Written In the Stars – Gray Williamson, master of Mungrup, still

If you were the man behind the making of Playing God, you might presume the horse is the best you’ve ever had. Not so Gray Williamson.

The master of Mungrup Stud in Western Australia, a decent kick south of Perth, bought the racehorse Playing God in early 2014 for a stud career, and today, and by a considerable way, the horse is the leading sire in the west.

But he isn’t Williamson’s fairytale.

“No, that would have to be Metal Storm,” Williamson tells The Straight. I’m sorry, who?

“He was statistically better than Playing God. He was an absolute freak.”

Metal Storm was a French-bred son of Kenmare who arrived in Western Australia in 1995. Williamson had been on the scout for a son of Kenmare, and he asked Brett Howard, of Randwick Bloodstock, to give him a hand.

The bay Metal Storm, damsire Habitat, was a Group 3-winning miler in France but without the fuss and fervour of other horses of that era, and Howard remembers he was a steal.

“From memory, and it’s going back a long way, he was under $100,000 landed,” says the now-retired Sydney-based bloodstock agent.

Metal Storm, as history proved, was champagne on a beer budget. Getting just over 100 foals in his first two crops, his stakes winners among them were Storm Shot, Krystal Storm, Kalatiara, Metal Master and the outstanding Group 1 winner Old Fashion.

“I remember going across to Perth when his first yearlings went through the sale ring and they were fairly well received, relative to where Metal Storm stood in the market,” Howard says. “But once they started racing, he far exceeded my expectations as a sire, and I’m sure the same could be said for Gray.”

Williamson had had stallions before, and stallions like Playing God and Oratorio since, but none like this one.

“It took until May of his two-year-olds’ year before Metal Storm had his first winner, and then it just didn’t stop happening,” Williamson says. “There are quite a lot of similarities between him and the way Playing God started, but it was because of Metal Storm that Mungrup’s profile was lifted so much. We were able to take the Playing Gods to sale and people were much more aware of us, just because of Metal Storm.”

“And then it all came crashing down,” Howard says.

In mid-September 2001, just three weeks into the new breeding season after a previous season of covering 144 mares at Mungrup, and with a new world order courtesy of the World Trade Centre terror, Metal Storm was found dead in his paddock from a snake bite.

“We had about 600 horses on the property at that time, and a snake found him,” Williamson says. “I reckon in all my time I could put only one other horse down to a snake bite.”

Metal Storm’s fate robbed Western Australia of a superstar. However, it robbed Gray Williamson and his then wife Jan of a farm-maker, the sort of horse that firms the brand and settles the ledger.

“A Coolmore or an Arrowfield could wear it,” Howard says. “But for someone like Gray, who had a fledgling, family-run operation, it was devastating. Metal Storm would have been a leading sire in Western Australia for the next ten years, and he would have set Gray and his family up for the rest of their lives.”

For anyone who knows Gray Williamson, however, crying into his beer isn’t his style.

“It happens,” he says. “Just when things are looking good, when the sky is looking very blue, all of a sudden the clouds come over, but that’s the ying and the yang.

“I think back on Metal Storm and remember it was pretty devastating, but then, because I’d never had a champion sire before that, he was the one horse that really showed me what the ramifications of having a good stallion were, and they weren’t just monetary.”

To this day, Metal Storm’s brilliance continues to pop up, like in Bob Peters’s triple Group 1 winner Arcadia Queen, whose second dam, the outstanding Antique, was by Metal Storm.

In the end, the French son of Kenmare sired 23 stakes winners and 184 individual winners of 800 races from just 248 starters.

As it tends to, life went on at Mungrup Stud, but it was another 13 years before Playing God arrived at the Narrikup farm in March 2014. Starting at $6600, the horse’s service fee is today $49,500, the nearest to him in the state being Sessions at $9900.

Because of Metal Storm, Williamson knew what to do with Playing God and his progeny. He pulled the strings expertly until June 2020 when, gripped by COVID, bowel cancer recovery and a marriage collapse, he announced the winding-up of Mungrup Stud.

At the time he said; “It’s very sad for the family, but life doesn’t go in a straight line all the time.”

