Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Suppose They Both Run the Table
Los Angeles, June 30, 2009--You're supposed to play 'em one at a time, whether it's quoits or horse races, but I can't resist speculating about what those erudite Eclipse Awards voters will do with Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra should they go their separate ways and not show up on the same day on the same track the rest of the year. That likelihood hit the game between the eyes on June 29 when Jerry Moss, the owner of Zenyatta, suggested in an interview with The Blood-Horse that his unbeaten filly, just as she did a year ago, will keep to California tracks as she readies for another California Breeders' Cup. Earlier, Jess Jackson, the principal owner of Rachel Alexandra, said in effect that it would take wild horses to drag his horse to California, where dirt is a dirty word.
As an aside, I never did buy into the canard that a Triple Crown champion is all racing needs to reinvigorate itself, not any more than a Zenyatta-Rachel Alexandra Armageddon would be a panacea for the sport's myriad problems. Whether it's showdowns or slot machines, racing is going to be in the short-term fix business for a long time.
Back to Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra, the matchup made in heaven that has gone to hell. For Zenyatta, Moss and his trainer, John Shirreffs, have penciled in the Clement L. Hirsch Stakes at Del Mar on August 9. I caught myself calling it the Clement L. Hirsch Handicap, but not this year. After 40 runnings under this name or that, the Hirsch will be a non-handicap for the first time. Without the change in conditions, Zenyatta, who carried 129 pounds in winning the Vanity Handicap at Hollywood Park, was looking at carrying at least that much and perhaps 130 pounds. If she hews to the same schedule as last year, the Lady's Secret at Santa Anita followed by the Breeders' Cup race that used to be called the Distaff, the Vanity will have been the last handicap of her career. Her impost will be a measly 123 pounds in the Breeders' Cup--whether she runs within her own division or against males in the Classic.
Jackson and his trainer, Steve Asmussen, are taking more time about revealing Rachel Alexandra's next race. Last week, a few days before his Preakness winner won the Mother Goose at Belmont Park, Jackson reeled off at least five possibilities down the road, including two mixed-gender options, the Haskell at Monmouth Park and the Travers at Saratoga.
We're not talking about mere division titles here, we're talking Horse of the Year. Rachel Alexandra has more wiggle room than Zenyatta in this regard. She has already won a Triple Crown race. beating the Kentucky Derby winner, and her wins over other fillies have been off the charts. Should Jackson's filly beat males a second time, the balloting for the big prize could be a foregone conclusion, assuming the two fillies don't meet. There have been times when Eclipse voters have penalized horses for skipping the Breeders' Cup, but two wins over males would negate that quibble. What is more, I don't sense much backlash against Jackson for eschewing the surfaces California horses must run on.
But there's one other what-if: Suppose Zenyatta wins a Classic devoid of Rachel Alexandra? Voters' quandary sets in, that's what.
I don't think Zenyatta can afford to lose from here on out. Depending on the circumstances, Rachel Alexandra has margin for error. The best thing for racing might be for Zenyatta to somehow get beat at Del Mar. That might take the edge off their theoretical rivalry, but it might also force Moss to leave California and find Rachel Alexandra.
Jackson's position is not unlike the stand he took with Curlin a year ago, when the post-Triple Crown clamor was for a race between the 2007 Horse of the Year and Big Brown, the Derby-Preakness winner. In so many words, Jackson said, "Here's my horse, here's the race, come and get him." Curlin might have even gone to France, for the Arc de Triomphe, but he failed his only grass test at Belmont. He and Big Brown never did land in the same starting gate. Jackson had the reigning champion, and could afford to hold his ground. It paid off with a second national title for Curlin. This time, maybe Jackson figures he has the champion pro tem. The way Rachel Alexandra's been blowing the doors off the opposition, it's really her title to lose.
So far, Jackson has kept his baiting to a minimum. "They'll have to come East, or some neutral track," he said last week. "But I can't criticize another owner for protecting his horse."
