Gate Dancer Just Needs to Go Straight

It is always exciting when a great sports celebrity is in our midst, one who has done something nobody else ever did in his sport’s history.

Consequently, a lot of eyes will be on the horse in post Position 2 in the eighth race at Santa Anita today to see a genuine legend of the sport of kings compete.

This is a track which has seen Top Row, Equipoise, Twenty Grand, Seabiscuit, Swaps, Time Supply, Red Rain,Azucar, Citation, Noor, Hill Prince, Round Table. But none of them did what this 2-horse in the funny looking hood did in his time.

He is the only horse ever to have been disqualified for a foul in the 110-year history of the Kentucky Derby.

Think of it. Some 1,200 horses have started in the Kentucky Derby. There have been rogues in there, biters, kickers, shadow-jumpers, psychos, runaways, fourfooted Mafiosi. None of them got their numbers taken down.

Oh, they took first place away from Dancer’s Image who won the race in 1968. But that wasn’t the same thing at all. First of all, it took the courts of Kentucky to do it, and it took four years. This guy’s number came down right now. No lawyers, bailiffs, judges, writs of certiorari. He didn’t have to lose it in a bottle in a lab. He lost it on the track. They caught him red-hoofed. He’s the Godfather of this family.

Gate Dancer is a historic animal. He is to race tracks what Jesse James was to railroads, Willie Sutton to banks. He’s an outlaw, a renegade.

He’s like a lot of criminals. No telling how far he could have gone if he went straight. But, he’s got this one quirk. He’s anti-social. If he could talk, he’d be hanging around a poolhall, whirling a chain, wearing Cuban heels or selling postcards to sailors. Looking for trouble. He can’t help himself. He thinks a horse race is a dock war.

When he gets into a stretch, he tries to trash the field, to mug the horses nearest him. He should go into psychotherapy. Or the gas chamber. He treats a horse race the way Dick Butkus used to treat the line of scrimmage.

You will recall the recent Breeder’s Cup series at Hollywood Park. Racing was attempting to put its best foot forward, to stage its Super Bowl. They had their top race, the Classic, a $3-million event for 3-year-olds and up. Gate Dancer was eligible for it. Unfortunately.

He turned the finish line into a bar-room brawl. By the time he got through knocking heads, the million dollars first money was won by a jumped-up allowance horse, Wild Again, and the horse-of-the-year in there, Slew o’ Gold, was nursing a king-sized headache. Gate Dancer was demoted to third.

If all Gate Dancer could do was beat people up and turn races into riots, he could be dismissed as the quadruped Lyle Alzado, but the facts of the matter are, he may also be as good a race horse as there is in the country. Any country.

Consider that he was a fast-charging fourth in the Kentucky Derby before they took his number down. Consider that he started in 20th post position in that race. They not only threw him out of that race after it was over, they tried to throw him out before it started.

Consider that, the following week, he won the Preakness and broke the race record by 2/5ths of a second. Even then, he was trying to lug in. If he hadn’t been two lengths clear of the field, he might have banged someone else into the infield.

Then he went to Omaha and won the Gold Cup there by five lengths, then on to the Super Derby in Louisiana where he broke the track record by 1 2/5ths seconds.

Part of the mystique of Gate Dancer is, he doesn’t just come to the races in tail braids and ribbons, he looks as if he’s on his way to a masked ball. His trainer, Jack Van Berg, finally made up his mind that his horse’s pugnaciousness derived from the fact that his hearing was too acute. He might have been over-responding to the catcalls from the railbirds--”Ya gonna die again inna stretch, ya dog?”--because, for some reason, Gate Dancer always began his antisocial behavior when he hit the wall of noise in the stretch. Like a good fighter, he saved his best punches for the 15th round.

The trainer devised a stocking-cap contraption of cloth and foam-rubber to fit over the horse’s eyes and ears and make him look either like the class dunce or a guy on his way to a Klan meeting. When he’s coming at horses, he looks like a ski-mask bandit leaving a robbed bank.

Like his horse, Jack Van Berg tends to be underrated. A second-generation trainer, who has won more races--more than 4,400--than any trainer who ever lived, Jack was never mentioned in the same breath with Sunny Jim and Plain Ben because he trains so many horses in so many places that he has an 800 phone number. He got a reputation as a mere claiming horse trainer, which is kind of funny since claiming horses are harder to train than ones who become statues. Anyone can train a Man o’ War.

Like Van Berg, Gate Dancer has been in more airports than a DC-10. Jack and Gate Dancer raced in California--Northern and Southern--Arkansas, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Nebraska and Louisiana last year.

If he were human, they’d have his picture on the post office wall. Trainer Van Berg’s job is to convince Gate Dancer that he’s not really the Masked Marvel and that the race isn’t actually a tag-team match, or two out of three falls. He’s got to convince him that he’s not Dempsey, but Secretariat.

Up to now, Gate Dancer’s racing style gives new meaning to the phrase, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Van Berg hopes to convince his horse that you can’t win a race on a TKO, or even on points, and to impress on his pugilistic equine that he’s never lost a race--or won a fight.