Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Left at the Altar

Los Angeles, September 2, 2008--To hear Charlie Hayward tell the story, the Breeders' Cup reneged on a deal that would have returned its multimillion-dollar racefest to Belmont Park in 2010. Speaking on get-away day at Saratoga, the president of the New York Racing Association said that his Belmont was out and Churchill Downs was in. Front men for the Breeders' Cup and Churchill commented by saying no comment. Hayward sure as hell knows what happened to Belmont, and he didn't sound like he was guessing about Churchill.

A long time ago, the IRS came after me, looking for about a hundred dollars of my ailing mother's money. She had given me power of attorney over this fortune. I was determined to make the government jump through as many hoops as possible, so a couple of years later we wound up in U.S. District Court, before a judge who did a pretty good Roy Bean imitation. "Sir," I said, "the only thing I did during the year in question was the same thing I did with my mother's money the two years before that. The IRS had no problem those two years, and the tax law hasn't changed since then, so why are they unhappy with what I did the third year?"


The judge was unmoved. "Sir," he said, pointing a bony finger in my direction, "the government has the right to be inconsistent." If only Learned Hand had been around, instead of that buffoon. I paid the hundred dollars. But at least there was the satisfaction of the judge chastising the IRS attorney for wasting his time over such a niggardly amount.

This is a long-winded way of saying that if the U.S. government can be inconsistent, why can't the Breeders' Cup as well? Attention, Yogi Berra: When it comes time for the Breeders' Cup to parcel out its races, it's also never over till it's over. Sometime in the 1990s, a good source, an--how do you Americans put it?--unimpeachable source told me that Oak Tree at Santa Anita was going to be awarded an upcoming Breeders' Cup. I ran with the story, which was quickly debunked by the Breeders' Cup, and my sports editor accused me of smoking my socks. "How could this happen?" I demanded of Mr. Unimpeachable. "Simple," he said. "Yesterday Oak Tree was in. Today they were out."

Charlie Hayward's board of directors at NYRA may be asking what he does with HIS socks. He said that in May he told his board that he had a "handshake deal" with the Breeders' Cup for 2010. Several weeks later, two high-ranking Breeders' Cup officials called to tell him that, heh, heh, Churchill Downs' "lucrative" proposal had superseded Belmont's. "We weren't given a chance to respond to the Churchill offer," Hayward told Steve Byk on satellite radio.

Hayward also said that Churchill's proposal for the 2008 races, the one that sent the Breeders' Cup ricocheting in the direction of California, came with the proviso that the Louisville track become the permanent host. Six Breeders' Cups have been run at Churchill, whose only drawback is dicey weather, and when Tom Meeker ran the show there, negotiations were seldom contentious. Post-Meeker, it's a whole new ball game. The late Mike Barry, the Louisville wit, used to refer to Churchill as Bottom Line Downs. Barry ought to see them now. A couple of years ago, they excised the Kentucky Derby race charts from the media guide to save a sou or two.

Churchill stood in a corner for a while, sucking its thumb, then apparently emerged to low-bridge Belmont. Those hidebound horsemen who still think that dirt has a future in their game can be buoyed by the fact that despite the Breeders' Cup's vacillation over 2010, the races were ticketed for a track that hadn't bought into a synthetic surface. There would have been a conniption epidemic if the Breeders' Cup nabobs had gone back to Santa Anita for a third straight year, but the dirt option wasn't necessarily guaranteed. Del Mar, for one, has been poking around for possible Breeders' Cup dates for years, and now its main track is Polytrack, the same artificial going they use at Keeneland, which might have designs on the Breeders' Cup for the track's 75th anniversary in 2011.

