THE KENTUCKY DERBY : Chalk Up a Victory for Outcasts

A horse they thought so little of they did everything but leave him on a park bench with a note on him won the Kentucky Derby Saturday and may be the greatest thing to come down a homestretch in this decade and maybe in several.

If he was a cat they might have drowned him at birth. He was knock-kneed, he wobbled when he walked like a teen-ager in high-heels. He was so ugly he was almost 2 years old before they were sure he wasn’t going to be a camel.

Twice, they tried to auction him off. But the horse-buying public was too smart for that.

Nobody wanted Sunday Silence till Charlie Whittingham got a look at him.

Charlie Whittingham has been around race horses since the days of Dan Patch. He knows they don’t have to look like something out of a Roy Rogers movie. You judge a horse with a clock, not a mirror. Man o’ War might have had a lousy profile.

Charlie liked Sunday Silence so much, he bought half of him. The horse the tuxedoed auctioneers could not get a nibble on looked to Charlie like a bigger bargain than a hot diamond.

The horse who won $574,200 Saturday and $980,000 in his life wouldn’t bring $17,000 at a dispersal sale two years ago. When Arthur Hancock III declined that sale price, his partners backed out. “You take him, then,” was their attitude.

Whittingham, on the other hand, reacted as if a rich uncle had just left him an oil field. He couldn’t believe a horse this good would be available at any price. The horse was not only good, he was as well-behaved as a Boy Scout and as trainable as a circus seal. Talent often comes coupled with moodiness, truculence, temperament. Talent often hates to be told what to do and how to do it. Good Soldier Schweiks, they’re not. Sunday Silence was like a kid who eats his vegetables and cleans the blackboards. If he could talk, he would say “Yes, sir!”

That’s all Charlie Whittingham needs--a fast horse who will do what he tells him.

So, the horse nobody wanted is the toast of Kentucky today. He won the coldest--and the slowest in 30 years--Kentucky Derby on a gelid May Saturday when sleet swept down the backstretch and a cold wind whipped in the horses’ faces on the turn for home.

Was the winner much the best? Well, look at it this way: How many Kentucky Derbies do you see with the winner running sideways in the stretch?

The race was run in the slow-freight time of 2:05. Horses move faster than that pulling surreys. That was the slowest Derby since 1958. There’s no telling what Sunday Silence might have run if he hadn’t come down the stretch like a guy carrying a football--or being thrown out of a waterfront bar. Saddle broncs in a rodeo do less jumping around. Patrick Valenzuela must have thought he was trying to stay on a Brahma bull.

The least surprised guy in Kentucky was Charlie Whittingham. Whittingham has been telling everybody who would listen for months that his horse was something special. It was such a startling change of posture for Charlie that the public chunked in $592,058 on his horse to win.

It has always considered an act of faith back here in the bluegrass country that horses who come over the mountain from the Pacific are, by definition, “nice little California sprinters.” They’re not supposed to like it when anything draws alongside them.

The horse who was supposed to expose them at Churchill this year was a speed demon infelicitously named Easy Goer. Tracksiders couldn’t make up their minds whether he was another Man o’ War--or merely another Secretariat. Wonder Horse III. He didn’t even need to be whipped. He had won the Wood Memorial under a hand ride like a horse on a bridal path being ridden by a debutante. He had come within a click of a world mile record with nothing chasing him. No one had ever shopped him around or put an ad in the paper or offered to throw in the saddle if someone would bid on him.

Charlie Whittingham was unimpressed. “Maybe he’s a wonder horse,” observed Charlie. “He better be.”

He wasn’t. It was a case of easy come, Easy Goer. He did finish second. It was the second time he had lost at Churchill in six months. Maybe he didn’t care for the track. It was hard to. It was greasier than a truck stop hamburger. The field often looked like Charlie Chaplin trying to cross a waxed dance floor.

It was vindication of two sorts for his principal owner, Arthur Hancock III. He not only refused to sell Sunday Silence short--twice--but he had the laugh on those who said he was not serious enough to run the family heirloom, Claiborne Farms. When Arthur Three got out of college, he passed up mucking the family stalls in favor of playing a guitar in honky-tonks and writing songs about guys whose wives left them for truck drivers and took the kids with them. He even named Sunday Silence from a Kris Kristofferson lament titled, “Sunday Morning, Coming Down.”

The family wasn’t sure they wanted a guy who would rather be Willie Nelson than a stud farmer, rather have a hit record than a Derby horse. Arthur took his guitar and left home.

Claiborne Farms had 34 horses in 28 Derbies, winning two of them. Arthur Three has been in four Derbies and won two.

The horse nobody wanted and the owner the family didn’t want either hauled down the biggest prize in racing Saturday. If he--they--win the Triple Crown, they may set a new trend in the sport of kings. Get owners out of rock concerts and horses out of the Yellow Pages.