Let's say both fillies sweep whatever races they have left, prior to the Breeders' Cup. Would that prompt Jackson, in a change of mind, to bring his filly West? I doubt it. "Belmont Park is a great track," he said recently. "It ranks with Santa Anita," he added, and then he caught himself. ". . . In its former days," he said.
Written by Bill Christine
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
A Lack of Leaders in Lotus Land
Los Angeles, June 23, 2009--Usually the Thoroughbred Times' annual recitation of top industry leaders goes in one memory bank and out the other. My overloaded cranial Rolodex is no longer large enough to retain compilations such as these, which make for a magazine story for a rainy day and are seldom worthy of a second reading. But this time this ranking of the game's high and the mighty struck me as geographically revealing:
There are scarcely any Californians on the list.
The Thoroughbred Times, after polling its editors and writers, goes 20 deep, from Jess Jackson to Joe Santanna, president of the HBPA, and I'm hard-pressed to find more than two entries who can in any way be claimed as from California. On the periphery are Jackson, the celebrated winemaker, and Frank Stronach, skipper of the beleaguered Magna Entertainment combine. Jackson might live in California, but his best horses seldom run here, purportedly because there are no dirt tracks left in the state. Stronach, who's No. 2 on the list, is a bona fide carpetbagger, who has residences all over the world, but none in California. Austrian-born, his North American business interests are centered just outside Toronto. He governs Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields largely by phone, and emissaries. He is as California as a grand duke.
From Sheik Mohammed, in third place, down to Santanna, there is definitely no one with a Malibu tan on the list. The national manager of the Jockeys' Guild, Terry Meyocks, might at one time have been at least California-based, but the guild, riddled by scandal, left its skeletons in a closet in Duarte, hard by Santa Anita, and took a Kentucky cleansing a few years ago.
The Thoroughbred Times also cited the 32 movers and shakers who missed the top 20 but received votes, and for California it was one more comeuppance. California's only representatives on this so-called also-eligible list were Ron Charles of Santa Anita, John Harris of the California Horse Racing Board, Jerry Moss, a racing board member and prominent horse owner, and the veterinarian Susan Stover. So the box score for the entire poll is California 6, other guys 46.
What voice this gives California in national matters is pianissimo. Perhaps California has so many acute problems of its own that it can't tarry over far-flung concerns anymore. Richard Shapiro, when he was chairman of the racing board--Harris' predecessor--was deeply involved in national issues, but he was dropped from the top 20 this time. Shapiro, after resigning from the board, confirmed that he was among the legions that fell prey to the master swindler Bernard Madoff, and more recently, after taking a consulting job within the industry, he has been waiting for the next shoe to drop. Something about an accusation that he allegedly got out of his fancy-schmancy car to vandalize the fancy-schmancy car of an old racing board adversary in a Hollywood Park parking lot.
It would be difficult to ascribe to Harris national leadership standing when he is sometimes odd man out on his own state board. Recently, when Del Mar sought to eliminate Mondays from this season's racing calendar, Harris was the only commissioner who voted against the change.
Since 1997, there has been only one California racing executive--Del Mar's Joe Harper--who's been elected president of the Thoroughbred Racing Associations. While this may be only a figurehead position--most people know that the trade organization's real nuts-and-bolts work is done by an undermanned office staff in Maryland--it seems that the days are no more when Cliff Goodrich, Bob Gunderson, Bob Strub and Jim Stewart regularly took their turns at the head of the TRA.
Second-guessing being one of my religions, I thought long and hard to come up with some California names who belonged on this year's top 20. The voters came away unscathed. I looked at some of the names from out this way who had graced the list before: Bob Lewis, John Mabee, Allen Paulson and Ed Friendly. Sadly, all with the dust. R.D. Hubbard, onetime boss of Hollywood Park, previously made the list, but he has moved on. Wayne Lukas and Bobby Frankel, those rare trainers who sometimes were listed, are neither on the list nor living in California anymore.
But according to the magazine's own criterion, "(not) people of power, but rather individuals in position of influence," I came up with one omission. Mary F. Walrath is not from California, but she belongs. She's from Delaware--Magna Entertainment's bankruptcy judge.
