Saturday, February 06, 2010

The Curse

Congratulations Steve Asmussen, you officially lost the 2010 Kentucky Derby! Well, the odds were against you to begin with, but especially now.

Eclipse Award-winning trainers, in recent history, don’t win roses, don’t buy roses, aren’t fit to say, ‘Stop and smell the roses.’ In the last decade, three conditioners have been named Champion Trainer—think about that—Asmussen, Todd Pletcher, and the late Bobby Frankel: two, four, and four.

Going back nearly 20 years to 1993, only six different trainers have won the award. When you’re hot, you’re hot.

The last trainer to win the Derby in the year he was named Champion Trainer was Bob Baffert in 1998 with Real Quiet, the same year he missed the Triple Crown by a booger.

Nineteen ninety-seven was the last year a trainer, also Baffert, won the Champion Trainer award and then went on to win the Derby the following year. That doesn’t seem that long ago, but that was thirteen years now gone.

Since the Eclipse Awards’ conception in 1971, just 18 trainers out of 39 renewals have won the award. Frankel has won the most (five) with Pletcher, Laz Barrera, and D. Wayne Lukas sit one back.

Eighteen Kentucky Derby’s spread out among the eighteen trainers over 39 years.

Here’s the decade-by-decade breakdown: The Seventies: Six

The Eighties: Five

The Nineties: Seven.

The Eunucks: Zero.

Baffert and Lukas dominated the nineties with six Derby’s from the Eclipse winners. Carl Nafzger won the other in 1990 with eventual uber-sire Unbridled.

The ’80’s alone had seven different winners of the award and Lukas was the only trainer to win the Eclipse (1987) and then win the Derby the following year, that being 1988 with Winning Colors.

The ’70’s saw six trainers win the ward and Lucien Laurin had a decent baby in Secretariat in 1972 and a movie deal in 2009. The only horse to do that.

Laz Barrera won the Eclipse in 1977 and then won the Derby in 1978 with the last (the last?) Triple Crown winner, Affirmed.

This suggests three things:

1. That winning the Kentucky Derby doesn’t necessarily make a trainer a champion.

2. That there is validation and evidence to a calendar year than extends itself beyond the Triple Crown.

3. That the Eclipse Award winning trainer is cursed.

There’s the Sports Illustrated Curse, the Madden Curse, and now the Eclipse Curse.

Just look at the winning trainers of the past few Kentucky Derby’s alone: Chip Woolley, Rick Dutrow, Jr., Nafzger, Michael Matz, John Shirreffs, John Servis, and Barclay Tagg. No Eclipses, yet they posses the rose where others the thorn.

Aside from Nafzger (who had already won a Derby, albeit 17 years separated) and Dutrow (who trained 2005 Horse of the Year Saint Liam), all the names were obscure. And during this stretch of obscure names only three well-known names won Eclipses: Asmussen, Pletcher, and Frankel.

Take Asmussen, would he have been a slam-dunk to win Champion Trainer were it not for Curlin and Rachel Alexandra? Perhaps, because he did win 1,200 races over two years (think about that). But Scott Lake on the Maryland circuit and Gary Contessa in New York win hundreds of races and are never in the discussion.

No wonder why Asmussen says he’s as blessed as he is because he was handed both these super horses from other trainers.

He still had to train them, and he could have faltered. What Curlin and Rachel Alexandra did was shine a light on his operation and management that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Just think of the pressure.

Pletcher’s Derby draught has reached the level of comic tragedy. He may be the best trainer never to win one. Golfers get slammed and pegged as the ‘Best to Never Win One’ moniker until they do, but Pletcher has escaped this ire, all trainers for that matter. At least Pletcher has proved to be the best all-around trainer in the country and that can be his scapegoat in all this. His program isn’t centered solely around the Triple Crown and dirt. He runs on the turf. He runs long. He runs short. He runs in the prestigious filly and mare races.

If anything, the Pletcher’s and the Asmussen’s have proved that even when you own the haystack, it’s still damn hard to find that needle.

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Now this is a rivalry

Now there is a rivalry.

For anyone who has had a chance to see Jess Jackson’s acceptance speech for Rachel Alexandra winning the 2009 Horse of the Year award, you know it’s on now.
All you had to do was look to the face of Jerry Moss during the frequent cutaways. The look on his face said it all.

1. I’m not pleased that I lost.
2. I don’t like you that much.
3. See you in 2010.

His face lacked all joy. His jaw was locked so tight you could hear his teeth cracking. His jaw was so squared off you could have forged Excaliber on it. Though nobody with any inkling of intelligence would say that, ‘Aha! Zenyatta is no longer unbeaten,’ Moss still defended her with an edge that could blunt a diamond. “Zenyatta’s never lost. She’s perfect. Nobody’s beaten her on the racetrack. So they beat her by proxy as far as I’m concerned. This doesn’t take away anything from the just enormous job done by [trainer] John [Shirreffs]. I can’t say enough about what he and his barn have done. I obviously congratulate Mr. Jackson and Mrs. Jackson. They have a great horse. Someday we’ll meet, and we’ll decide at that time who is the best. Frankly I wouldn’t trade with anybody. I’m looking forward to the encounter.”

This makes IEAH’s 2008 taunts sound like the ‘Too Light’ half of a Bud Light commercial.

This was like Patrick Roy saying, “I can’t hear what Jeremy says because my ears are blocked with my two Stanley Cup rings.”

This is blood that the ‘Twilight’ vampires might shy away from. Maybe this is what was meant when the Police sung, “Don’t stand so close to me.”

Twenty-ten has potential written all over it. Keep in mind that all it would take is for Rachel to come back from a breeze with chips in her ankle or for Zenyatta to clip her own heels to slay this rivalry before it ever gets physical.