You would think that the Breeders' Cup owes 2011 to Belmont Park, but in racing, consciences are sometimes checked at the door. There's nothing to dislike about the cut of Charlie Hayward's jib, but year after year at NYRA, he can't catch a break. "Why is it, Nulty, that everything I touch turns to (bleep)," Robert Mitchum's weary Philip Marlowe says to a cop in "Farewell, My Lovely." Hayward can identify with that line. Even the recently completed Saratoga meet, which is NYRA's crown jewel, had its mixed moments. The season began with a monsoon. Big Brown found a way to miss the Travers. And Curlin didn't show up until the third-last day of the meet, drawing a crowd that was much below Saratoga's Saturday norms. Big Brown has found a way to miss the Belmont Park meet, too. Curlin could run in the Jockey Club Gold Cup, but you know that Hayward isn't betting either way. How big of a chump do you think Charlie is?

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Did Loss of Curlin Make Pacific Classic Better?

Del Mar, Calif., Aug. 26, 2008--The race did not feature the one horse that everyone wanted to see. Like so many recent Pacific Classic Stakes, the star of the. . . division was elsewhere. This time, perhaps in a stall on the Saratoga backstretch.

Where did you possibly read those lines first? Try Vic Zast's recent treatise on the Travers. An old journalism professor of mine--I believe the course was Ethics 301--once said that if you're going to steal, steal from the best, and since colleague Zast's succinct comments about the jewel at Saratoga also fit the biggest race Del Mar offers, I merely substituted the appropriate words and let 'er rip. Sorry about that, Vic. Bill me.


As always, we're talking about Big Brown and Curlin. Every race they stay on the shelf is a diluted exercise. It was a wonderful weekend at Saratoga and Del Mar, where more than 70,000 fans came out and the ratings for network television coverage deserve to be higher than usual, but the Travers sans Big Brown and the Pacific Classic minus Curlin are glasses half-full. Their rivals are making a living by beating up on one another while the picky owners of the Big Two play footsie.

There was a lot to like about Go Between's workmanlike win in the Pacific Classic, but the reality is that the 5-year-old son of Point Given is a synthetic-surface aberration. There are a lot of horses like this going around these days, even though Colonel John fired a shot for the compleat racehorse by winning on dirt for the first time in the Travers. Go Between probably will never get the chance to shed the synthetic-track stereotype that Colonel John is working hard to shed. Go Between has won half of his six starts on synthetic, while on grass and once on dirt he's only a .250 hitter. Bill Mott, his trainer, would be foolhardy to run Go Between on anything but synthetic between now and his likely career finale, the Breeders' Cup Classic over Pro-Ride at Santa Anita.

The Pacific Classic, a million-dollar race from infancy, has evolved into a nice late-summer divertissement, but as a sendoff for all things cosmic, it has hardly pushed the needle on the impact scale. Bertrando's win at Del Mar and subsequent second-place finish in the Breeders' Cup was a long time ago. As a fixture, the Del Mar race is still living off the Dare and Go upset of Cigar, and that was in another decade, another century even.

This Pacific Classic brought 10 horses, three more on the average than the race usually draws, and three shippers from the East, besides Go Between, were in the field. Behind Go Between, the best any of the invaders could do was a fifth-place finish by Student Council, who won the race a year ago. The other shippers were last and second-last. Well Armed, who lost to Go Between by a neck, is a California-based Eoin Harty trainee (see Colonel John) whose history would appear to indicate a lifetime of soundness issues.

But Well Armed, like Go Between, is yet another horse who is an underachiever on dirt and an ersatz wonder. His lines: 7-4-2-0 on artificial, 11-1-0-1 everywhere else. Mott and Harty should kiss the Breeders' Cup honchos who settled on Santa Anita for the next two runnings. In any other scenario, they are trainers who might be looking at races on the undercard.

