The Third Step Is Steepest for Sunday Silence

You imagined Black Beauty looked like this. Glowing coat, the color of anthracite in the sun. A movie horse. Something Clint Eastwood would ride into town.

Sunday Silence is not America’s horse, exactly. He’s not Man o’ War, Swaps, the horse that saved the fort or won the West. But he’s the big horse around the barns at Belmont this week. The cameras cluster around Barn No. 5 as the hot-walkers take him around the ring, hose him down.

Off in a corner, his bright blue eyes missing nothing, the canny old trainer, Charlie Whittingham, the Casey Stengel of the horse business, looks him over for telltale signs of short-windedness, trembling in the legs. He feels him for heat, then nods. A blanket is thrown over Sunday Silence and he is turned over to the oat bin.

Charlie is satisfied. His horse is ready. He’s got the horse, where are the windows?

This does not mean Sunday Silence is as sure a thing as Mike Tyson or sunset in the West. If winning a Triple Crown is not the hardest thing to win in sports, it’s in the photo. It’s as hard in its way as winning a Grand Slam in tennis or golf, or winning three titles at the same time in the ring.

In the first place, it’s not only contested in three different places, but in three different states. Belmont is not a track, it’s a country. The infield is just smaller than Rhode Island. Jets could land in it. The track itself is a mile and a half in circumference and the race Saturday goes around all of it. Nothing a horse has done in his life so far fits him for this test.

You don’t have to say winning the Triple Crown is the hardest thing in sports to do, but the last time a horse won it, Jimmy Carter was President, you could buy a new car for less than $10,000 and coffee was a quarter.

The Belmont Stakes is 121 years old and they ran 51 of them before anyone won the Triple Crown at all. That was Sir Barton and he beat two horses. There never are a lot of horses in the Belmont, but the ones who are there are quality. They all have a chance. No ribbon clerks here.

They went a half-century before the first Triple Crown winner and a quarter-century between winners No. 8, Citation in 1948, and No. 9, Secretariat in 1973. There have been only 11 Triple Crown winners in the 121-year history of the stake, not even one a decade, an occurrence about as commonplace as eclipses of the sun, or snow in San Diego.

There’s a misconception that, because of its distance--5/16ths of a mile longer than the Preakness, a quarter of a mile longer than the Derby--stamina will win it. You can go broke betting that way. If a field has a bunch of mile-and-an-eighth horses in it, the best mile-and-an-eighth horse will win the mile-and-a-half race. And American horses are not bred to go much more than a mile anyway. Sprinters win the Belmont. All the time.

What wins a Belmont are the same things that win any other title fight--speed and courage. Thoroughbred racers, you have to know, are the most faint-hearted of athletes. If they were fighters, they’d never get up. In football, they’d run out of bounds. In baseball, they’d take a called third strike and hope for a walk.

Once a thoroughbred is passed, he’s through. He’s met his match. He throws in the towel. Quits in his corner. In poker, thoroughbreds would fold aces. What they are is yellow, to tell you the truth.

Sunday Silence is not. But neither, you have to say, is Easy Goer.

When a horse is alive in the Triple Crown, all the attention focuses on him. Sunday Silence is the leading man in this drama. Easy Goer gets the faithful old sidekick part. He’s Tonto to Silence’s Lone Ranger, Gabby Hayes to John Wayne’s Ringo Kid. He gets listed alphabetically in the credits. If Sunday Silence wins again Saturday, Easy Goer becomes a trivia question, no more.

It’s a melancholy role, but it’s one his father played before him. The last Triple Crown winner was Affirmed in 1978. He beat a horse called Alydar, Easy Goer’s sire, in all three of the races, by diminishing margins. Affirmed gets his name in lights. Alydar is in the fine print.

Does Easy Goer keep the family tradition, second? Well, two years ago, a horse called Bet Twice finished second at Churchill Downs and Pimlico and then more than evened the score atBelmont.

It came about this way: Not too long ago, the Triple Crown was just a newspaper diadem. Only journalists in search of an angle linked the three races. The tracks stonily ignored each other, snooted the others’ races haughtily. It was almost as if New York society were to ask, “Kentucky? Where’s that? Kentucky Derby? What’s that?” Pimlico’s Preakness had stepchild status with both of the others.

Until 1985, that is. That’s when a Kentucky Derby winner infelicitously named Spend A Buck contemptuously dismissed the Preakness and the (Gasp! Quick, Jeeves, the smelling salts!) Triple Crown itself for an upstart race called the Jersey Derby, which paid the winner $2.6 million for breaking with tradition.

Faced with this proletarian revolt, the Triple Crown tracks hastily banded together and fell into each others’ arms to guard against further defections of this kind. Later, an automobile company, Chrysler, stepped in, posting $1 million for any horse scoring the most points in a Triple Crown series--five points for first in each race, three for second and one for third. They further guaranteed a Triple Crown winner would clear $5 million.

It opened an intriguing panel of possibilities. By finishing second twice to a horse called Alysheba in the Derby and the Preakness, Bet Twice earned six points, to Alysheba’s 10. But when he won the Belmont and Alysheba finished out of the money, Bet Twice heisted the million dollars right out of Alysheba’s pocket, posting 11 points to his rival’s 10.

The same thing could happen Saturday. By holding on courageously over the oil slick that was Churchill Downs in the Derby and then engaging Sunday Silence in an ears-flat, toe-to-toe slugfest at Pimlico, Easy Goer has left the issue in as much doubt as the second Dempsey-Tunney fight. Easy Goer needs a knockout to win, but Bet Twice landed it two years ago. And it’s a million-dollar shot.

There is a famous story about the Queen of England at the first America’s Cup race. Being told the United States had won, she asked, “Who was second?” Only to be told, embarrassingly, “Your Majesty, there is no second.”

In the Triple Crown, there is a second. It’s like a baseball game. You get three strikes. And it’s never over till the final out.

THE DRAW

Sunday Silence and Easy Goer will start side by side in the Belmont. Story, Page 13.