For once we see that the gloves are off and Rick Dutrow is nowhere to been seen. Not since the movie ‘Up’ could we have a geriatric action sequence to write about.

When was there a rivalry this salty? You’d probably have to go back to Easy Goer and Sunday Silence. Before that Affirmed and Alydar. Before that? Not sure, but perhaps we can agree that horse racing’s first true rivalry was Seabiscuit and War Admiral. One has horse California cool, the other has sovereignty over the eastern seaboard.
But what these prior rivalries had was multiple attempts at each other. It will not suffice to have Rachel and Zenyatta — should they meet — to race only once, no matter how big the stage and how big the purse.

The Yankees bludgeoned the Red Sox for what seemed like centuries and that was still a rivalry. Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Hemingway and Faulkner, Frost and Nixon, Yin and Yang.

The recipe for a rivalry has a few parts. One, the two parties must hate each other. Now we can never know the true nature of these Golden Year-Californian’s, but it seems they dislike each other enough to want to beat the other into an early grave.

Two, fan bases need to be rabid and more polarized than a magnet. To read comments on Rachel Alexandra columns is to read some of the most adiment Zenyatta supporters and all their venom. The dialogue is brutal, brutal but passionate.

Three, the media hooks on. Since the Breeders’ Cup Classic no topic has been covered like the Rachel-Zenyatta debate for Horse of the Year. Dozens of turf writers opined on this until readers were bloodshot. For anyone in the racing press to hark on such a topic for this long over so many months proves that the perennially jaded have found something that, in all their years of covering this fine sport, truly moves the meter.

Moss is more subtle and subdued, much like the Red Sox John Henry. Jackson throws his plumes around more in the manner of Hank Steinbrenner. His presence in the game is the stirrer that agitates the White Russian. Around the time of the Woodward you got Claire Novak calling him a poor sport and Ed DeRosa applauding him for the same behavior.

This rivalry has the chance to be bigger than Lincoln v. Booth. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Minus the death of course, one can imagine Moss yelling to Jackson, “Sic semper tyrannis. I have done it! Zenyatta is avenged!”

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Saturday, January 09, 2010

Trim the fat

I used to love organic chemistry. It was one of my best subjects in college. For whatever reason it clicked in my brain, all the chemical mechanisms, Fischer Esterification, SN1 and SN2 reactions, chair diagrams, you name it.

One thing you learn is that to move a chemical reaction along, that is, to move the ingredients into a higher yield, you have to remove product, otherwise the reaction stalls because reactions must be balanced.

Horse racing has too much product thus stalling innovation and losing its specialty. If stuff, whatever that stuff may be, is too numerous, if it loses its allure, if I can go to the track every day then why would I go? There’s not enough exclusivity.

It’s as if Count Dracula not only sucked the life out of the tracks, but left them shells of their former selves, walking Un-Dead, nosferatu. Every other major sport takes a break. Baseball is off from November to February. Football is off from February to July. Basketball is off from June to October. Hockey ... do they still play hockey?

At least the off-seasons of the major sports leave some anticipation, a lag time when you have to think about the upcoming year. Horse racing seems like the over-anxious boyfriend doting over the hot chick. Buddy, she liked you but you wouldn’t leave her alone. There’s something to be said for playing hard to get.

My God! Why is egg nog so good? Because we can only drink Hood Golden (the only egg nog worth drinking, for all you Garelick or Southern Comfort people, just stop it. Stop it.) for 25 percent of the year it makes it special. Starbucks Egg Not Latte is the treat of treats. To quote the Steep and Cheap Web site (for all you campers and hikers, I highly endorse their products), “I think we only drink egg nog around the holidays because it would kill us if we drank it all year.” Horse racing seems to be drowning on horse racing.

What can the game do to reclaim a sense of experience? Isn’t the NFL a drama fix condensed into neatly packed three-hour pills? Though I think the college’s Bowl Championship Series would be better suited with a playoff system, it has made Week 1 at the end of August every bit as compelling as Week 11. Every week there’s anticipation and every week there is a payoff.

Let’s make every weekend, let’s say Saturday’s, like a major stakes day, bump up the admission, enforce some sort of a dress code and turn every weekend into an encapsulated Travers Day, Derby Day, Ascot, and, a shout-out to my friend Phil Schoenthal, who used to train Digger in 2007, the winner of the 2009 Grade 3 Gravesend, down in Bowie, Maryland, Maryland Millions Day.

Could this squeeze out some people? Yes, and I hope so. Because it is the exclusivity that makes something special, that brews anticipation. The NFL Network steals a few games away from the general public and it infuriates fans, but you still tune in every week. You’re still talking about the NFL.

Your very own John Pricci wrote that a dress code at the track would add to the overall experience, a throwback to the days when the track was a place to see and be seen. When I go, granted under different parameters than most, I’m in a suit and I don’t necessarily want to be brushing shoulders with the meatball in a Queen tank top sloshing around his eighth Coors Light by the time Thursday’s weekly steeplechase race goes off.

Run the claiming races as simulcast-only during the week so trainers can swap horses and keep their strings afloat, but turn it over on the weekend to a card with a continuous loop of stakes, change $15 to get in (children under 12 get in free!), men where pants, a blazer, (and please, leave the mustache in your bathroom’s S-pipe), women, well, use your imagination (have we ever had to really worry about you?) Men, grab a fedora too, a very underrated look. If you’re dressed to the nine, imagine it like the Italian custom of the passeggiata, where the men essentially dress above their means and parade themselves in the town’s square to impress the women hanging outside their windows.

By turning the track into an experience instead of a wasted piece of property, it will be special again, the place to be, a nip of nog at the perfect time.

As always I encourage comments, but if you shy away from public participation and want to voice an opinion, feel free to e-mail me at .

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