He Will Be Riding One Last Demon

There is an axiom around a race track that if you take eight cheap horses and run them in eight races, you will get eight different winners.

Translation: Inferior horses beat each other with clockwork regularity. The only thing consistent about them is inconsistency.

So, what does the eighth race at Churchill Downs this Saturday have in common with a getaway race any day at Caliente?

Answer: A whole bunch of horses who can’t seem to win two races in a row in any kind of company.

This is the in-and-outers’ Derby. The run for the scallions. The crapshoot Derby. The who’s-turn-is-it-this-week Derby. The after-you-my-dear-Alphonse Derby.

Lots of bad horses have won Kentucky Derbies. I remember an old trainer standing on the press box roof the year Cannonade, a mediocre plodder, won the race in snow-plow time--2:04 on a fast track--and he was almost crying. “If Native Dancer can’t win this race, nobody deserves to,” he would sob to anybody who would listen.

There are 50,000 race horses foaled each year. Sometime right afterward, a whole bunch of over-dressed, over-rich boobs congregate in a showroom some place to start throwing shovelsful of money into the pot for the best-looking ones of the lot--not the fastest, just the handsomest.

David Harum must be crying in his bier some place because only a handful of these animals they buy for millions ever get to a race track, never mind running on one and winning.

The best of them are supposed to get to the Kentucky Derby. Few ever do. By the time their year rolls around, the Derby starting gate is full of colts the auctioneers never got around to asking money for.

Like this year.

You look at this bunch and you wonder where the calliope is. There should be a brass ring. This is not a field, it’s a merry-go-round.

Let’s see. Capote can beat Gulch, who can beat Demons Begone, who can beat, well, any horse in Arkansas.

Alysheba can’t beat anyone except, possibly, some horse who lets him lug in. War, not to be confused with Man o’ or any other Warhorse, can win if one or more other horses get disqualified.

Leo Castelli can’t beat Cryptoclearance, who won the Florida Derby by a head over a horse, No More Flowers, who is 50-1 on the morning line for Saturday and figures to go higher.

You can see where they will be careful not to have any tin cans lying around the post parade this year. This may be the first Kentucky Derby that gets lapped by the ninth race.

Some years ago, fight manager Joe Gould was asked to handicap a World Series between Detroit and Chicago. After a prolonged study of the form, he closed the book with a snap and announced, “I don’t see how either one of ‘em can win it.”

He would be right at home at the 1987 Kentucky Derby. It may be the first 17-horse dead heat in history. The finish line may look like dinner call in a boarding house.

A Derby is supposed to have a big horse, a standout that all the others measure themselves against. In the past, there have been Count Fleet, Citation, Cavalcade, Secretariat, Affirmed, Gallant Fox, the legends of horse history.

This year, it’ll be a horse who won three straight races in Arkansas.

You’ll be able to recognize him Saturday, all right. He’ll be the one with all the bandages on. One more piece of gauze and Demons Begone would be the equine Claude Rains. He may get invisible in the stretch.

Or, he may never make the stretch. Demons Begone is something new in the way of a big horse for Louisville. He’s a winner of the Arkansas Derby (a little “Turkey in the Straw,” professor!) and, although Sunny’s Halo went from an Arkansas Derby win into a Kentucky Derby victory a few years ago, the adventures of Shan Pac, a winner of the 1957 Arkansas Derby, used to be more typical.

Shan Pac was a wonder horse from Hot Springs that year who scattered opposition but came to the Kentucky Derby to face the likes of Iron Liege, Gallant Man, Round Table and Bold Ruler, no less.

The Racing Form was kind. “Shan Pac was overmatched,” it noted.

I’ll say he was. He finished 10 lengths behind the next-to-last horse.

But if you think the horse needs a winning streak at Louisville, consider the rider.

Pat Day may be the best rider ever to ride at Louisville who’s never won a Kentucky Derby. There isn’t a rock on this track at Churchill Downs that he doesn’t know.

Not so many years ago, Pat wasn’t riding Arkansas Derby winners for a living, he was riding Brahma bulls.

And even that was nothing compared to what he was trying to stay aboard in real life--like gin and drugs. There were times Pat Day was trying to ride racing horses when he would have had trouble staying on a parked bus. About the only place he didn’t get arrested for drunk driving was on a race track.

“I drank so much at night--Crown Royal and water--that I never completely sobered up in the daytime. I never used a needle but I took every color of drugs you can name.”

He had to give up bull-riding one day when the bull forgot who was riding whom and ended up roweling Pat Day. He gave up the other bull on Jan. 27, 1984.

Did he go to a rehab center?

“I went to the Lord Jesus,” Pat Day says firmly. “I needed help and I went where you can always get it and it never fails.”

Pat Day has won almost 4,000 races and over $50 million on race tracks but was 15th, 16th and 11th in Kentucky Derbies till rising to fourth in last year’s.

But, that was the old Pat Day. This one is as different as night and day.

“The only thing I have in common with that one is we inhabit the same body,” this Patrick Alan Day says.

This may be the year two outsiders come in, the ex-bull rider and the current Arkansas Derby champion. When this Day breaks, his horse may turn out to be the big horse, after all, and the Racing Form will have to note that with this Arkansas Derby winner it was the rest of the field that was overmatched.