Reproduced from the September 1999 edition of the Greyhound Monthly:
(visit the Greyhound Monthly website)

Editor Roy Brindley talks to stud
keeper
Martin Tucker

Pick up the phone and give County Roscommon based Stud Keeper Martin Tucker a phone call and you will probably think you have misdialled and got through to an Essex shop keeper. Despite the English accent, a country Tucker left in 1981, the easy going family man is Irish through and through.

Having seven sires on his roster, Tucker would appear to be in stud keeping’s major league but in truth the lack of a ready made stud dog has so far restricted the thirty six year olds break through into the big time. “In 1998 we conducted one hundred a one breedings. I have to be pleased with the fact that we were up to one hundred and forty by mid-July this year”, he explains.

Returning to his mother’s native county eighteen years ago, Tucker aged just seventeen, but always interested in dogs, was keen to race his imported whippets. “There was no whippet racing here but I had five of them and was allowed to race them on charity nights, the spectators had seen nothing like it and loved it. Sadly I soon got banned by Bord na gCon who feared it might in some way take over from the greyhounds, I remember there was a piece in the Irish Independent about it at the time. I was given my first pair of greyhounds as a birthday present that year, I tried to train them as whippets, but obviously it doesn’t and didn’t work”.

Married in 1989 and buying the plot of land where his family lives today, Tucker built kennels in 1990. “We put every last penny into it and started to train, breed and rear a few dogs. My wife was working in the Department of Agriculture and that kept the show on the road, every time we got a few pounds from the dogs it was put straight back into the place culminating better kennels and a house being built four years ago”.

“My first stud dog was Mollifrend Tom of Colin Packham’s. He was the track record holder at Swindon, and one of the first real good Daleys Gold off-spring to come through. Since starting I have had to make a dog into a stud dog, what I mean by that is, I have never had a dog put with me that is going to get 100 bitches in his first year”.

The handler does house Some Gamble who is currently described as Ireland’s most successful first season sire. Few people would argue with the fact, but the brindle dog’s race credentials are shaky albeit through no fault of his own. Unbeaten in two starts in his native Ireland he was put into the East Anglican Derby after a minor one off open win. Unsuccessful there he won the Pepsi Cola Sprint at Yarmouth but shattered his stifle when hitting the rail in a trial a Peterborough soon afterwards. “You can still feel the nuts and bolts in his leg”, explains Tucker. “David Pruhs his trainer was quoted in the personality profile of the Sporting Life as saying his worst moment in racing was that incident and his best moment was watching him win his first race after coming back from it a year later”. Given that kind of reference or the fact that he is half brother to Some Picture, it is still not a CV that will see any stud dog overused before proving his ability to throw fast dogs on the track. A classic example of “a dog needing to be made into a stud dog”.

“Things really started with Alpine Minister who was owned by some friends, I was hoping to get him for stud when he retired but we didn’t and he went down south for three and a half years. For one reason or another he never really took off. He won The National Unraced Puppy Stake in Shelbourne at 18 months of age and was the youngest dog ever to break 29 seconds at Shelbourne.He Won the Consolation final of the Puppy Derby, came second in the Guinness 600, second in the St. Ledger and went lame in the second round of the Easter Cup. He also went to stud at a very difficult time with an era of about ten outstanding stud dogs: I’m Slippy, Whisper Wishes, Daleys Gold, Greenpark Fox, Easy & Slow, Manorville Sand, Moral Support and the like. Basically if you didn’t get one of them you would gladly take one of the others. So it was difficult for a dog that hadn’t won much or wasn’t proven as a sire. His habit of turning around at the pick-up after a race and running back the wrong way was also unpopular, a lot of people thought he wasn’t chasing properly because of that trait”.

Thirty-five bitches in three and a half years in Limerick was not earth shattering and Tucker laments: “I think if he had stayed up here he would have got more because his litter sister broke the clock at Longford, she was very popular, with people knowing her, they knew the family and would have used him”.

On being transferred to Tucker in January 1994, possibly three years too late, the new keeper and Alpine Minister had a massive stroke of luck with his daughter Shimmering Wings winning the Oaks. “On back of that win he got forty four bitches in twelve months that compared to just six in 1993”. Of course being so lightly used in 1993 there were not many Alpine Minister dogs of racing age in 1995 and people began to put that Oaks win down as a flash-in-the-pan. He therefore began to struggle again during the next twelve months with just twenty two matings in total.

Towards the end of 1995 and the start of 1996 his 1994 crop started racing and were winning left right and centre. Sixteen Stake winners and three track record holders eventually came from those forty four litters, as the news spread the telephone started ringing. Twleve bitches in the first six and a half months of 1996 became fifty nine by the end of the year, spurred on by Rantogue Pride’s Puppy Derby victory in 1996. “Suddenly I had a stud dog with an Oaks and Puppy Derby winner to his credit, soon to be followed by the 1997 Easter Cup victor in the shape of Park Jewel”.

“After that win in April 1997 the phone was red hot, two breedings a week were no problem, we’d cracked it. But on May 22nd of that year I went out to the kennel to find him dead”. After a lengthy pause Tucker continues: “He was beyond ten years of age but it makes you wonder what he could have been, given the fact that he simply never got the quantity or quality of bitches early on in his stud career”. Remembering the exact day of the dog’s departure clearly reflects Martin Tucker’s fondness of the dog.

After a cup of tea and a charge around the garden with his adorable son, Gavin, Tucker proudly shows off his state of the art breeding facility which gives the handler the ability to conduct all his breeding artificially. “I prefer the artificial insemination”, he says. “It removes the risk of both injury or infection,”. Acknowledging that the stud game is not one where you can learn from your mistakes, Tucker went to Sharyn Conole’s world renowned stud in Texas to be trained on the artificial insemination procedure and to learn about frozen semen, should that programme be introduced or legalised in this corner of the world. A further overseas excursion, this time to Australia followed. “Well I wanted to do it right, not go out to a shed and experiment with it”, he states.

Complete with some American styles crates, again to minimise the risk of injury, this time to the bitch, the stud is an impressive set-up with all the dogs looking in terrific shape. All in all, with his friendly character, modest ways and eagerness to learn, I just sense that a ready made stud dog, or future champion may not be too far away for Martin Tucker and I dare say it, he deserves it!

 

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