Winner’s Circle Is the Place to Be for Storybook Finish

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough and stands about the woodland ride wearing white for Eastertide. That is A. E. Housman, using his spare language to create the sweet melancholy of youth. My friend John Sadler plucked Woodland Ride from that blossom-strewn poem for the name of a 3-year-old horse owned by him and his son, who is also named John Sadler.

Last week, John Sr. called and asked if I would like to go with him and his wife, Elsie, to see Woodland Ride run for the first time. I said I would be ready as soon as he could get up my cranky driveway.

Woodland Ride had run many times in training, but this was his first time around the Santa Anita track as a grown-up. The younger Sadler is a respected horse trainer and he had decided that the youngster was ready. Woodland Ride is a small horse, fine-boned as an antelope and the color of a rosewood table with countless hours of polishing.

I’m not sure of his color but he is in the brown palette, bay or chestnut, roan or sorrel. Those words sound as if they had fallen out of a Housman verse--”bay or chestnut, roan or sorrel, growing in an autumn glade,” it might go. Any time you can get glade in a line, you have wiggled your way into the late 19th-Century vocabulary of poetry.

John Sadler and his son bought the horse together. The younger Sadler looks like his father and when they walked across the paddock together, they were mirror reflections, same smile, same voice.

The jockey who was going to ride Woodland Ride in the sixth race was Gary Stevens, a physical therapy classmate of mine when I was learning to use my brand-new titanium knee. Gary Stevens was there to strengthen his knee, which had been badly crushed in a race-track accident at Santa Anita. I never saw anyone work as hard as he did during those agony sessions three years ago. He was our celebrity, and was the most self-effacing of all of us who moaned or grumbled, screamed or whined. (I was the whiner.)

The Sadlers took me to the box where I met Marianne Millard, one of a pair of successful horse trainers and breeders who have a horse farm called Here ‘Tis in Hemet below the San Jacinto Mountains. Her partner is Bea Rous and they both taught school in Torrance. Bea was also a principal. Her father used to have a string of racehorses in the East and when she and Marianne Millard found they shared an interest in horses, they decided to give up teaching and go into the horse training and breeding business. They now have 100 horses belonging to them and others.

They have 18 brood mares. One of theirs is a mare called Melaire that they bought in a claiming race. She was due to foal on April 1 and the day we were at Santa Anita, Marianne said she was still relaxing in the pasture, looking up at the snow-covered San Jacintos, a mare who had nothing on her mind but dinner and a comfortable night’s sleep. Her human friends were twangy as bow strings waiting for the foal.

Marianne says she goes into the barn with each mare when the water breaks and the time comes. She makes sure the foal is properly placed. They are born feet first, with their legs gathered together and their heads on their forelegs. Sometimes, Marianne has to turn the small creature around so it can get out into the air quickly.

Woodland Ride? He came in second in his very first race. Those who knew said that he had a very good reach, that he was long-coupled for a little horse. And he hugged the rail all the way, which everyone said was a good attribute. Well, of course.

In the seventh race, young John Sadler had another horse run second, Don’s Irish Melody, with Laffit Pincay Jr. up.

And for a storybook finish, a Millard-Rous horse named Mark Chip waltzed home and everyone trooped down to the winner’s circle. John Sadler Jr. had trained Mark Chip and the jockey was Gary Stevens.

It was a beautiful afternoon with eight mountain ranges lined up in the San Gabriels, each one a shade of gray-blue. The sky was dark and low enough to make the day dramatic, and young Woodland Ride showed his excellent stuff, as did young John Sadler.

The elder John Sadler said before the race that seeing Woodland Ride run was like watching one of your kids in a school play. Such sweet, sharp agony. John himself had a brief theatrical career in the fourth grade when he appeared as a peach tree and, unfortunately, spoke to an adjoining tree. The teacher suggested that perhaps another branch of the arts might suit him better. Who knows? She might have truncated (no pun intended) the greatest tree career in the theater.