Horse Racing : Do So a Winner for Cooke’s Stable

When Jack Kent Cooke bought the late Max Gluck’s Elmendorf racing and breeding operation for a reported $45 million in 1984, he retained Ron McAnally as his trainer on the West Coast.

With Cooke, McAnally doesn’t have the feeling that he’s working for Howard Hughes, but it’s close. The trainer and the 75-year-old Cooke have seen each other three times since Elmendorf was sold: Once at Santa Anita, twice at horse auctions in Kentucky.

Cooke, former owner of the Lakers, builder of the Forum and owner of the Washington Redskins, has never been a hands-off operator, however, and he keeps tabs on his California racing interests through Jack Robbins, the veterinarian best known for his work with John Henry, two-time horse of the year, whom McAnally trained.

When Do So, a 3-year-old filly bred by Gluck and owned by Cooke, won last Saturday’s San Clemente Handicap here, the wheeler-dealer entrepreneur’s son, John, was in the winner’s circle.

Do So may be the best horse Cooke has raced since he bought Elmendorf. The daughter of Nodouble has a come-from-behind punch similar to her dam, Top Soil. But the way Do So behaves in the gate, she needs recovery powers, and unless McAnally can get her to break better, she’ll always have lots of ground to make up.

In the San Clemente, Do So hopped in the air at the start, which was at least the third time she has broken badly. “She tried to climb through the gate before I sprung the latch,” said Tucker Slender, Del Mar’s starter.

When the Gluck estate held a dispersal sale of the Elmendorf stock, Do So was going to draw much less than Jim Brady, the farm manager, thought she was worth. So Brady bought her for $20,000 for Cooke.

Now on a four-race winning streak on grass, Do So won the first two at Hollywood Park, then went to Canterbury Downs near the Twin Cities to capture the Canterbury Oaks. At Canterbury, where record Minnesota temperatures reached 107 degrees, Do So lost 40 pounds, so McAnally gave her five weeks off before her next start, in the San Clemente.

Speaking of John Henry, Sam Rubin, the man who bought the $6-million gelding for $25,000, is spending part of the season with his wife, Dorothy, at Del Mar.

Rubin says he owns four horses--one in New York, one in Florida, one in Massachusetts and one in California. Needless to say, he needs more than one trainer.

Dogwood Stable, the Aiken (S.C.) outfit that syndicates horses for racing, plans to establish a California division with trainer Eddie Gregson, hoping that the rest of this year won’t be like the first part.

According to Cot Campbell, who manages the Dogwood operation, his group has been forced to retire or destroy seven top horses because of injuries. The horses had won 14 stakes and earned $2.8 million.

Among those destroyed were Southjet, who won the Rothmans International at Woodbine in 1981, and Inlander, the Eclipse Award winner as the champion steeplechaser last year.

The late Bill Veeck once wrote a book called, “30 Tons a Day,” the title referring to the amount of manure Suffolk Downs had to remove when he owned the track.

During the 24-day Saratoga season that started Wednesday, the New York Racing Assn. will pay more than $40,000 for manure removal--at a rate of $1.55 a cubic yard.

Jack Drees, who died last week, was the sportscaster for a few Kentucky Derbies. Most memorable to him, though, was the Derby he called for practice, as it turned out, when Lucky Debonair won in 1965.

There was a fire at Churchill Downs that day, preventing the audio on the national telecast. But Drees called the race, anyhow, in case the audio could be repaired in time.

“The only one who heard that call was the guy standing next to me,” Drees said.

Because Del Mar doesn’t want to do business with Chuck Di Rocco, the telecast disseminator authorized to transmit the track’s signal by Nevada gaming authorities, no telecasts of the races have been seen in Las Vegas this season. The best some of the horse parlors have been able to offer are re-created audio accounts of the races.

Joe Harper, Del Mar’s general manager, says he has a contract to send the races to Nevada with Frank Scott, who was the disseminator the last two years. Harper said that an associate of Di Rocco was ejected from Del Mar for transmitting racing information from the grandstand a few years ago.

There have been reports from Nevada that Di Rocco would share his profits with Scott if Del Mar’s telecasts began, but Harper said that such an arrangement would be unsatisfactory for Del Mar.

The absence of a telecast to Nevada is costing Del Mar, its horsemen and the state of California $7,500 a day. Of that amount, 10% would go to the state, with the balance equally split between Del Mar and the horsemen for their purses.

Horse Racing Notes

If Forty Niner emerges as the dominant 3-year-old colt in the second half of the year, how will Eclipse Awards voters compare his feats to those of the retired Risen Star in the first half? Forty Niner finished ahead of Risen Star in the Kentucky Derby but couldn’t beat him two other times, including in the Preakness, and then didn’t run in Risen Star’s Belmont. No matter what Forty Niner does within the division from here on out, he will probably have to beat older horses--and win the Breeders’ Cup Classic--to dislodge Risen Star. Before Risen Star quit running, Forty Niner had won two of seven starts this year.

Although Ladbroke, the English firm, has agreed to buy Golden Gate Fields, its officials were dismayed by the poor condition of the plant and the backstretch when they toured the Bay Area facility. . . . Probably one of the best racing photos of the year was taken by Steve Stidham, the track photographer at Hollywood Park, who caught Luis Ortega and his mount in a spectacular spill there. The picture shows six feet--the horse’s and the jockey’s--pointing to the sky in a cloud of dust.

Oak Tree’s schedule at Santa Anita includes these major stakes: the Oak Tree Invitational Oct. 9, the Oak Leaf Oct. 10, the Norfolk Oct. 15, the Yellow Ribbon Nov. 6 and the Carleton F. Burke Handicap Nov. 7. The 27-day meeting will run Oct. 5 through Nov. 7. . . . The future for By Land By Sea is indefinite after complications developed during her throat surgery.

Very Subtle, who worked six furlongs in 1:10 recently at Del Mar, may run only once before the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., on Nov. 5. The 4-year-old filly won the Sprint at Hollywood Park last year. . . . Santella Mac, who has finished second in the Eddie Read Handicap two straight years, will remain at Del Mar. A $50,000 supplemental payment would have been required for him to run in the Arlington Million at Woodbine, near Toronto, Aug. 20. He was nominated for the Million, but then subsequent eligibility payments weren’t made.

Java Gold, who has had several physical setbacks since finishing second to Alysheba in last year’s voting for top 3-year-old colt, worked Wednesday morning at Saratoga in New York and may run there later in the month. . . . Temperate Sil, who won the Hollywood Futurity, the Santa Anita Derby and the Swaps, has been retired and will go to stud next year in Japan.