P-Dub,
As a longtime board lurker, intermittent TG purchaser, and an unabashed East Coaster – I was bred, born, raised, and still live, less than ten miles from Saratoga Race Course, and as a baby, I once spent an afternoon on my father\'s knee watching Mickey Mantle hit the last home run he ever hit in the old Yankee Stadium – it is with some hesitation that I get involved in this discussion, but I step out of the shadows tonight to say my piece.
For openers, despite my deep East Coast roots, I long ago conceded defeat in the Easy Goer-Sunday Silence debate. I quite simply believe that by virtue of the superior athleticism that allowed him to run faster around turns, Sunday Silence was the better horse. Not to nitpick, but among the numerous horseplayers I know, my vote for Sunday Silence is met with universal derision, and not once have any of the Goer fans used speed figures to justify their love. I fully realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but to a man, and in a few cases, to a woman, every single person I know who argues in favor of the Phipps horse insist that the track got him beat at Churchill, and that Day got him beat in Baltimore and again in Hallandale. Speed figures never enter their equations.
Speaking of riders, I have long appreciated your ardent defense of Mike Smith. Many summers ago, on a late August day, my best friend and I were leaving Saratoga as the horses loaded into the gate for the last race of the day. We decided to duck down to the fence, down by the finish line, to watch the race; it was a gorgeous, pleasantly warm, sun-splashed afternoon, probably not unlike the afternoon you had yesterday in Arcadia.
As the horses headed into the first turn, some trouble developed. Not far from where we stood, a rider was suddenly ejected from his mount and thrown many feet up in the air. We watched in horror as the rider flipped, flew through the air, and, after what seemed like minutes, landed in the grassy hedge with a loud thud. I turned to my best friend and said – I still remember it – “holy shit, that guy’s dead.”
We just stood there, waiting to see what was going to happen to that rider who’d been pitched into the air. Eventually, they got him into an ambulance and drove him away.
I’ll never forget the sight, and the sound, of that rider getting tossed from his mount and landing with a sickening sound. It shook me to my core and made me question my participation in this game: for awhile that day, I feared that the rider in question had given his life for my entertainment, and I didn’t feel good about that.
That rider, of course, was Mike Smith.
I realize that jockeys make mistakes, errors in judgment that sometimes cost us our wagered money, and I don’t maintain that they are above criticism, but after what I saw that afternoon at Saratoga in August of 1998, I am loathe to complain about their efforts. As far as I am concerned, after what I saw that long-ago afternoon, Mike Smith has a lifetime pass to go as wide as he wants, whenever he wants, but he doesn’t, and he certainly didn’t in yesterday’s Classic. He was one of the lucky ones; he lived to walk again, to ride again. Many others have fallen, or been thrown, and not had his luck. Still, seeing him atop Zenyatta with his arms raised to the heavens after the Classic yesterday put a smile on my face.
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I initially regarded synthetic racing with suspicion, and then ambivalence. There seems something unnatural about it. The plastics are meant to be a kinder, gentler version of dirt courses, but they play nothing like dirt; in general, they seem to negate the kind of advantage Sunday Silence employed so beautifully, namely, the ability to use sustained high speed to win the highest caliber races. And so it all seems confusing, and sometimes ugly; in the initial synthetic edition of the Pacific Classic, if I remember correctly, the winner required something on the order of two minutes and seven seconds to complete the mile and a quarter. I remember scoffing at this with my East Coast buddies, and California racing, a once-feared breeding ground of lightning fast raiders who’d occasionally ship into town to mercilessly plunder our beloved New York stakes, seemed to recede into irrelevancy. Not that any of you out there cared, nor should you have, but we simply stopped paying attention.
But yesterday, several of us gathered ‘round my living room and pooled our money together and we bet with both hands all afternoon. And there was not a complaint to be heard. No bitching about how it was fake racing, no whining about how the odds were stacked against our East Coast dirt horses. It was what it was: it was something we racing fans don’t get nearly enough of, namely, a full day of competitive, interesting, full-field wagering opportunities. Yes, we factored the synthetic angle in, but we knew what we were getting. We knew the New York horses would hate it, we knew the races would play differently than they do here at home, and we adjusted our handicapping accordingly. We didn’t feel like we had no clue as to what was going on; we felt like we were handicapping, and betting, on horse racing. We even used TG to make a score: we had the late pick three and pick four, and while I realize this was not classic TG handicapping, the horse that really made the pay-offs on those bets had number power in what we thought was an absolutely abysmal race for a putative Breeder’s Cup race. To us, it looked like a “chaos race”, and in that case, if you’re playing picks, and using a lot of horses around a couple of singles in other races, you gotta throw in a horse with a number, right? (Note: excuse the redboarding; for the record, we didn’t make a lot of money on the day as the Juvey and Sprint winners wiped out a lot of our action.)
And the unanimous opinion in my living room was this: it was a hell of a lot better, and a hell of a lot more fun, than betting on a Breeder’s Cup card from an Eastern track mired in the middle of a dismal late fall all-day driving rain storm, a la Monmouth 2007. (Not that I bet that one: I was busy that day, dealing with the fallout from a surgical procedure on my wife that went horribly awry.)
The Breeder’s Cup powers-that-be were mocked and derided – and for all I know, they are a bunch of half-wits lucky to have avoided pissing all over their own shoes yesterday afternoon, it beats me – for having their signature event out there on the plastic two years in a row, but all I can say is this: from the comfort of my couch, it was nice to not have to think about the on-track weather. There’s something to be said for conducting a day of racing under sunny skies and moderate temperatures.
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As for Horse of the Year, well, honestly, I don’t care all that much. A tie between the two fillies would be fine with me.
Yeah, for all I care, Noble’s Promise is Horse of the Year; he was the lynchpin to a day of wagering, a few weeks ago, that gave this unexpectedly widowed father of three very young children the option of staying home with them until the middle one starts school next fall. He\'s my new favorite horse, and Willie Martinez is my new favorite jockey, What can I say? With some forethought and some assistance from useful connections within one’s circle of family and friends, it is possible to live very well, thank you, in upstate New York, for not a lot of money.
Perhaps that’s too cynical a view, but so be it. After what I’ve been through, frankly, I’m entitled.
If I had a vote – and of course I don’t, and I never will – up until about six thirty Eastern time yesterday, I would have voted for Rachel without even thinking about it. She won over seven different racetracks. Day One to Day Three Sixty Five, she had the more ambitious campaign. Never has a three year old filly put up this kind of a season. Never.
But I gotta admit, Zenyatta’s performance yesterday got me thinking. Yeah, it was one race. But what a race she ran. Clearly, synth or no, a better field than anything Rachel faced this year, and she won it easily, under trying circumstances. Smith said he still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of her, and I’d tend to believe him. My guess is that the voting is dominated by Kentucky types who wouldn’t vote for Zenyatta no matter what, but regardless, she ran a tremendous race yesterday, one for the ages, and capped off a tremendous day of racing.
Best wishes for an excellent week in Hawaii, and a tip of the cap for an excellent day for the West Coast.
