TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1066556
Being wise enough to suspect that genes work from a base wide and deep, Hancock attributes the phenomenal success of Sunday Silence in Japan to a pre-war bed- rock of outstanding sire lines. "Look, genetics is an inexact science," he says. "Like Daddy said, they can have all the qualifications—pedigree, looks, racing ability—and hell, still half of them are flops. Bold Ruler had some siblings couldn't run a lick. Remember Jimmy Car- ter's fool brother? Drunk, taking a leak on the street in New York. The president's brother. So it's all a big mystery. But it's exciting. That new foal could be another Sunday Silence. Probably won't be. But could be. Johnny Nerud used to say, 'What you're trying to do is put yourself in a posi- tion for luck to run over you.' And then you just wait and see." There were so many ways luck could have missed Hancock with Sunday Silence. As a weanling, he had colitis so bad on Thanksgiving Day that the vet, having given him 23 litres of fluid, looked at his watch at lunchtime and said, "You little son of a bitch, if you're going to die, go ahead and die; I'm getting hungry." Unsurprising, then, that Sunday Silence remained such a weedy yearling, close- hocked, dragging himself round the back ring. Nobody had ten cents for him then, never mind $10 million. And just as well. "He was a gift from God, I'm just telling you," Hancock says. "It's such a miracle that I ended up owning him and he bailed me out. You can believe what you want but God is either everything or He's nothing. So you got to make your choice." Ever attuned to omens, he found the num- ber 13 strewn across the horse's story. Lucky for some. The letters in both the horse's name, and his own; when they tried to sell him, twice, his hip numbers combined to make 13; Charlie Whitting- ham was born on April 13, 1913; going to see his final Derby work, the Han- cocks were put up on the 13th floor, room 1313. "I believe in synchronicity and serendipity and all that stuff," he says. "Like Shakespeare said somewhere, 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'" And it is this quest for harmony, for order latent in the chaos of the universe, that unites Hancock the horseman and Hancock the musician. Picking up his guitar, as natural to him as it is for a foal to suckle,