In all the wash up, Playing God was sold to Darling View Stud, where his trajectory has continued under the eye of the Atwell family. Mungrup held a dispersal sale via Magic Millions that sold 157 horses, among them 85 beloved broodmares. But in that ying-yang cycle Williamson talks about, he held onto a mare called Cosmah Domination, who was by Mungrup veteran Oratorio, himself on the brink of being pensioned.

“Cosmah Domination went through the dispersal (for $7500 to Scarborough Investments) and I ended up buying her back with a few others,” Williamson says. “It turned out to be a good decision because she’s now the dam of Bustler and A Lot Of Good Men.”

Bustler won the Group 1 Railway Stakes in 2023, along with the Group 3 Belmont Sprint and Listed Fairetha Stakes. A Lot Of Good Men won the 2024 Group 2 Western Australian Derby.

“These days, I know that when something good happens, there can be disaster just around the corner,” Williamson says, “which is why when you have a winner, or something is going really well, you must celebrate it. You’ve really got to take it for what it is.”

In a state made of mining money and untold frontier and fortune, Williamson is a gentleman. He’s careful with his words and absurdly positive when he’s had every excuse to be sour on life.

Today he is 68 and he was a young man when diagnosed with bowel cancer. He and Jan had been a force in western breeding for decades when their union collapsed and they had to split the Mungrup property, the only home Williamson had ever known, down the middle.

He lives now on a part of it with his new partner, South African nurse Patsy Ryan, the other part of it settled by his daughter Claire and her own operation, Willaview Park. Does Williamson wander back to that ying-yang again, finding himself home after all the upheaval of the dispersal?

“It’s quite fulfilling actually,” he says. “I’m content here, and that might sound blasé or whatever, but I am. I’m back on the part of the farm where I actually grew up, and it’s nothing like what it was when my mother and father were here, but I can look over at the trees where my brother and I used to kick the football around, and that’s quite lovely.”

At the time in 2020, Williamson had every intention of exiting the industry stage left. But that isn’t how it has gone, Mungrup Stud presenting 14 horses at the upcoming Perth Yearling Sale. Next door, Willaview Park will have nine, the farms competing but not really.

Among Mungrup’s lots is a Playing God filly from Cosmah Domination, along with yearlings by locals Splintex and Lightsaber, and some east-coast blood by State Of Rest, Too Darn Hot, Pinatubo, Ghaiyaath and Acrobat.

“But to be honest,” Williamson says, “a lot of people over here joke with me that they don’t want the ones I’m presenting at the sales, because I’ve had a fair amount of luck over the years with the ones that haven’t gone to the sale ring for one reason or another.”

Hot Zed is one, a horse that was turned away from the sale ring because of his being by the obscure sire Red Hot Choice. He ended up winning three Listed Races and a Group 3 between 2021 and 2023.

And that, perhaps, is why Williamson has an open mind when it comes to the stallion ranks in Western Australia. While the east coast pursuit of stallion fashion has made the game a rich man’s, Williamson is reminded of the success of Kenmare, Metal Storm and even I Am Invincible, each off the blocks of humble beginnings.

“I’m not in a position or of an age to stand stallions any more, but if I was, I’d be going hard on looking for a horse that could stand in Western Australia for that $20,000 fee and up,” Williamson says. “I don’t think it would be beyond WA to absorb that.”

And if he were given the power to get such a horse?

“I’d probably be going overseas. Overseas stallions are cheaper to buy than those here in Australia, and I’d want an outcross to Danehill that can run early and on top of the ground, because most of our tracks here are reasonably hard.

“I love a horse like Vandeek, for example. I sent a mare to him this year (at Arrowfield) because I loved the way he performed, and he’s that Havana Grey sireline. In other words, I wouldn’t be afraid to be going outside of the traditional lines.”

Williamson is evidence of a few things; you win some, like Playing God, and you lose some, like Metal Storm. When you get lucky, like with Cosmah Domination or Hot Zed, you can be just as unlucky five minutes later, like with his bowel cancer diagnosis.

He is a veteran of life’s swings and roundabouts.

“He’s the most even-tempered person I’ve ever met,” Howard says. “He’s one of those people that, whatever good comes his way, he deserves. Yes, the highs are highs and the lows are lows for a lot of people, but with Gray, the variation around that middle is very subtle. He’s just a lovely person.”