Weekend Racing at Santa Anita : Great Communicator Isn’t a Sleeper This Year

This time last year, Great Communicator was considered little more than a fluke, a freak and a figment of Thad Ackel’s fertile imagination.

Then the brawling, back-alley gelding went out and won the San Juan Capistrano Handicap, Santa Anita’s most prestigious grass race, and a legend was on the loose.

By the end of 1988, Great Communicator had run out more than $2 million in winnings, taking the Breeders’ Cup Turf race along the way. People were comparing him to John Henry, the patron saint of all overachievers who begin life on the wrong side of the race track.

On Sunday, Great Communicator will try to become the first horse in 21 years to win consecutive runnings of the 1 3/4-mile San Juan.

Ackel, his trainer and part owner, considers the $400,000 event nothing less than the first major step on the road to the Eclipse Award that got away last year, when Great Communicator lost at the ballot box to the East Coast colt, Sunshine Forever. Sunshine Forever was invited to the San Juan and assigned 124 pounds, which would have made him co-high weight with Great Communicator, but his people declined.

“If my horse wins on Sunday, it will be like winning the first primary of a presidential campaign,” Ackel said. “They’ll have to call him the front-runner for the Eclipse Award.”

Ackel, a tall, dark and roughhouse handsome son of a famous New Orleans politician, is careful to lace his optimism with a healthy dose of caution. Great Communicator figures to be in for a tougher San Juan test this year than last, when he outlasted longshot Fiction and the Canadian mare Carotene to win by a neck.

Leading the opposition Sunday will be a pair of fresh 4-year-olds from that bottomless pit of talent, Charlie Whittingham’s barn. Both Nasr el Arab, owned by Sheikh Mohammed al Maktoum of Dubai, and Frankly Perfect, owned by Bruce McNall of the Kings, already have beaten Great Communicator over the Santa Anita grass course. And the 76-year-old Whittingham virtually owns the San Juan, having won six of the last eight runnings and 11 of the last 20.

But Ackel, 33, is not daunted. He even found reason to be pleased with Great Communicator’s second-place finish to Frankly Perfect in the San Luis Rey Stakes March 25, even though the margin was a conclusive length.

“Look, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed after that race, but I certainly wasn’t disenchanted,” Ackel said.

“Truthfully, I had backed off on his training a little leading up to that race because of the way he came out of the San Luis Obispo.”

Great Communicator won that race, his first of the year, by two lengths Feb. 20.

“He looked and acted like he was at the end of a long year, rather than at the beginning,” Ackel said. “So I had to put some weight on him. And to do that, I had to lighten his training a touch, because he can’t eat any more than he does.

“Since the San Luis Rey, he’s come to the point where he looks better than any time I can remember, and acts that way, too.”

Great Communicator, a notoriously blase work horse, usually can be clocked on a sundial in his morning workouts. Last Tuesday, however, he ran six furlongs in 1:15 3/5 at Hollywood Park. For the 6-year-old son of Key to the Kingdom, the move was nothing less than brilliant.

“You know, I believe that’s the fastest he’s ever worked six furlongs,” Ackel said. “The clockers were cheering him on.”

The sleeper in the San Juan field may be Pranke, who was quietly impressive in winning the 1 1/2-mile San Marino Handicap at Santa Anita on March 11. Pranke--it means forepaw in German--was a star in his native Argentina, where he won the equivalent of the Kentucky Derby. Eddie Gregson trains him now.

“He was the best of his generation,” said his owner and breeder, Hector Sanchez, through interpreter Sylvia Alonso. “He deserved a chance to prove himself against the best North American runners.”

Post positions are usually meaningless in a 14-furlong race, with the field starting off at a slow gallop. For what it’s worth, this is how the eight San Juan starters will enter the gate Sunday:

Pranke, with Chris McCarron aboard; Waki River, Gary Stevens; Academic, Robbie Davis; Pleasant Variety, Laffit Pincay; Nasr el Arab, Pat Valenzuela; Great Communicator, Ray Sibille; Flattering News, Bill Shoemaker; and Frankly Perfect, Eddie Delahoussaye.

Horse Racing Notes

Bill Shoemaker will have a good shot at stakes win No. 1,000 today when he rides Imperial Star in the San Simeon Handicap at 6 1/2 furlongs on the turf. The English mare will be facing seven males, including defending San Simeon champion Caballo del Oro and Prince Khalid Abdullah’s Mazilier. Rendoo, Happy in Space, Captain Holly, Brave Capade and Pinecutter complete the field. . . . April 19 marked the first anniversary of the death of George Ackel, Thad Ackel’s father and the man for whom their horse was named. Ackel notes that his father was a great communicator long before the tag was applied to Ronald Reagan.

Looks as if the racing world will have to wait until the Arlington Million on Sept. 3 for a rematch between Great Communicator and Sunshine Forever. “That’s fine with me,” Ackel said. “Let him win all the money in the East and I’ll do my best to do the same out here.”