Breeders’ Cup Ends Up as a Lady’s Day

It was horse racing’s version of an All-Star game. A fight card with all titleholders.

If it was baseball, these would all be the Pete Roses, Henry Aarons, Reggie Jacksons, Roberto Clementes of their business. Not quite Babe Ruths. Not quite Secretariats, perhaps. But quality. Every race was a title fight, a Wimbledon final, the seventh game of a World Series.

Horses like these are supposed to win at any time, anywhere, in rain, mud, on ice, grass or over broken glass.

Cheap horses, you run eight times against each other, you get eight different winners.

But these were not cheap horses. These were the class of the tracks on two continents, and any horseplayer can tell you that “class” in horse racing means consistency.

They write these races for the best horses in the world. No “non-winners of two races since the last solar eclipse allowed 2 pounds,” no “non-winners of $10,000 twice since June 1.” No plating horses, no Caliente claimers. The Aristocracy.

Well, if these guys were human, they’d be popping out to shortstop, taking called third strikes, getting tackled in their own end zone, getting their punts blocked, losing love-love at the net.

You get a class card, you don’t get a $73.80 payoff. They got one Saturday. Boxcars are not indicative of royalty on the track. Boxcar payoffs are for tracks with holes in the roof--and in the shoes of the bettors. A Breeder’s Cup race winner is supposed to pay off 6-5. Or even odds-on. They’re all so good, the mutuel money is to be spread evenly.

When every race is for a million dollars and one is for $2 million and one is for $3 million, you figure the ribbon clerks have all been run out.

The ribbon clerks had a field day at Santa Anita Saturday. The help took over the castle. The spear-carriers drowned out the tenors. The best friends got the girl. The butlers ate the caviar.

What happened? How come the Joe Louises, the New York Yankees, Notre Dame--the chalk--didn’t win?

Well, it may be that all that is left in racing is ribbon clerks. Consider there was not a single Triple Crown winner--from any year--in the card that is supposed to be racing’s best. Part of it may be attributed to the normal attrition of the sport. And part of it may be attributed to the abnormal attrition, the rush to early stud.

The Breeders’ Cup is supposed to determine the Horse of the Year. And it probably did. A female. Lady’s Secret. Females are not rushed to stud. Females produce one foal a year. Sires can produce 40. Broodmares can wait.

Secretariat is probably the best American-bred horse of his time, maybe of all time. He was rushed to stud after he won the Triple Crown in 1973.

The only runner of any consequence he’s produced is Lady’s Secret. Known as the Iron Lady, she has won 5 stakes in 7 races in 12 weeks. She won by from 8 to 7 to 6 lengths. Saturday, she won, unwhipped by rider Pat Day, in an event called the Breeders’ Cup Distaff. She won by 2 1/2. “We’re not interested in beating the point spread, just in winning,” trainer Wayne Lukas said after the race.

She won more than a race. She won probably two Eclipse Awards, filly or mare of the year, for certain, and Horse of the Year, doubtless.

The falls of the rich and famous began early on Breeders’ Cup day. The opening million was for next year’s Kentucky Derby candidates (though no 2-year-old winner has yet gone on to win a Triple Crown event either at Kentucky or at Baltimore or New York--Derby, Preakness or Belmont).

Winners of the prestigious Eastern races such as the Hopeful and the Champagne, as well as the runner-up in the Champagne, were beaten by a local product, Capote, who had raced only three times in his life. They were run further down the track by a horse, Qualify, who won the Del Mar Futurity, and by another horse out of the less fashionable tracks in Kentucky and Ohio, Alysheba.

The Breeders’ Cup sprint was supposed to be a wire-to-wire romp in track record time for the lordly Groovy, racing’s Carl Lewis. At 2-5 odds, he finished fourth.

The day went on like that. A $24 payoff for one obscure winner, Smile; a $19.60 payoff for another, Manila. And the $73.80 for an Irish interloper, Last Tycoon. These fields would have been right at home in Juarez. Or Omaha.

Which is why a lot of people placed their last hopes in a dainty chestnut horse entered in the richest race on the card, the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Precisionist is a throwback to the days when horses went to race tracks, not breeding barns--when they, as it were, made war, not love.

Fred W. Hooper is an owner in an old gallant mold. The first horse he ever bought won the Kentucky Derby. Fred Hooper has been trying to win it again ever since (41 years) with no luck.

He came close one year. In 1961, his Crozier ran second (to Carry Back). “The boy went to the front with him too soon,” Hooper recalls, “at the 5/8 pole. That was Braulio Baeza, and I had just brought him over from Panama. That’s a tough race on a horse--and a man.”

Crozier won a Santa Anita Handicap and $671,733. In 1982, he produced Precisionist.

A stylish runner, Precisionist was cast as a sprinter who would need wheels or a cab to get more than a mile, and Hooper decided not to ship him to Kentucky in his 3-year-old year.

It is a decision he has come to regret. Precisionist has won 17 races at distances from six furlongs to a mile and a quarter, and $2,749,710.

He won the Breeders’ Cup at a flat mile last year. And he was the favorite to win the Classic at a mile and a quarter this year.

He didn’t. He finished third.

But the point is not that he lost but that he competed. He was there. By all racing theory, Precisionist should have long since joined the long line of star-name racers who have gone into planned parenthood, into the real big bucks of the business, the mega-million syndication.

Hooper was under some pressure to put him there. A horse with Precisionist’s credentials does not belong on a race track, he belongs in a boudoir in accordance with the prevailing economics of the horse business. The sum of $20 million was proffered.

Why did Fred Hooper keep him in the irons? “Well, he didn’t have a pimple on him,” Hooper says. “He was perfectly sound, he didn’t have a thing wrong with him. And he likes to race. And so do I. Besides, there are too many horses retired in this business. It’s nice to get all that money but there’s no fun in it. For the public or for the owner.”

Adds Fred Hooper: “It’s a financial sacrifice for me to keep racing him, but it would be a psychological sacrifice for me to stop. Where’s the satisfaction in that?”

For Fred Hooper, who built half the state highways in the southeast, it would probably be as unsatisfying as going out and looking at 400 miles of macadam.

Which is why it’s too bad he had to settle for $324,000 and third place in the Classic Saturday instead of $1,350,000 for first.

Racing should be as economically rewarding as siring. A Breeders’ Cup should have two dozen Precisionists in it. If race horses don’t run, horse racing won’t either.