The Pacific Classic weekend, which ended with Garrett Gomez banking an estimated $120,000 for his four minutes of work on Colonel John and Go Between, started with a jockey story of another nature. Two days before the Pacific Classic, in the paddock prior to the first race, a couple of sheriff's deputies handcuffed Matt Garcia as he was about to mount an 81-1 shot in a maiden race. Garcia was ignominiously led off, something to do with a "criminal threat," the Daily Racing Form wrote. Joy Scott was whisked out of the jockeys' room to ride Garcia's horse to a last-place finish. "A stranger thing," one of the Del Mar stewards told me, "is that Matt will still get his mount fee, since he passed the scales before the race. Those are the rules." That fee is a pittance, but a jockey in Garcia's predicament will need all the found money he can get.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Check List for Petaluma Tony

San Mateo, Calif., Aug. 19, 2008--Things you ought to know about Tony from Petaluma, who parlayed a $12 ticket (3x1x1x2x1x1) to cash a $356,909.60 pick six at Del Mar last month (there was only one other winning ticket):

* He and two younger brothers all suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary eye disease. Tony, 62, is legally blind. Two years ago, given the choice of using a cane or a guide dog, he opted for a dog. Now he has "Warner," a black Labrador retriever.

* Warner, Tony said, "must have thought I lost my mind" when he sat at home and listened to the TVG telecast of the final leg. Dumaani's Gold, Tony's 5-1 single in the race, and Improvising, the 5-2 favorite, finished in a dead heat. "My horse was a length and a half behind in the stretch," Tony said, "but I could tell from Trevor Denman's call that she was just coming and coming. While I waited for the photo, I thought, 'Even if my horse doesn't win, I'm in line for a pretty decent consolation with five out of six.' But when when they announced the 5 (Dumaani's Gold) had dead-heated, I went crazy, and Warner couldn't figure out what was wrong with me."

* Singling Zardana, the Ron McAnally trainee who won the fifth leg, the Osunitas Handicap, at 43-1, wasn't that difficult, Tony said. "This was a Brazilian-bred, and McAnally has a reputation of doing wonderful things with horses from down there," Tony said. "There were no Secretariats in the race, and McAnally had to have a reason for taking a shot. I knew that not many horses were winning wire to wire on the grass at Del Mar, and if I knew that, McAnally had to know it, too. I kind of thought that he'd tell his jockey (Aaron Gryder) to take back instead of going for the lead. And that's the way the race set up."

* Because Tony can't read the Daily Racing Form, he relies on listening to several handicappers he respects. He sets his alarm clock for 7 a.m every Saturday to listen to Sam Spear's hour-long racing show on San Francisco station KNBR. Ellis Starr, a regular handicapper on the Spear show, gave out Beyla, the 7-2 winner of the third leg.

* "Trainer-owner-jockey combinations are important when you're trying to pick winners," Tony said. "So are bloodlines. I've been following racing long enough to recognize a lot of the key bloodlines."

* Tony hardly ever plays the pick six, and can't explain why that Saturday he did. "It's harder to hit than the lottery," he said.

* Before he hit the pick six, Tony was living off a disability pension of $1,500 a month and a part-time job that paid $600 a month. Three days a week, he spent three hours on buses getting to a 4 1/2-hour job. He has quit the job.

* Before his eyesight began to fail, Tony was a 206-average bowler.

* Tony's 1970 marriage ended in divorce. Bowling apparently played a part. Shortly after they were married, his wife landed a job that required her to relocate from California to the New York City area. Tony, who was bowling in six leagues a week, followed her six months later. "After a couple of years, she told me that she had found someone else," he said.

* Tony eventually returned to his native California, but not before he was at Belmont Park the day Secretariat swept the 1973 Triple Crown.

* Tony celebrated his 62nd birthday by spending last weekend in Reno at the Eldorado Hotel and Casino. "I go there a couple of times a year," he said. "It's a great place, it reminds you of the good old days in Reno, and they make me feel very comfortable."

* Tony is a small bettor, and plans to stay that way. His money from Del Mar is in two banks, and he's hired an accountant to manage his future. "I know betting on the horses can be addictive," he said. "I don't think I'm an addict. But when I get interested in something, as I am in racing, I get very passionate. I think there's a big difference between being addictive and being passionate."