Monday, April 21, 2008
This Year’s Class Has the Smell of Roses
LOS ANGELES, April 22, 2008--Nobody ever said that trainers and jockeys had to win the Kentucky Derby before they could be elected into the Racing Hall of Fame. If smelling the roses were a prerequisite, the hall's doors would have slammed shut on such superb saddlesmiths as George Woolf and Manny Ycaza. Combined, they were 0 for 18 in the Derby.
The Derby-Hall of Fame comparison might be even more glaring on the trainers' side. Allen Jerkens, Ron McAnally, Shug McGaughey, Bobby Frankel and Richard Mandella have all been enshrined, and none needed to apologize for the Churchill Downs void at induction time. Sylvester and John Veitch, that rare father-son tandem who made the Hall of Fame, went 0 for 13 in the Derby. Obviously, the voters didn't care.
Maybe this year's voters didn't care, either, but it couldn't have hurt that Carl Nafzger, Edgar Prado and Ismael "Milo" Valenzuela, who have had their tickets punched to Valhalla, have been the winners of some of the most memorable Derbies ever run.
Saddling only one Derby horse for the next 16 years, Nafzger was back for the third time in 2007. In one of the great training jobs in Derby history, he had an early plan and stuck to it. Street Sense beat a classy field, becoming the first Breeders' Cup Juvenile winner to win the race, and the first horse to win off only two starts as a 3-year-old in 24 years.
"If you don't believe in God, study my life," Nafzger said when he learned of his Hall of Fame election. "It's been a miracle."
Prado, one of 16 jockeys to win 6,000 races, had been no better than third with six Derby mounts before Barbaro in 2006. Like Street Sense, Barbaro sent the historians scurrying for the record books. His 6 1/2-length win was the biggest margin in 60 years, and he was only the sixth undefeated horse to ever win the Derby. Two weeks later, Prado was a hero without portfolio, quickly pulling up a distressed Barbaro in the early running of the Preakness. Prado's adept horsemanship helped buy the colt eight more months, but he was put down, all remedies exhausted, in January of 2007.
"Barbaro had a lot to do with this," Prado said on a Monday teleconference. "I won an Eclipse Award, and now this. It takes a great horse to take a jockey to this level."
Prado's name was on an unbalanced ballot. Usually each category includes three candidates, but there was only one trainer listed besides Nafzger--the late Bob Wheeler, most deserving but penalized because many of his accomplishments came when the electorate's whippersnappers weren't around. Inside Information, who polled the most votes among contemporary females, had to beat out three others, all highly qualified. Against Open Mind, Silverbulletday and Sky Beauty, who totaled more than $6 million in purses, it's unlikely that Inside Information, who lost only three races in three years, registered a voting majority. By the next millennium, expect the Hall of Fame to announce actual vote counts.
Valenzuela, passed over several times on the regular ballot, was voted in by the Historic Review Committee, which also cited Ancient Title, the intrepid California gelding who won 20 stakes during a remarkable career that spanned seven seasons.
It seemed like Valenzuela, now 73 and in ill health, rode them all and often, but he only got on Ancient Title once. Milo's mealticket was Kelso, whom he rode 35 times, 21 of them stakes wins, in three of his five Horse of the Year campaigns. Before Kelso, there was Tim Tam, who was to be ridden by Bill Hartack in the 1958 Kentucky Derby. But Hartack suffered a broken leg in a starting-gate accident, and Valenzuela took over. They won the Preakness, too, before Tim Tam, in the final race of his career, went lame in the Belmont.
Valenzuela's other Derby winner, sort of, came in 1973, although the race was run in 1968. Sounds like a pretty good way to make a few bucks in a barroom. Dancer's Image, first-place finisher in the 1968 Derby, failed a post-race drug test (phenylbutazone was illegal in Kentucky then), and the win, for Valenzuela and the second-place horse, Forward Pass, wasn't notarized until some prolonged court battling ended five years later. Valenzuela's share of the purse, $12,260 plus interest, came to more than $14,000.
"I would have been happier if Rosa (his wife) would have been here to share this with me," Valenzuela said about the Hall of Fame. "This is my last ride across the finish line--at 73, being inducted."
Manila, another horse who was voted in, had been on the ballot 11 times before. Ridden by Jose Santos, he won the Breeders' Cup Turf at Santa Anita in 1986. His owner, Mike Shannon, envisioned Horse of the Year honors, but the vote went to the filly, Lady's Secret. Winless as a 2-year-old, Manila was then sold to Shannon by his breeder, Eduardo Cojuangco, whose businesses had collapsed during the fall of the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines.
Gary Stevens, riding Theatrical, lost by a neck to Manila in the Breeders' Cup. "Manila was a tough competitor," Stevens once said. "I knocked the whip out of Santos' hand in the stretch, and they still beat us."
Written by Bill Christine
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