Maybe the Blues Brothers had a footwork edge but there will never be another doubles combination like Dr John McGirr and Jack Hogan (aka the Lolly Pig). Give them a pub or racecourse bar and they would not only stimulate turnover but conversation and laughter, too.
Doc McGirr, a rotund medico, was a sportsman in the true sense of the word and steered our first world boxing champion, Jimmy Carruthers, to a world bantamweight title in South Africa.
He also gave apprentice jockeys learning the trade under Theo Green their first rides. A protege of Doc McGirr's, Green became Australia's greatest tutor in saddle skills. The horses provided by his patron might have been a bit slow but they proved a suitable way for his boys to gain vital racing experience.
Hogan, a racehorse trainer with a penchant for chocolate, had been a knuckle man of some repute. Call him the Lolly Pig and his eyes narrowed and the left knuckles flexed.
''When he was a young bloke, Hogan would rather have a fight than a feed,'' Cec Rolls, the man who prepared the Golden Slipper winner Eskimo Prince and put the polish on the Lee brothers Jim and Greg, once told me.
McGirr held court in just about every watering hole in the state but, with Hogan riding shotgun, favoured the Watsons Bay Hotel, owned by the Doyles. In the shout with them and Mick Doyle were knockabouts like Reg the Raffler and Jim Coorey, part-owner of Gunsynd. ''Doc McGirr was the MO at the naval base down the road,'' Doyle, a former Australian Jockey Club committeeman, recalled.
''He'd drink ponies.'' (At the Doncaster Hotel his measure was even smaller: a ''lady's waist'', tagged due to the shape but only a tad larger than a thimble.)
It was more about gabbing than booze, with McGirr the band leader.
Getting out of the car park at the end of a session could be difficult for Hogan. ''He couldn't look around, only see back and forward, and [he] usually went into reverse until he hit something,'' Doyle said. ''Doc McGirr would drive Coorey mad. He'd introduce him as 'meet Jim, he's a lesbian'. '' (Coorey was
in fact Lebanese.)
McGirr had started out as a swimmer and a rugby player, rubbing shoulders around the gyms of Sydney. There he came across Bill McConnell, who conditioned Carruthers and who felt the speed machine needed some business expertise to get to the next level. Doc McGirr also came across Green, then a flyweight contender. Both liked a chat.
''The Doc had some very slow horses,'' Doyle recalled. All the better for learners such as Ron Quinton, Gordon Spinks, Malcolm Johnston and John Duggan, who had their first rides on them. Quinton, from Mendooran, broke his maiden on a Doc McGirr winner, Quelimane, at Kembla Grange.
Hogan had never been a top-bracket trainer but he was an excellent money-getter.
For example, there was the time he bought Grand Charles off Maurice McCarten. Grand Charles liked the sting out of the ground and Hogan took him to Brisbane. Alas, it was a particularly dry spell until, one Friday night, the sprinklers were given full flow. After Grand Charles scored, another trainer complained to stewards that Hogan was responsible. ''What a scurrilous allegation,'' Hogan told me. ''Anyway, a couple of weeks later the bludger was caught red-handed turning the taps on himself.''
(Obviously the culprit had decided that it was open slather. Now racecourse managers do it anyway, to keep the tracks suitable for the likes of Grand Charles.)
Possibly a float accident restricted Hogan's neck mobility. The trainer was letting the ramp down behind the trailer at Randwick when the horse inside crashed out and flew up Alison Road, leaving the trainer flat on his back.
The same float had carried Hogan's Summer Lad, a 100/1 winner ridden by Quinton at Randwick. John Holloway, my colleague on The Sun newspaper at the time, made the unpardonable error of labelling Summer Lad as a ''can't win'' in the paper's form guide. He had no luck with Hogan.
Years later Holloway told me Hogan had died. Mick Doyle had mentioned it to him. I checked with Doyle. Yes, Hogan had passed on, he said. I wrote the obituary. But he hadn't. Hogan was still going; another Hogan with the same initials and form had.
An unpardonable error by me. In the obit, too, the name Lolly Pig had been mentioned, enough to make him rise from under a float ramp and muster a final hook. Peter Gallagher, from Brisbane, did the placating. Both McGirr and Hogan are now long gone. Weight is right.
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