Fittingly, Jacobson Is Partial to Horse Named Call the Witness

One of Buddy Jacobson’s favorite horses was named Call the Witness.

Jacobson, serving a murder sentence in the Attica Correctional Facility, appreciates the association, after the fact, of that horse’s name. There were 79 witnesses called at Jacobson’s 12-week trial in 1980.

“Call the Witness beat Kelso once, at Atlantic City,” Jacobson said.

But Jacobson’s favorite Call the Witness race was at Hialeah. The horse was owned by William Frankel, who had a reputation for betting huge amounts when he thought his horses were going to win.

“You can see the odds board from the paddock at Hialeah, and we couldn’t believe the price on our horse,” Jacobson said. “Frankel got a lot of money down with bookies all over the country.”

Call the Witness won and, because most of Frankel’s bets were off-track, Jacobson remembers the horse paying $127.

“I don’t know how much Frankel made, but it was plenty,” Jacobson said. “There were stories of $6 million on down. But he took care of me real good.”

In 1963, Jacobson claimed a 7-year-old gelding named Audience for $10,000.

“I didn’t know it, but he was a bleeder,” Jacobson said. “In those days, they didn’t have anything to treat bleeding. If a horse was a bleeder, you could buy him for a pack of cigarettes.”

Audience won 15 races the year Jacobson claimed him.

“I got a hold of something that stopped a horse from bleeding,” Jacobson said. “It was a drug that doctors gave to women when they’d hemorrhage while trying to have a baby.”

Jacobson’s sweetest victory--and his biggest--was Bupers’ victory in the Belmont Futurity in 1963.

Bupers had been bred by Ogden Phipps, one of the cornerstones of the hoity-toity Jockey Club. Jacobson bought Bupers privately for $16,500 a few days after he could have claimed him for $11,500.

“If I had claimed him, his nomination to the Futurity wouldn’t have counted,” Jacobson said. “But by buying him outright, I kept him eligible.”

According to Jacobson, Phipps withheld that Bupers had suffered a serious back injury.

“In those days, if an injury didn’t show, the thing you’d do was tell a man you were selling the horse to,” Jacobson said. “But Phipps didn’t say anything. The back problem made the horse sulky and ornery. He’d refuse to pass horses, and when he did make the lead, he’d try to pull himself up.

“He could pull himself up on a dime, and that’s what he did when he made the lead in the stretch of the Futurity. The jockey (Avelino Gomez) broke his right stirrup. It was all he could do to maintain his purchase on the horse. He was half on and half off, and up on the horse’s neck.

“But he made it. And Phipps stormed out of the place.”

That angry departure was noted in a New York newspaper the next day. The headline writer had been as clever as Avelino Gomez. Atop the story it read: “Ogden Flips.”