, one on a disused racecourse near Maidenhead, and he has since sold both fruitfully. His pride is justified. “My parents didn't have any money and all I had was a bit of drive,” he said. “I'm a grammar school boy who saw a lot of snobbishness in golf. I felt I cracked it open.”
A snap decision in August 2003 has brought fame to go with his fortune. “I just decided to drop in on Paul Nicholls,” he said. “I didn't know him but I saw him as the man on the way up. I walked into a deserted yard that Sunday morning and called out, ‘Is anyone home?' Paul put his head out of the office window and, in the next hour, I sensed he had an enthusiasm to match mine. He's streets ahead of other trainers.”
On the day Kauto Star won his first race at Newbury, Nicholls told Smith that someone was willing to give him a 100 per cent profit to take the horse. He refused. “I often wondered if it was J.P.McManus, or even Paul Barber. But I knew Paul wouldn't tell me,” he said.
Thanks to that decision, Smith will be surrounded by 108 friends in a private marquee on Friday, a single man in his element. “Last year, we had a dinner after Kauto won and three of the ladies told me it was the greatest day of their lives,” he said. “I said they must rank it behind their wedding days but they said, 'Oh no, it was much better than that.'”
Source:The Times
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