On Gloomy Day, Alysheba Is Bright Enough : Alysheba Proves Again, He Gets Beat but Won’t Stay Beat

It was like seven Dempsey-Tunney fights the same night, a whole card of Ali-Fraziers. It was like seeing Notre Dame and USC play nine quarters.

Horse racing got jealous of the Super Bowls, Final Fours, Wimbledons, U.S. Opens.

To be on the “in,” nowadays, to be fashionable, a sporting event needs a Roman numeral. Like Popes, Czars, Rocky movies, Caesar’s campaigns and rich kids, you need a whole bunch of X’s and V’s to make yourself important.

Breeders’ Cup V got off to an impressive start when a commoner named Gulch won CCCL thousand dollars by II lengths.

It is a day when racing throws money out of train windows at people who really don’t need it, $10 million for 7 races for horses owned by Greek shipping magnates, steel heirs, real estate tycoons, and ex-owners of pro football teams.

As an event, it is a little like being locked in a candy factory overnight, waking up in a harem. Winding up with too many blind dates.

Horse racing is not ordinarily a confrontational sport. The last thing a horse trainer wants to face is someone as good as he is. They make football coaches look like runaway optimists, fight managers look daring. They know horses too well to trust them with the rent money.

The trouble with a Breeders’ Cup (for them) is, you have to fight the contenders. You can’t shop around for a spot. You can’t go around fighting your chauffeur, playing cards with your aunt, golf with a guy who owes you money. Horse trainers are not famous for going around looking for competition. They’d rather find a game with a guy who can’t add. For one thing, you’re never sure when a horse is going to pout, loaf, jump shadows, bite or spit the bit.

There are no breathers on the schedule Breeders’ Cup day. Everybody on the field is an All-American.

On the afternoon of the Breeders’ Cup, an acquaintance spotted the trainer, Jack Van Berg, hurrying through the clubhouse.

Now, Jack Van Berg is about as quintessential a horse trainer as you can get. Hollywood would cast Jack Van Berg as a horse trainer. Bluff, direct, Jack is a man who wears a more or less perpetual frown on his face. He’s not a guy you would sell the Brooklyn Bridge to or try to bluff out of a pot with a pair of treys. There’s not much around a race track Jack Van Berg hasn’t seen and discounted, a hard-luck story he hasn’t heard. Jack Van Berg has won more races than any trainer who ever saddled. He has probably lost more, too. Horses don’t fool him.

The acquaintance approached him. Breeders’ Cup day had dawned raw and threatening. Clouds as black as 10 tons of coal rolled across the Kentucky landscape. A gelid wind rattled the windows in the ramshackle old track at Churchill Downs. Rain blew in gusts. It was not your basic track-fast sun-on-the-backstretch racing day. The hardboots on the backstretch knowingly nudged each other. Van Berg’s horse couldn’t stand up on a muddy track, much less run on it, they winked. The racing surface was a cross between plate glass and window putty. Throw Jack’s horse out, was the informed tip.

The acquaintance braced Van Berg. Was it true? Would his horse look like a drunk on a dance floor? Van Berg was disbelieving. “He can handle this track. He can handle any track, he snapped. “Don’t worry. He’ll win this thing. Easily.”

A few hours later, he did.

You have to like Alysheba, Jack Van Berg’s horse. For one very big reason: He gets up. You have to like fighters who get up.

In May 1987, Alysheba won America’s race, the Kentucky Derby. He did it going to one knee and taking a count in the stretch. “Most horses at the eighth pole are looking for some place to lie down,” Van Berg reminds you. “Alysheba had an excuse.” He got up like Dempsey. Swinging. He won.

Alysheba is America’s horse. He lost the Belmont last year after winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. He came back to beat his conqueror.

He’s no wonder horse. He can’t talk. Save cowboys from drowning. He gets beat. He doesn’t stay beat.

He and Ferdinand, the Kentucky Derby winner the year before Alysheba, hooked up in one of the great stretch duels in racing history at the Breeders’ Cup in ’87. Alysheba got beat by a nose.

This year, in that same race, the $3 million Breeders’ Cup Classic, Ferdinand wasn’t on hand but the lists were full of runners whose trainers were betting Alysheba had lost his form. Two owners put up $360,000 apiece to tackle Van Berg’s horse. That’s a lot of money to call for cards, for one roll of the dice. But Alysheba looked that beatable.

He shuffled one of them back to seventh, 360 grand poorer. Alysheba ran across what trainer Wayne Lukas called the “peanut butter surface” of Churchill Downs to win as he pleased. His margin was half a length, but Alysheba never runs up a score. He just lets you know you’re beat . He doesn’t exactly fall on the ball but neither does he grandstand. “He doesn’t look like he’s winning easily,” his rider, Chris McCarron insists, “but he is. He wins by the most decisive half-a-lengths in the game.”

Besides the West Coast supplemented horse (Cutlass Reality, whose owners paid the 360 grand), New England owners paid the same amount to send out the area’s most popular athlete this side of Doug Flutie. Waquoit at least got in the photo and in the money (third) and got back all but $36,000 of the $360,000. Van Berg could have told them to fold their hands and save their money. But, Alysheba must have looked to them like a sucker for the right.

He wasn’t. He’s the horse-of-the-year. He beat the supplemented entrants but he also beat Forty Niner, a runner whose connections were so confident, they took one of the world’s greatest jockeys off their horse and put a young woman on. “I don’t bet a girl jockey if she’s on Man o’ War,” disgustedly growled a veteran race-track type as Claiborne Farm ousted Laffit Pincay Jr. in favor of Julie Krone.

The Breeders’ Cup was an artistic if not a meteorological success. It produced the champion of the year in Alysheba and it produced one of the great horse races of any year. This year’s Kentucky Derby victor, Winning Colors, running the most stout-hearted race any front runner ran on the mucilage surface all day, lost by a heartbreaking nostril (not even a nose) to another plucky filly, Personal Ensign. It was a finish right out of Disney.

The Breeders’ Cup may some day get as many Roman numerals as the Vatican. Horse racing has found a way to make its sport as competitive as Dempsey-Firpo. Lakers-Celtics. It’s a welcome change from a sport which had come more to resemble the Christians and the lions.