Horse Racing / Bill Christine : A Horse Named Al Davis Adds to Saratoga Stir

Al Davis caused a commotion at Saratoga last Sunday.

This wasn’t the Raiders’ Al Davis. It was a 4-year-old gelding with the same name, a horse named after the football executive.

Al Davis, who earlier in the season had won a race at Saratoga by 10 lengths, was entered Sunday for a $45,000 claiming price. Frank (Pancho) Martin, who trains for Viola Sommer, put in a claim before the race for Al Davis. But the horse broke down during the running and had to be destroyed the next day.

When a horse is entered in a claiming race, any purse money won goes to the owner that started him, but afterward he belongs to the new owner, no matter what happens in the race.

Although Al Davis was listed in both the track program and in the Daily Racing Form as a colt, Martin learned after the race that the horse was a gelding. Martin brought this to the attention of the stewards, who ruled that the claim was void and that Al Davis was still the property of his original owner, Ted Sabarese.

Sabarese, a 46-year-old man whose New Jersey computer-manufacturing company is reportedly a $200-million business, said he went to the Saratoga paymaster’s office a half-hour after the race to collect his money and was told that Martin’s claim had been disallowed. In other words, the broken-down Al Davis still belonged to Sabarese.

This development has not left Sabarese a happy man. A lawsuit is in the works, and, in the meantime, the Al Davis affair has given Sabarese the opportunity to unload on the New York Racing Assn., which operates Saratoga, Belmont Park and Aqueduct.

“We did what we were supposed to do, but it was the NYRA that didn’t list the horse properly,” Sabarese said. “. . . The previous time this horse ran (Aug. 6), he was a gelding, and the horse identifier at the track was notified of the change prior to that race. The horse was examined by a track veterinarian before each of the two races he ran at Saratoga, and the vet should have noticed that he was a gelding and not a colt.”

Sabarese has not been enamored of the NYRA for some time. He sent some of his horses to trainer Wayne Lukas at Santa Anita last winter because of disenchantment with New York.

But to take potshots at the NYRA this year, you have to stand in line. The Al Davis incident is just another in a series of unusual events, including:

--The refusal this week of about 100 temporary pari-mutuel clerks to report to work at Saratoga because of a pay dispute.

--The erroneous disqualification of a winning horse by Saratoga stewards, resulting in a loss estimated at $1 million to bettors.

--A reversal by the NYRA’s testing laboratory of a finding that had disqualified Lashkari, the fourth-place finisher in last November’s $2-million Breeders’ Cup Turf Stakes at Aqueduct, for having illegal medication in his system. --A Saratoga backstretch raid, not unlike the one at Del Mar last summer, that led to the arrest of 13 illegal aliens by United States immigration officers.

--An $87-million negligence suit filed by Don MacBeth. The jockey, seriously injured in a spill at Aqueduct, claims that he was not told by a track veterinarian before the race that his horse was unfit to run.

And now the Al Davis incident. Sabarese doesn’t sound as if he will let it go away.

Racing Notes Chris McCarron will ride Maysoon in the Budweiser-Arlington Million at Arlington Park in suburban Chicago a week from Sunday, replacing Walter Swinburn, who would have been unable to make the 114 pounds assigned the 3-year-old filly. . . . Trainer Wayne Lukas’ appeal of Sovereign Don’s penalization from first to fifth in the Will Rogers Handicap at Hollywood Park May 24 has been disallowed by the California Horse Racing Board. Mazaad was given the victory when the stewards moved Sovereign Don back for interference near the finish line. . . . Vernon Castle probably won’t run in the Del Mar Handicap Sept. 1. His handlers believe that the stake is too close to his win in the Del Mar Derby last Sunday.