Those of us who get to almost know the CEO of the Hong Kong Jockey Club find Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges to be very German, sometimes petulant, a knowledgeable and passionate horse racing man who lives and breathes something that has completely inhaled him and makes him kinda edgy in a Christoph Waltz way.
This is when he cocks his head to the side, smiles a rather enigmatic smile that’s part Mona Lisa and part Dr Strangelove with the stage set for a conversation that could go anywhere and the background music being a weird combination of Bernard Herrman, Isaac Hayes and Mahler.
I had known the man known to many as “E.B” or “Mister CEO” in passing for over twenty years. I was then with either Universal Music or EMI Music, and those in the music industry and those in horse racing were very much ships and tankers passing in the night with very different ways of looking at things and leading very different lifestyles.
It was only after he casually asked if I had ever been to the Beer Garden at Happy Valley racecourse- I hadn’t- and what could be done to make horse racing appeal to a younger demographic, who didn’t know or care about what were called Sassy Wednesdays, did I really get to know the man behind the tongue twister name.
Changing Sassy to Happy, then making the advertising not look like a tacky come-on for an escort club in Macau, Happy Wednesday nights quickly became a stylish young international brand and a game changer for the often blinkered and rather wrinkly racing world.
When in advertising working on the Creative for McDonald’s, STARTV etc and also as a music executive, very few of us were involved in the racing caper.
We were too busy being groupies, flying around the world for pretty useless marketing conferences and getting high by hanging with those leading actual Rock star lifestyles.
A handful of us might have owned horses, but when knowing that our bosses and big names in the music business like songwriter Burt Bacharach and Jerry Moss, the M in A&M Records, were breeders and horse owners, this inspired some of us to create the image of being a high flyer, not only in the music world, but by slightly upping the quality of our equine purchases.
After all, Jerry Moss and his third wife happened to own the champion American galloper Zenyatta, who, by the way, was named after the third album by Police.
We could now talk knowingly to him about owning horses in Macau and winning races in places like Orange and Darwin.
I don’t think Mr Moss was very impressed.
I had a couple of horses, but only after promising my wife at the time that we had invested in two champion gallopers.
She bought us a house in St Louis and I had two not very good horses.
We were unevenly even.
As for Winfried, we got to know each other very well during those Happy Wednesday nights, and there were those who never understood what on earth we could have in common.
Some working for the HKJC even saw this budding bromance as something to be wary of and suddenly I was a “traitor” who had teamed up with the “enemy”.
To keep boredom at bay, at this time, I was writing an online column called Racingbitch, where nothing was spared- the various Game Of Thrones being played out in the land of Oz, characters like “The Plodder”, “Toffee Tongue”, The TVN Drama, choreographed drive-by shootings, odd hires, The Bill V’Lahos Files, The Harvey Weinstein of Racing, the Oompah Loompahs, Kittens, Gotham City, Fidel’s etc.
There were some interesting and arresting people in very high places feeding me stories for free with my late great barrister friend Kevin Egan looking after the legalese and explaining where and how the dots joined.
With Happy Wednesday becoming the instant hit that brought fun and interactivity, good ‘live’ music and fabulous looking young French, German, Scandinavian, British and Americans on a regular basis to the races plus a Trip Advisor recommendation, dinners with Winfried and our chats at the venue Adrenaline after the last race were free flowing and often surreal and weird, but always entertaining and never without coming up with a relevant idea.
There was always food for thought. And there was always Winfried suddenly hitting the dance floor with arms flailing all over the place as he went into the throes of his Octopus Dance to forget whatever might have been worrying him.
We talked about movies, music, marketing, food, the women in my life, the new clubs that someone in his position couldn’t be seen at and everything in between.
Was I enjoying working on Happy Wednesday?
For a good few of the twelve years, yes, but it was getting formulaic and I missed the creativity of many in the advertising world and returning to winning international awards, where the only rule was no rules.
When it was surreptitiously decided that a new double act of diversity be brought in to take over the reins of the Happy Wednesday brand, this was hardly a surprise.
Hong Kong is a very small place and the new lady in my life- a lawyer- is hardly naive.
She somehow seems to know everything before it happens and always knows the proof in the pudding is in the evidence.
My adieu could have been handled better, but it was what it wasn’t and the relationship with Winfried went into such deep freeze for over a year that it was frozen.
But times change, people change, Hong Kong has changed, things thaw, the word “happy” is in short supply around the world, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto have smoke ‘em the peace pipe.
If it’s always about the need for horses for courses, other than this week’s HKIR week, Winfried’s next card to play will almost certainly be the evolution of the hi tech training facility in Conghua in China.
It’s turning this venue into a new field of dreams for him and something that will transcend the way horse racing is viewed that’s his priority- something I am guessing will be aspirational, exclusive and upmarket “racetertainment”.
Being driven and knowing exactly where he is going and how to get there and what it takes to make something extra special is the strong suit of Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges.
He wears it well.
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