Spend a Buck Is Named Horse of the Year : Choice of Kentucky Derby Winner No Surprise; Proud Truth Second

To the surprise of almost no one, but the dissatisfaction of some, Spend a Buck has been named horse of the year for 1985.

The announcement of the Kentucky Derby winner’s championship was made Thursday in Miami Beach, Fla., where Spend a Buck, the divisional champions and the top human competitors from last year will be honored at the Eclipse Awards dinner tonight.

In a year when there were no dominant horses, Spend a Buck’s selection had been expected since it was announced a month ago that he had unanimously won the 3-year-old colt title.

The 204 Eclipse voters--turf writers, track racing secretaries and Daily Racing Form staff members--chose Spend a Buck as the divisional champion even though Proud Truth had beaten older horses in winning the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic in November and Chief’s Crown had been one of only three horses to win four major stakes during the year.

The three rivals met only once, in the Kentucky Derby, and Spend a Buck won by 5 lengths, the biggest margin in 39 years, and his time of 2:00 1/5 for 1 miles was the third-fastest in race history. Chief’s Crown ran third and Proud Truth fifth.

Spend a Buck polled 74 votes, only a 37% plurality, but the election wasn’t close because he led all three voting groups and needed support from only two to win the title.

Proud Truth finished second in the balloting with 40 votes. Vanlandingham was third with 20 votes, followed by Mom’s Command, 17; Precisionist, 16; Pebbles., 15, and Chief’s Crown, 10. There were scattered votes for several other horses, among them Flatterer, the steeplechase champion.

Spend a Buck, a Kentucky-bred purchased as a yearling by owner Dennis Diaz of Tampa, Fla., for $12,500, ran from March to August, winning five of his seven starts and running second and third in his two other races. In the last race of his career before he was retired to stud, the son of Buckaroo-Belle De Jour broke the 1 1/8-mile track record at Monmouth Park in winning the Monmouth Handicap.

Still, Spend a Buck had his detractors. He earned a record $3.5 million, but some resented that $2 million of that total was a bonus from Garden State Park for winning three of its races along with the Kentucky Derby.

Woody Stephens, the Hall of Fame trainer, didn’t like Spend a Buck because he didn’t run in New York, a no-medication state where the colt couldn’t use furosemide to curb a bleeding problem.

The operators of Pimlico in Baltimore were irked when Diaz passed up their Preakness, the second jewel in the Triple Crown, after Spend a Buck had won the Kentucky Derby. The Preakness date was too close to the running of the Jersey Derby, the race Spend a Buck had to win in order to lock up the $2-million bonus.

Spend a Buck, whose stud career will begin this month at Will Farish’s Lane’s End Farm in Versailles, Ky., was trained by Cam Gambolati, a young conditioner who had never had a stakes winner before.

Angel Cordero rode Spend a Buck in his first four races, including the Kentucky Derby, and Laffit Pincay was aboard in the Jersey Derby and the Monmouth Handicap after Cordero had honored a long-standing commitment to ride another horse, Track Barron, in New York.

After undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery in November of 1984, Spend a Buck started the year slowly, running third in the Bay Shore Stakes at Aqueduct. In his only other non-winning performance he finished second to Skip Trial in the Haskell Handicap at Monmouth in July.

Spend a Buck is only the second 3-year-old in the last seven years to be voted horse of the year. Conquistador Cielo was the other, in 1982.

SPEND A BUCK’S 1985 RECORD

Date Race (Track) Fin. Lngh* Mar. 23 Bay Shore (Aqueduct) 3rd 5 1/2 Apr. 6 Cherry Hill (Garden State) 1st 10 1/2 Apr. 20 Garden State (Garden State) 1st 9 1/2 May 4 Ky. Derby (Churchill Downs) 1st 5 May 27 Jersey Derby (Garden State) 1st Neck July 27 Haskell (Monmouth) 2nd 3 3/4 Aug. 17 Monmouth (Monmouth) 1st Nose

* Lengths ahead of second-place horse or behind winner.

RECAP: 7 starts, 5 wins, 1 second, 1 third, $3,552,704 in purses.