A Horse for the Aged or a Horse for the Ages?

As good a race horse as I have ever seen was Dr. Fager. He set a world record for a flat mile of 1:32 1/5 at Arlington Park in 1968, carrying 134 pounds. He won the Withers in 1:33 4/5 in 1967, carrying 126 pounds. He won the seven-eighths Vosburgh in 1968 in 1:20 1/5--the world record is 1:19 1/5--carrying 139 pounds.

As the backstretch lingo has it, he could run a hole in the wind carrying a statue of General Sherman.

But his greatest accomplishment might have been winning the horse-of-the-year designation in 1968. He is the only sprinter ever to do so.

It’s a peculiarity of our sporting breed that, if it’s humans, we revere the 100-meter dash over all other distances. It’s the glamour race of the Olympics. The “world’s fastest human” is a Grade 1 celebrity. The whole world knows who he is.

But nobody wants to hear who won the 5,000 or the 10,000. That’s not a race, it’s a voyage. The only person who watches the whole race is the winner. Sometimes, he’s the only one who remembers who won.

A race between horses is different. There, if it isn’t a mile and a quarter or more, it’s no-count.

Although Dr. Fager is the only pure sprinter ever to be horse of the year, Bold Ruler was a sprinter by instinct when he won the award in 1957. But Bold Ruler did more than sprint. He entered the Triple Crown races. He finished fourth in the Derby, won the Preakness and finished third in the Belmont. A gritty performance for a horse that was supposed to be looking for a cab or an oxygen bottle after a mile.

Dr. Fager never got to run in the Kentucky Derby, which I always thought was a mistake. The crowd in the race his year might never have caught the good doctor, even if he had to run the last two furlongs on his knees. It was won by a nonentity named Proud Clarion, who never won again.

Which brings me to the horse in this year’s Breeders’ Cup who might be the fastest thing on four legs this side of an ocelot.

Groovy is a backstretch blur, a horse so quick-starting he looks as if they gave him a head start, so strong he wins sprints under 132 pounds.

He got his chance in the Kentucky Derby, all right. Somewhere along the line, his handlers must have thought they had Emil Zatopek on their hands and not Carl Lewis.

Part of the problem is, he doesn’t look like a sprinter. If he were human, you’d take him for a Bulgarian wrestler. His nickname would be Hulk.

Groovy’s run for the roses--if you could call it that--was memorable because he didn’t beat a horse. Actually, Groovy probably thought he won the race. That’s because he was leading at his distance--seven furlongs. He had a clear advantage going into the last 3/8ths, when he assumed the race was over and spit the bit.

Groovy had good game owners, though, and they put him in the Preakness, in case the Derby was a fluke.

It was no fluke. Groovy had found his groove. He worked a 1-minute 20-second day, then put away the apron or the hard hat.

They had the world’s fastest horse and they were, in effect, trying to get him to pull a wagon.

The trouble, really, was an esoteric race-trackers’ formula for measuring prowess called “dosage index.” Einstein would understand it. The rest of us would have a better chance at the Theory of Relativity. But it’s a horsemen’s theory of what weight to attach to breeding as a measure of a horse’s chances to win at a classic distance. To show you how unfoolproof it is, Groovy came out as a horse who would be at his best in the last three furlongs.

Groovy knew better. Horse trainers believe a horse can be rated (i.e., half-strangled to slow him down in the beginning of the race while saving his real run for the wire). Groovy obviously despised this tactic.

He wanted to get to the nose bag. He started running like Ben Johnson or Charlie Paddock the minute they dropped the flag and he didn’t stop till he ran out of breath. His dosage index should have been that of a rabbit. He ran as if he were getting out of a forest fire.

His handlers finally got the message. They let Groovy run his catch-me-if-you-can races.

There was an unconsciously funny line in the Breeders’ Cup documentary this year when the announcer, describing last year’s sprint, notices in mid-race that Groovy is “stalking” the leaders. Now, stalking is a word you never apply to Groovy. Groovy is the stalkee. If he ain’t got the lead, somebody done made their first--and last--mistake.

Off the lead, he’s a horse for the aged. On the lead, he’s a horse for the ages. A year ago, the Houston oilman, Art Preston, and his brothers, bought the horse for $4 million.

“I just liked the idea of having the fastest horse in the world,” Preston explains.

Groovy had broken Belmont’s six-furlong record in 1:07 4/5--the world record for the distance is only 1:07 1/5. He had broken every existing Saratoga record--and a few clocks--with a five-furlong workout in :56 4/5. He won six consecutive races this year without defeat.

Someone thinks Groovy is the horse of the year--the racing secretary at Belmont who assigned him 144 pounds for the Fall Highweight Handicap. The last horse to carry that much weight was General Custer’s.

It’s a high compliment. Preston only hopes the horse-of-the-year voters are as impressed as the track handicapper was. If he wins the Breeders’ Cup sprint Saturday in anything near or under the race record time, Preston thinks he should be the horse of the decade:

“I mean, what do they want him to do--talk?”