He Knows How to Get the Job Done

Anybody can train Man o’ War.

Anybody can win with the 1927 Yankees.

Anyone can play four aces. Anyone can win with Koufax’s curve, Tilden’s serve, Ali’s jab or Nicklaus’ tee shots.

It’s no trick to get the girl when you look like Robert Redford.

It’s what you do when life deals you a busted eight-high straight that separates the craftsmen from the charity cases. It’s what you do when the count is 0-and-2 and your bat’s broken.

Anybody can get rich in Texas. It’s getting rich in Bulgaria that stamps a man as worthy of a bow. I could win with Sam Snead’s swing. Making do with the one I got requires a lot more ingenuity.

Which makes Mel Stute one of the five best horse trainers you will see on any track in this country this year.

You should see the stock Mel has had to put up with in his career. You wouldn’t get on some of those nags to get out of a forest fire. You wouldn’t know whether to ride ‘em or milk ‘em. Bridle path rejects.

One thing they all had in common: consistency. They all quit at the eighth pole.

What happens to you, though, when you get bad horses to condition all your life is, you get to recognize a good one when he comes into view.

But not always right away. In 1975, Mel had a dish-legged colt out of a mare, Countess Mary, who had broken down at Santa Anita and by a sire, Bold Combatant, who was so undistinguished he was sold to Japan.

Ballplayers who can’t hit the good curve anymore go to Japan, and so do studs who can’t produce anything that can win anywhere but fairgrounds bullrings.

Stute put the foal of these race-track rejects into a sale with instructions to unload if the bid reached $4,000. It never did.

So, he took the horse out of the auction and telephoned the movie producer Howard Koch instead. “Either lend me $6,000 or buy this horse,” he proposed.

Koch hesitated. “I’ll get back to you,” he said and then telephoned actor Walter Matthau to see if he wanted half the horse. Walter, who could read a Racing Form, passed.

Koch then telephoned actor Telly Savalas. Telly, who didn’t know what a gelding was, thought it would be a gas.

And that’s how Mel Stute got his most famous horse, Telly’s Pop, to train. Telly’s Pop became a winter book favorite for the 1976 Kentucky Derby, no less.

He won the Del Mar Futurity, the California Derby, and actually looked like the second coming of Secretariat before he became unsound and had to drop out of the classics picture.

“He became Hollywood’s favorite horse,” recalled Stute, laughing. “We broke all records for people in the winner’s circle photo. I think we had 200 there at Bay Meadows, not including me and the jockey.”

As if things weren’t tough enough, Mel had gotten into racing only as a brother to the established trainer Warren Stute, with whom he is still confused.

“I rubbed horses for him, walked hots,” Mel said of his brother. “When I went out on my own, I learned everything there was to learn about bad horses. I didn’t have a one that didn’t have something wrong with him. I specialized in cheap horses.”

Even his very first winner, Egg Nog, a $800 claimer he won with at Longacres in Seattle, was a rogue who had been ruled off the tracks in California for bolting.

The horses Stute got, you couldn’t just tie a yellow ribbon on them and put them in the paddock parade.

First of all, you had to cajole stable space for them. Then, you had to find a spot on the card where they wouldn’t get run over by the next race.

The major tracks didn’t often write races whose conditions fitted Stute’s stable. They just didn’t write races for horses who are nonwinners--ever--and odds-on to remain that way, or for maiden 8-year-olds.

But, like a guy learning to win with a hanging curve or a loop in his backswing, Mel Stute learned to condition a horse the way only a guy who is trying to make the rent and the income finish in a dead heat can.

“I would go 8 to 10 years between good horses,” he said. “Where a Wayne Lukas would spend millions at a sale for one or two horses, I would spend, say, $104,000 for 12.”

Most horsemen insist that the only way to tell a good horse is by clock or by breeding, but Stute would haunt the claim box in search of the horse who didn’t know he came, so to speak, from the wrong side of the track. Snobbery has limited appeal to horses.

“Horses, like humans, exceed themselves,” Stute advises.

The good horses come with greater frequency now. Back in the old days, there would be a lot of flag drops between the eras of Great Circle, his first good horse, on whom Bill Shoemaker won his first $100,000 race in 1950; First Balcony, who won the 1961 Californian, and Telly’s Pop. In between, Stute had horses who had to be tubbed in ice, fired in the ankles or wrapped like King Tut just to be able to make the post parade without a cane.

But, this week, Melvin Frederick Stute gets to know what it must have felt like for Casey Stengel to go into a World Series with Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Allie Reynolds, or for Knute Rockne to look down the bench and see George Gipp or the Four Horsemen suited up and ready.

Stute is going into today’s $1 million Hollywood Park Futurity with aces full for a change, a hand where he can say, “I’ll play these,” instead of, “Check to the raise and I’ll take four cards.”

Stute has two of the best 2-year-olds this year that he’s ever had, at least since Telly’s Pop, and maybe the best anyone has.

Snow Chief is a hard runner who has beaten his company consistently all year, and Darby Fair is the son of a horse who finished fourth in the 1978 Kentucky Derby and third in the Belmont. But old habits are hard to break, and Mel Stute ran him at the Pomona Fairgrounds this year, where he won and paid $46.

He had to send Snow Chief to Mexico to get blistered for bucked shins, but Stute is an old hand at that and is confident enough about both his horses to pony up $100,000 in supplemental fees just to enlist them in today’s Futurity, and he hopes to send both of them back to next year’s Kentucky Derby.

In any case, it’ll be nice to be in the position for a change of the manager who can say to his cleanup hitter, “Go on up and hit a home run,” and not, “Let’s see. Who’ve I got who can hit this pitcher?” Or who can put an all-star lineup on the field in the Super Bowl and say, “Try not to run up the score.”

He just hopes he doesn’t get soft.