Horse Racing : Jamie Baker Captures (Bitter) Flavor of the Track in New Play
Jamie Baker drank his first mint julep on Kentucky Derby day at Churchill Downs 14 years ago, when he was 12.
“One thing about the Derby back then, they’d serve anybody,” Baker said. “But it wasn’t much of a drink.”
Growing up in Louisville, Baker forgot about mint juleps, but he has retained an interest in horse racing, and these days the Pacific Theater Ensemble is doing his long one-act play, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” in Venice.
Just as Mark Harris’ “Bang the Drum Slowly” wasn’t really about baseball, but a novel and movie about an extraordinary relationship between men who just happened to play baseball, “Rockville” isn’t a play about racing. It’s a well-acted story about ne’er-do-wells, an idealist and piteous women.
Their lives are surrounded by racing, but they probably would be in a morass no matter what they did. The play is set in a bar near Churchill Downs, several hours after the 1944 Kentucky Derby.
One of the characters is named Ed Whitman, a boozing jockey who fixed a race. The real Ed Whitman was Baker’s grandfather, a jockey who was the exercise rider for Brokers Tip, who in 1933 won the wildest Derby ever run.
That was the race in which Don Meade, aboard Brokers Tip, and Herb Fisher, riding Head Play, grabbed each other in the run to the wire.
“The image of men running around in circles and hitting each other was a strong parallel to other events in my family,” Baker writes in the play’s program. “ ‘Anything to win’ was the motto. This play is dedicated to my family in the hopes that a lesson has been learned.”
Baker says that “Rockville” is the first in a trilogy of plays about racing. “Rockville” will be presented tonight, Friday and Saturday.
Baker left Louisville in 1977, after seeing several Derbies and parking cars for a few years in his grandmother’s front yard near Churchill Downs.
“The Bold Forbes Derby (1976) is the one I remember the most,” Baker said.
“Not because of the horse that won, but because a few of us were able to sit on the outside rail and watch it. There was a hole in the fence, and we just crawled through.”
Gary Stevens won five races Wednesday at Santa Anita, including a 6 1/2-length victory on Winning Colors, the only filly that trainer Wayne Lukas has nominated for this year’s Triple Crown races.
Stevens started his big day with a win in the fourth race, then rode the winners of the final four races on the nine-race card. He finished sixth and seventh with two other mounts.
Undefeated Winning Colors won the one-mile La Centinela Stakes in a time of 1:36 3/5 for her third win. The daughter of Caro, who was a $575,000 yearling purchase by Gene Klein, paid $3.40.
Sunday’s $250,000 El Camino Real Derby at Bay Meadows could be dominated by 3-year-olds from Southern California, with Purdue King expected to be the favorite.
Other horses training locally and expected to run include Ruhlmann, Stalwars, Seeker’s Journey and Blade of the Ball.
Purdue King had a spectacular workout Wednesday morning over a Santa Anita track dulled by recent rain, running five furlongs in :58 4/5.
Bedouin, a 6-year-old gelding who ran 15th in the 1984 Kentucky Derby and then played a role in two record events at Santa Anita, has been retired and will join several other veteran geldings at the farm supported by the California Equine Retirement Foundation in Temecula.
Bedouin, whose grayish coat made him stand out even though he frequently ran in the shadows during last races of the day at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita, provided Laffit Pincay with his seventh winner of the day at Santa Anita last March 14.
In 1986, Bedouin was again a last-race winner, making Craig Phillips the only winner of a Pick Six payoff of $1.9 million.
Pincay became the first jockey to win seven races in a day at Santa Anita and Phillips’ payoff broke a pari-mutuel record.
Bedouin shuffled from trainer to trainer in the claiming ranks and wound up winning 14 races in 67 starts for purses of more than $300,000.
Patti Barton, who retired in 1984, has won more races--1,202--than any woman jockey, but two riders are likely to pass her soon.
Patty Cooksey, riding at Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., has 1,194 wins and Julie Krone, currently at Aqueduct, has a total of 1,170. Cooksey was scheduled to ride six races Wednesday night, but her first mount broke down in the stretch and sent her sprawling. She missed her final five mounts because of a sore elbow, but is expected to resume riding tonight.
Horse Racing Notes
Very Subtle and Timely Assertion will resume their rivalry Saturday at Santa Anita in the $100,000 El Encino Stakes, over 1 1/16 miles. There is a chance that Sunday’s stake, the $150,000 San Pasqual Handicap at 1 1/16 miles, might be split into two divisions. . . . Chris McCarron didn’t ride for the second straight day at Santa Anita because of the flu, and Pat Valenzuela was also sidelined Wednesday.
. . . In a change of plans, Eastern regular Jacinto Vasquez has come back to Santa Anita to ride after a couple of weeks in Florida. . . . The Clover Racing Stable, which won the Del Mar Oaks with Lizzy Hare and has in Political Ambition a candidate for the Charles H. Strub Stakes at Santa Anita Feb. 7, has bought a 50% interest in No Points, a 4-year-old Miswaki colt owned by Blanche and Bob Levy, who raced Bet Twice. No Points, second in a recent stake at Hialeah after winning four straight, is a grass runner who will be sent to trainer John Sadler at Santa Anita. . . . Tasso, winner of the 1985 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and that year’s champion 2-year-old colt, has been retired to stud at Lane’s End Farm near Versailles, Ky. . . . Of the 36 Eclipse Awards winners in the last four years, 29 ran in the Breeders’ Cup and 20 were winners. The non-Breeders’ Cup participants who still won Eclipse Awards were John Henry, Swale, Spend a Buck, Mom’s Command, Snow Chief, Tiffany Lass and Forty Niner.