Seldom Do Horses Possess a Winning Name and Ability

I guess my all-time favorite on a race track was Man o’ War. Name, not horse.

With that handle, he didn’t have to be good. Man o’ War is as felicitous a collection of vowels and consonants as ever graced a winner’s circle. It’s not often a name that good and a horse that good get together.

Horses with great names, like good guys, seem to finish last. Whenever you find a Blue Prince or a Red Shadow on the program, save your $2. He won’t beat a horse.

It drives me up a wall when something called Deputed Testamony or Jaklin Klugman, or Temperate Sil, some really ugly collections of syllables or misspellings that look as if they were cribbed off a wall of graffiti, makes good.

It is the notion of Alex Karras, the footballer-turned-actor, that names make the athlete in any sport. It is his conviction that Dick Butkus by any other name would be a wimp.

Butkus gives him something to live up to. With that moniker, you have to go through life growling and maiming people.

Horses may be the same way. Call one Warra Nymph and he figures no one much cares what he does and he runs accordingly.

Which is why I have always loved horses named Equipoise, Count Fleet, Secretariat. They had something to live up to--and did.

Which brings me to Precisionist.

There’s no horse on the track I like better than Precisionist, a lovely, graceful animal with a style to fit his name.

Even if you didn’t like the name, you’d like the horse. If Precisionist were human, he’d be one you’d say of, “He comes to play.” If he fixed your roof it wouldn’t leak.

Most race horses are as temperamental as tenors. Precisionist is as dependable as a butler. You want 9 furlongs, you get 9 furlongs. You want 6, you get 6. Of impeccable racing. He’s always trying. You have to beat him.

He should be enjoying the sybaritic luxury of life as a sultan with a harem at the moment. After a lustrous career of showing up on time and in shape for work every day, they retired Precisionist to the dilettante life of a King Farouk or Porfirio Rubirosa 2 years ago. Every day was ladies’ day for him. No clock to punch, no plows to pull, no guys to carry, races to win.

Precisionist, God bless him, didn’t care for it. He wanted to get back to the office, feel mud thrown at his face, get kicked in the ribs, whipped in the butt, cursed at, pulled at, made to sweat, hurt and hear people scream at him, “Don’t die now, ya yellow dog!”

Stud was all right for the playboys but it wasn’t Precisionist’s style. Fatherhood was for guys who couldn’t run three-quarters in 1:08 anymore.

Precisionist’s interest in the ladies turned out to be as minimal as a monk’s.

“He let me know he wasn’t interested,” his owner, Fred W. Hooper, said with a grin.

He also let the potential broodmares know. Out of 24, Precisionist got 1 in foal. That is major league disinterest.

Doctors at four separate universities, from UC Davis to Cornell, found nothing physically wrong with him. Maybe Precisionist just thought he didn’t want to bring a kid into the world in times like these.

For owner Hooper, the news was not all bad. He returned the money to his partner in the breeding and returned Precisionist to the track.

One of the troubles with racing today is, most of its stars, the horses with marquee value, retire to stud virtually as teen-agers. The result leaves the game as without stars as a Czechoslovakian art film.

Some people stay young on wheat germ, square dancing, face lifts or trips to Swiss clinics. Fred Hooper does it on horse racing. He may be the youngest 91-year-old you will ever hope to see.

You never hear him say, “Whaddee say?” He doesn’t squint when he reads. He moves without the aid of a cane and his fractions are as good as anything in his stable.

More than 40 years ago, in his first crack at it, Hooper won a Kentucky Derby. He began to wonder how long this easy game had been going on and set out to win 10 more.

That was the last Kentucky Derby Hooper won. He came here in 1949 with the odds-on favorite, Olympia, only to lose to the late charge of Calumet Farms’ Ponder. In 1961, he had the precocious Crozier, who later won such prestigious stakes as the Santa Anita Handicap but who got nosed out by the less-than-fashionably bred Carry Back in that year’s Derby.

Hooper brought Copelan to Kentucky in 1983 only to get him manhandled in the Blue Grass by a piece of ruffian horseflesh named Marfa. Copelan had to bow out of the Derby while he healed.

A Breeders’ Cup program is a 7-race rodeo, horse racing’s version of the playoffs, pitting the year’s best in the various categories of the sport from 2-year-olds on the dirt to aging experts on grass.

Precisionist is the patriarch of this venerable cast of characters. Entered in the sprint, an event he won in 1985, he will take the gate this time as an outside choice at 8-1.

It is possible to hope he won’t be beaten by something called Mawsuff, or Ready Jet Go, or even High Brite or Ruhlmann.

Happily, it won’t be You’re No Bargain who didn’t draw in. Nor did Synastry.

If we can’t have Man o’ Wars anymore, at least we can have horses whose names aren’t bad puns, worse misspellings, double-entendres, or, worse yet, collections of letters that don’t mean anything. Even horses should have their dignity. Particularly ones who are a flop with the ladies. And have to bury themselves in their work.