NOW, THEY’RE . . .Devaluing the Buck : Is the ‘Single Crown’ Good Enough to Win Horse-of-the-Year Award?

I’ve never really liked Spend a Buck. He ducked the Travers and the Belmont and he runs on furosemide. For Spend a Buck, the party’s over. He didn’t cross the Hudson (River), and the racing gets awfully tough over there (in New York). --WOODY STEPHENS, trainer Spend a Buck, the winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby, has been retired to stud, and Cam Gambolati, the colt’s trainer, is back at Calder Race Course near Miami, running a 15-horse public stable.

None of the 15 looks like another Kentucky Derby winner, and Gambolati, who will turn 36 Sunday, has enough spare time these days that he’s beginning to organize a scrapbook of Spend a Buck’s 1985 accomplishments.

One clipping that won’t be included in Gambolati’s collection is the recent Daily Racing Form story from Louisiana Downs in which Stephens belittled Spend a Buck.

Gambolati hasn’t been so angry since just minutes after the Derby when a boisterous fan got onto the track at Churchill Downs and whacked Spend a Buck on the backside as he was being led into the winner’s circle.

“For saying that, Woody Stephens is a piece of (bleep),” Gambolati said. “I’ve never said anything about his horses, and now he’s saying things about my horse that he wouldn’t say to my face. Spend a Buck beat his horses (Creme Fraiche and Stephan’s Odyssey) all year long, and he’s got no right to knock my horse.”

Actually, Stephens is not an isolated detractor of Spend a Buck, who could be yet another recent Derby winner that doesn’t win the 3-year-old championship. Gato Del Sol won the Derby in 1982, but the votes for the divisional title--and horse of the year--went to the Stephens-trained Conquistador Cielo. In ‘83, Derby winner Sunny’s Halo was outvoted by Slew o’ Gold for the 3-year-old title.

Stephens won the Derby and the 3-year-old title with Swale last year and believes that he has a shot at another championship this year with Creme Fraiche.

Unable to finish ahead of Spend a Buck in their only two meetings, including a neck defeat in the Jersey Derby, Creme Fraiche has been a horse of summer, winning the Belmont Stakes, the American Derby and the Super Derby in the last four months. Creme Fraiche may start only one more time this year in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park today.

The horse who may beat out both Spend a Buck and Creme Fraiche for divisional honors is Chief’s Crown, who also has horse-of-the-year aspirations after winning the Travers Stakes at Saratoga and the Marlboro Cup at Belmont against older horses.

Chief’s Crown will not run today in the Jockey Club Gold Cup, probably because the 1 1/2 miles are beyond the colt’s capabilities, and will make his last appearance of the year in the 1-mile Breeders’ Cup Classic at Aqueduct on Nov. 2.

If Chief’s Crown doesn’t win again, the Eclipse Awards voters--turf writers, track racing secretaries and Daily Racing Form personnel--will be puzzled by his credentials. Despite what he did early in the year, winning the Flamingo and the Blue Grass Stakes, and what he has done lately, Chief’s Crown was still unable to win a Triple Crown race, after going off as the favorite in the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont.

“Whatever happens, happens,” Gambolati said. “Since it’s something I’ve got no control over, there’s no use worrying about it. But we did win the Derby, and isn’t that supposed to be the most important race? If it isn’t, maybe they should hold it in December instead of May.”

In New York, where many of the Eclipse voters live, it has become fashionable to derogatorily refer to Spend a Buck as the Lasix champion. Lasix is the brand name for the furosemide medication that Spend a Buck was given before winning the Kentucky Derby and the Monmouth Handicap.

A bleeder, Spend a Buck could be legally treated with the diuretic in Kentucky and New Jersey, where he ran to all five of his victories, but Lasix isn’t permitted for racing in New York, a major reason why the colt didn’t run there after his Derby victory.

Spend a Buck’s career ended prematurely last month when he developed a swollen ankle while preparing to run in the Pennsylvania Derby at Philadelphia Park, a track in another Lasix state. Although the pattern indicated otherwise, Gambolati said that the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic would still have been a possibility for Spend a Buck had he stayed sound.

“The bleeding problem wasn’t the major thing on my mind as far as going to New York for the Breeders’ Cup,” Gambolati said. “But putting up the $360,000 was. The horse wasn’t made eligible for the race, and that’s what it would have cost to get him in. I’m not so sure risking that much would have been such a good idea, because you never get the best of it running against older horses.”

Forgetting the medication issue, which as a problem of racing’s crystallizes into problems for trainers, it seems incongruous that Gambolati needs to defend Spend a Buck’s record, which includes:

--A time of 2:00 1/5 in the 1-mile Derby, the third fastest in race history, behind Secretariat’s 1:59 2/5 and Northern Dancer’s 2:00.

--A winning Derby margin of 5 lengths, biggest since Assault in 1946.

--A time of 1:45 4/5 in the Garden State Stakes, fastest ever at 1 1/8 miles around two turns.

--A time of 1:46 4/5 for the Monmouth Handicap, which broke the track record.

--Ten wins, three seconds and two thirds in 15 starts. Of 69 horses who have earned more than $1 million, Spend a Buck is the only one to finish in the money in all of his starts.

--Earnings of $4.2 million, second to John Henry’s $6.5 million.

There were similarities to both of Spend a Buck’s losses this year. Third in the Bay Shore Stakes at Aqueduct March 23, he was giving nine pounds to both of the horses that finished ahead of him, Pancho Villa and El Basco, and making his first start in four months after arthroscopic knee surgery. Second to Skip Trial in the Haskell Handicap at Monmouth July 27, Spend a Buck spotted the winner 11 pounds and was returning from a two-month layoff.

“This horse will be remembered for two things--drawing people to the race track and shaking up the Establishment,” Gambolati said.

Spend a Buck’s owner, Dennis Diaz, who bought the horse at a bankruptcy sale for $12,500, skipped the last two Triple Crown races to concentrate on a $2-million bonus from Garden State Park that came with winning the Jersey Derby. Reacting to this snub, the heads of the three Triple Crown tracks--Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont--have formed an alliance that will make their races more lucrative.

“People were attracted to this horse,” Gambolati said. “We drew almost 32,000 for the Haskell, more than horses like Chief’s Crown and Stephan’s Odyssey could draw. On Marlboro day at Belmont, with one of the best supporting cards I’ve ever seen, they only drew 30,000.”

Diaz sold a substantial interest in Spend a Buck to breeder William S. Farish after the Jersey Derby and the son of Buckaroo arrived at Farish’s Lane’s End Farm in Versailles, Ky., last week.

Gambolati, a head trainer for less than two years who never had saddled a stakes winner before Spend a Buck, has been given a lifetime breeding right, which means he’s entitled to breed one mare a year to the stallion for the rest of Spend a Buck’s stud career. Gambolati said that he recently turned down a $75,000 offer for his 1986 mating.

“The fun kind of went out of it after the breeding deal” Gambolati said. “Before, we took chances. Afterward, everything got technical and calculated. There were financial considerations regarding everything we did, and veterinarians all over the place. The day after Spend a Buck bled in the Haskell, there were three insurance companies at my barn to check on the horse.

“They already knew he was a bleeder, but they were still there.”

The closest thing Gambolati has to a Spend a Buck is an unraced 2-year-old named Eastern Bellboy, and he’s close only because of bloodlines.

“They’ve got the same mother (Belle De Jour),” Gambolati said. “But you can tell, this one isn’t gonna be another Buck.”