Whittingham Has That Magic Touch

If you were a millionaire many times over, would you get up every morning at 3:30 to go hang out with a bunch of characters who wouldn’t talk to you, play cards with you, eat with you or do anything willingly you’d want them to do?

If you could be in a condo with the scent of bougainvillea, hibiscus and azalea wafting through the window, would you want to spend your time in a tacky aroma of old hay, manure, sweat and horsehair?

Charlie Whittingham would rather be there than on the beach of the French Riviera. Dior, Balmain never made a perfume he thinks can compare with eau de shed row at dawn. If Charlie goes to heaven and they don’t have a fall and winter meeting and a good stakes program, he ain’t staying. If you ask Charlie who was the greatest American ever born, he’ll probably say Man o’ War. Lincoln finishes somewhere behind Count Fleet.

Charlie is a horse trainer, one of the best, maybe even the best. Horse trainers are the last American originals, the last stand of the frontier in this society. They belong to another time like the cowboys, riverboat captains, Indian scouts and horsetraders. Part David Harum and part Nick the Greek, they are the indomitables of our civilization, stoical in defeat, unemotional in victory. “I got beat a head,” they will shrug of a photo finish that just cost them a quarter of a million dollars. They have pulse rates of 50 and a blood pressure to match. They’d have to, around a race track where the difference between caviar and Spam is usually a nod of the head.

They’re a philosophical, suspicious lot. They know they’re in a high-stakes game where you watch the dealer at all times, hold the cards up near your eyes. The race track is no place for an innocent. That’s why they have cameras every hundred yards and trained judges with binoculars where there aren’t cameras.

Charlie is as familiar a sight around a race track as a paddock. He can usually be found in a stable--or a winners’ circle. He’s won so many thousands of races, he’s lost count.

You can’t miss Charlie. He’s got these bright blue eyes and they don’t miss much of anything on a race track. Charlie’s in his 70s but his eyes are in their 20s, and he can snap a clock on a rival filly with accuracy before the sun comes up, or spot a riding flaw in a jockey half a mile away. “Charlie can see everything he’s not supposed to see,” a rival trainer once complained. “He’ll come up to you say innocently, ‘That mare of yours a little lame?’ ”

Another trainer puts it: “Charlie has no hair and no illusions. He lost them both at Caliente.”

Charlie is as low-profile as a spy. He wears this hat which is just short of being cowboy but not quite street hat. “Charlie wears a five-gallon hat,” the stablehands grin.

His training is as low-key as he is. Horses just run for Charlie Whittingham. Thoroughbred race horses, I don’t know whether you know it or not, are the most contrary of God’s creatures. The last thing they want to do is run a race. They will do anything to avoid it--jump shadows, spit the bit, bite the rider, bite the other horse, run away, refuse the gate, prop. They are just easier to train than hungry tigers.

No one understands them any better than Charlie Whittingham. “He’s part horse,” Jimmy Kilroe used to say.

Charlie could be. He started training them down on the border at Tijuana, where nobody ever mixed the stock up with Count Fleet and keeping a horse sound was an art not a profession. He went East under Horatio Luro, Senor Win, and there wasn’t much about a race horse Charlie didn’t know when he came to California after the war, which he’d spent in the Marine Corps (“Oh, a few of those islands in the South Pacific,” Charlie will tell you, if pressed. A few islands held by the Japanese Imperial Marines at the time.)

If there was a gap in Charlie Whittingham’s career on a race track, it was a Kentucky Derby. To horsemen, this may be just the eighth on Saturday at Churchill Downs. To the public it’s the heavyweight title, the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, Indianapolis, all rolled into one. If you don’t win it, everything’s Bridgeport.

Charlie didn’t win it because he could never see going over the mountain with a horse that had a poor-to-no chance. He went back with Porterhouse once, a better-than-even-money shot till he got sore. Charlie took two of Liz Whitney’s horses back once but that was because Liz wanted to, not Charlie. They ran no place (Gone Fishin’ and Divine Comedy), and wild horses couldn’t have beguiled Charlie across the Rockies thereafter--unless he thought one of them could win.

Which should have alerted the racing world and the hardboots of Kentucky last year when Charlie went back there with a big growthy colt called Ferdinand.

On the face of it, Ferdinand didn’t look like the second coming of Secretariat. He seemed to be very good at finishing third, which he got a lot of experience at, notably in the Hollywood Futurity and Santa Anita Derby.

But, those who knew Charlie Whittingham knew he didn’t come back to Kentucky to fill the field. If Ferdinand didn’t have a chance, he would have been in a barn at Hollywood, standing in tubs of water.

When Charlie told the press that Ferdinand “has some ability,” that was like some other trainer telling them he was a new Citation. Their next question should have been, “Where’re the windows?”

The horse got away at 17-1, the second-worst overlay in 20 years at the Derby. For one thing, the punters wanted Charlie to take Bill Shoemaker, who they thought was too old, off the horse.

Charlie doesn’t do things like that. Charlie doesn’t insult legends. In Charlie’s mind, Shoe was the greatest rider he had ever seen but, more important, he was a friend.

When Whittingham and Shoemaker--and Ferdinand--won the Derby, it was a script for Disneyland. Heart-warming entertainment for the whole family. A win for loyalty, friendship, apple pie, the flag and senior citizenry. Up to then, the oldest jockey to win a Derby had been 42 (Angel Cordero). Shoe was 54.

The same combination is going to try to win the $500,000 Hollywood Gold Cup at Hollywood Park today. Charlie has won seven of these. So has Shoemaker.

Ferdinand has only won once since the Kentucky Derby. Is he going to turn out to be the One-Play O’Brien of horsedom? “I think,” says Charlie, “he’s going to be ready to run some Sunday.”

English translation: Hock the house.