Written by Bill Christine
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Plum for the Panhandle
Los Angeles, June 16, 2009--The long history of Mountaineer Race Track and its predecessor, Waterford Park, does not include an appearance by a Kentucky Derby winner, but when Mountaineer started throwing around slot-machine money, it was only a matter of time. Disdaining the richer Haskell at Monmouth Park, and the Jim Dandy, the traditional Travers prep at Saratoga, the handlers of Mine That Bird will run instead for a $750,000 pot in the northern-most tip of the West Virginia panhandle. The race could turn out to be the easiest spot this side of a walkover, but I kind of like the idea. Chip Woolley's big black cowboy hat won't look out of place, and one of the tracks of my youth will at last get a sprinkling of panache.
Because Mine That Bird is a gelding, he does not have to dance the hidebound dances that would boost a whole horse's stud price tag. Officials at Mountaineer are already licking their chops. Mountaineer has never drawn more than 25,000 for a single race card, but if they play their cards right, their attendance record will fall. Dilettante horseplayers from Pittsburgh, where they tired of watching the Pirates by mid-May, will pack the turf club. Cleveland will be well-represented. But the smart money will come from Youngstown, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia, although a race in which the favorite will go off at a nickel on the dollar leaves little wiggle room for smart money.
That Youngstown crowd used to crack me up. In the 1970s, when Mountaineer was Waterford, the track may have had more female jockeys than any place in the country. Patti Barton won most of her 1,202 races there. Another of the women riders gave the guys from Youngstown a hot horse one night. This wasn't a fixed race, but a horse who had a couple of hidden workouts. The horse won in a gallop, paid boxcars, and it was like New Year's Eve in Youngstown.
"Let's give her a couple of c-notes," a member of the betting cabal said.
"We can do better than that," another said. "We each took home thousands."
"She's been talking about getting a boob job," a third one said. "Come on. Let's pay for the whole damn thing."
And so they did. There are many romantic stories around the race track.
I called Patti Barton the other day, to tell her that a Kentucky Derby winner was going to run at her old track, and we wound up talking about the night she came to California and appeared on the Johnny Carson show. The hook was that she had ridden against one of her daughters (Leah, not Donna) the week before, which was said to have been a first in racing.
Carson, not knowing the path the answer would take, asked Patti if she'd ever gotten into fights with male riders. Watching at home, I knew the Cliff Thompson story was coming.
"We got into a scrape coming off the track," Patti said. In some fashion, Patti said the brawl ended when she grabbed Thompson by the gonads.
Heading for the jockeys' room, half-doubled up, Thompson managed a fairly good parting shot.
"That's the closest you'll ever come to a man," he said.
"From what I felt, I'm not sure I had one," Patti said.
Carson did one of his signature pencil flips.
"Welcome to the hard-hitting world of horse racing, folks," he said.
"Did you know this?" Patti said last week. "They banned that show in Boston."
Really.
"They really didn't ban it," she said. "They bleeped out the best lines. A friend of mine from there called the next day. 'What did you say?' she said."
Waterford Park opened on May 16, 1951. On October 11, 1952, a kid from Pennsylvania, after kicking around bush tracks in West Virginia, Ohio and Florida as an exercise rider, found himself named on a Waterford horse. Three days later at Waterford, he won his first race, and before it was all over Bill Hartack would win 4,271 more.
Arguably, Fabulous Strike is the best horse who ever ran at Waterford/Mountaineer. In three races, at the end of 2006 and early in 2007, the de luxe sprinter won three times, by a combined 26-plus lengths.
Best trainer at Waterford/Mountaineer? The conversation starts and ends with the late Dale Baird. From 1971 through 1995, Baird led North America in wins 11 times, mostly with cheap claimers that he also owned. The most his stable banked any of those years was $700,000. Starting in 1996, Baird won four more titles, all in succession, with an annual purse average of $1.5 million. Those slots in the West Virginia panhandle had spoken.
Written by Bill Christine
