Horse Racing / Bill Christine : Phone Trick Shows Courage to Match Speed

It is widely known that Phone Trick is fast, but the 4-year-old colt showed last Sunday in the True North Handicap at Belmont Park that he has loads of courage as well.

When the gates opened for the True North, Phone Trick broke quickly from the far outside in the five-horse field. It was a move that the unbeaten horse used to outdistance the opposition in most of his eight straight victories.

In the True North, however, there was another crack sprinter, Smile, who tried to run with Phone Trick. Going into the stretch, Phone Trick was only half a length ahead of his speedy rival.

The pair ran the first half-mile in :44 3/5, on a day when Belmont’s track was listed as fast but had little bounce to it. Smile, paying the penalty for trying to maintain that pace, had nothing left for the run to the wire and finished ahead of only one horse.

Phone Trick still hadn’t won the race, however, because he had one other horse to beat. Love That Mac, who was in third place behind Phone Trick and Smile in the early going, tried to close Phone Trick’s lead.

“I think my horse got a little tired, too, from running with Smile early,” said Dick Mandella, Phone Trick’s trainer. “But when Love That Mac got close, my horse just dug down and held him off. And our jockey (Jorge Velasquez) didn’t even hit our horse after the eighth pole. To me, that was what was important about the race, our horse being tested early and then having enough left to hold off Love That Mac.”

Phone Trick got his ninth straight win by half a length, and he was carrying 10 pounds more than Love That Mac, 8 more than Smile.

Phone Trick, an $85,000 purchase at auction who has earned more than $360,000 for Mandella and his two partners, Howell Wynne of Dallas and Larry De Angelis of Chicago, will shoot for win No. 10 in the seven-furlong Tom Fool Stakes at Belmont July 20.

That’s a race run under allowance conditions, which means that Phone Trick won’t be at the mercy of the racing secretary and shouldn’t have to run with much more weight than the opposition. If there is any opposition. The last time Phone Trick ran in California, winning the San Carlos at Santa Anita by 4 1/2 lengths, he had already scared away most of the trainers on the West Coast, and now he has quickly established his supremacy in New York as well.

After the Tom Fool, Mandella is undecided on Phone Trick’s schedule, but he wants the colt to be at his peak on Nov. 1 at Santa Anita for the $1-million Breeders’ Cup Sprint Stakes.

There was a report from New York that Phone Trick would be retired after the Breeders’ Cup, but Mandella said that neither he nor the other owners have ever contemplated that.

“Our idea all along has been to run him as a 5-year-old, to try to see if he could handle a route of ground,” Mandella said. “It’d be foolish to try to stretch him out now, not with a $1-million sprint stake in front of us. I might mess him up later, anyway, trying to get him to go longer, but I’m not going to do that this year.”

Although Phone Trick’s nine-race streak is a rarity, he is not close to the record. Citation holds the modern record of 16 straight. He won his last 15 starts in 1948 and, after missing all of 1949 with an ankle injury, won his first start in 1950.

Phone Trick is not even close to setting a record for most wins at the start of a career. Colin, who raced in 1908-09, retired undefeated, with 15 straight victories, all but one in stakes competition.

In winning Sunday, however, Phone Trick matched the 1976-77 start of Triple Crown champion Seattle Slew, whose Belmont Stakes win was his ninth straight, a streak that ended when he ran fourth in the Swaps at Hollywood Park.

Phone Trick’s next race, the Tom Fool, is named after a horse who also knew something about winning streaks. When Tom Fool was retired at the end of 1953, he was on an 11-race tear, and he carried 130 pounds or more in four of the wins.

Tiffany Lass, a 3-year-old filly who has never lost, hasn’t run since winning the Kentucky Oaks at Churchill Downs, and trainer Laz Barrera says it will be about five weeks before she’s back.

Tiffany Lass, whose win in Kentucky was her seventh straight, suffered a hairline fracture in her left foreleg.

When? Barrera says it might have happened in March, before the daughter of Bold Forbes won the Fair Grounds Oaks in New Orleans, the Fantasy at Oaklawn Park and the Kentucky Oaks.

“When the veterinarian looked at the X-rays, he said the crack looked like it had been there for a long time,” Barrera said. “I didn’t know, and as well as she was running, there was no reason to check her. I wasn’t even running her on medication--she was one of only two fillies in the Kentucky Oaks to run without it.”

Another top horse on hold is Turkoman, a major stakes winner this year who hasn’t run since his third-place finish in the Metropolitan Handicap at Belmont May 26.

“Three days after that race, his white blood count went sky-high,” trainer Gary Jones said. “He’s only been to the track once since then. We had him checked again about 10 days ago, and the count was still up. We’ll check him again in another few days before we can even consider going ahead with him.”

Horse Racing Notes

Jockey Angel Cordero, who hopes to resume riding next month, is a recent grandfather, his 20-year-old daughter having given birth to a daughter. Cordero, 43, is the father of a 5-month-old daughter with his wife-to-be, trainer Marjorie Clayton, who is 26. . . . Delicate Vine, a 2-year-old filly, won so convincingly in her first start at Hollywood Park last week that trainer Bobby Frankel thinks she might be able to run against colts. . . . Snow Chief’s co-owner, Ben Rochelle, says his material hasn’t changed since his vaudeville days years ago. “But now everybody’s laughing at those same jokes that weren’t funny then,” Rochelle said. “Shows you what a good horse will do for you.” . . . Canterbury Downs is off base, complaining that Hollywood Park took their drawing card, Snow Chief, away from them for this Sunday’s St. Paul Derby. The outcry was so widespread that a Twin Cities writer spent an hour on the phone, telling co-owner Carl Grinstead that he’d made a mistake by agreeing to run in the Silver Screen Handicap July 5 at Hollywood instead. All Hollywood Park executive Marje Everett did, trying to find some pizazz for a flat season, was practice free enterprise by increasing the purse and keeping the box-office California-bred at home. If a mistake was made, it was trainer Mel Stute’s meeting the Twin Cities’ media, unaware that Grinstead had changed his mind about running at Canterbury. . . . The final figures for Fairplex Park’s first harness season at Pomona were 2,810 in average attendance and $363,524 in handle. Ron Pierce won the driving title over Joe Anderson, 52 wins to 51. Anderson trained 47 of his winners, easily winning that title.