How do we love Tee Cee Bee? Let me count the ways.
If they were Shakespeare fans, that would surely have been the collective refrain from Alan Tubbs, Brian Dobson and Greg Sugars following Tee Cee Bee, Macray’s Blacks A Fake FFA win at Melton Friday night.
This was a triumph with layers, then more layers, then a few more layers after that.
From the public’s view, always limited, always flawed, the win was proof that Tee Cee Bee possessed a killer instinct, that he wasn’t the ‘Lay Down Sally’ many in the media had posited him to be.
But in truth, behind closed doors, it was about much more than that.
On perhaps the most superficial level, this triumph was about relief, particularly for star reinsman Greg Sugars, who has felt the pressure with Tee Cee Bee more acutely than many would understand.
This equine excitement machine you see, is trained by Sugars’ father-in-law Alan Tubbs, so there’s family involved.
And Tee Cee Bee may well be the second-best horse the iconic trainer has handled.
Then there’s his racing pattern. Sugars is a master judge of pace, his major strength, and there are many, is knowing when to hold them and also when to fold them; he wins an inordinate number of races dictating tempo and terms.
Tee Cee Bee doesn’t play those games. Partly through temperament but mainly due to a wind issue, which threatened to derail his career, Tee Cee Bee is a one-run speed freak; he’ll blister when he’s asked but just don’t ask too soon.
As a result he’s lost more than he’s won, and at times sparked the newly empowered keyboard critics to unfairly lampoon both horse and driver.
This is why Sugars went a little ‘Vinnie Knight’ on Friday.
“He’s a horse that has a lot of knockers so it will be nice to silence those,” Sugars said in his post-race interview.
“If you actually go through his record it is outstanding, but he has just been tarred with that (negative) brush by some people over the journey.
“It’s an emotional win that is for sure.”
The emotion attached to the monkey, being peeled from Tee Cee Bee and Sugars’ collective backs however, only scrapes the surface of what this triumph truly meant.
Far more poignant was the fact that long-time owner Brian Dobson, a man who has given so much of his life to the trots, was there to savour this success.
A man of extraordinary knowledge and equal resilience, Dobson is currently fighting Cancer. This isn’t his first battle with the Big C but all who have waged a similar war, know that each skirmish, each campaign against the evil scourge is harder than the one before.
At some point, nothing is guaranteed, certainly not watching your favourite horse sweep past his rivals, with the effortlessness and swagger of a Standardbred rock star live and in the flesh.
“This win was very special personally, because Brian obviously hasn’t been in the best of health, and for him to be there and see his horse win was magnificent,” Alan Tubbs said following the success.
“He said to me that this win did more for him, than all the drugs and all the medication, so to be a part of that was pretty phenomenal for all of us.”
The final layer of this narrative onion, revolves around the fact that Tubbs, himself having battled ill health for many years, will soon say goodbye to his own training Mecca, Jessamy Park.
That does not mean he’s foregone any dreams of big-race success with his breathtakingly fast five-year-old star. It does however give him a unique conception of life, and racing’s ephemeral romance.
“Nothing lasts forever and after what this horse has been through we know very little is guaranteed,” he said. “That’s why I say to everyone we must enjoy every win while it lasts, celebrate every high.
“The other stuff all happens but it’s what you do with the joy of the experience that actually matters in the end.”
Approved By Dean Baring www.harnessbred.com
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