He’s Ready for This Match Race

If you had a license to build yourself a horse trainer--someone right out of Central Casting to do a remake of “Broadway Bill”--you could do a lot worse than Charlie Whittingham.

First of all, there’s that three-furlong squint in his eyes. Then, there’s that habit of making one word do where the average person might need seven.

Charlie has been around horses so much he sleeps standing up, is the prevailing opinion. He’s slept in more stalls than Seabiscuit. They don’t make the horse he couldn’t improve six lengths in six months.

Charlie can tell more passing a hand down a horse’s leg than most veterinarians can with a sound machine and a thermometer. He can tell by looking at a horse if he can run. Charlie never needed a clock, just some binoculars.

Horse trainers are as endangered a species as bison. They should be mounted in the Smithsonian.

In a nation of babblers, they are as close-mouthed as spies. If they’d told the atomic-bomb secrets to a horse trainer, the Russians wouldn’t have found out about it yet.

You ever stop to think why they work horses out before the sun comes up around a racetrack? Exactly. Because it’s still dark. You think a horse trainer wants some wise guy to get a clock on a horse he’s saving for a big score? Horse racing wasn’t always the open book it has become with film patrols, backstretch judging and performance charts that tell you everything but what the favorite had for breakfast on race day.

It used to be as close-mouthed as a monastery. To illustrate the folly of loose tongues, they used to tell the story around tack rooms of the owner-trainer, Georgie Odom, who had a secret super-runner named Top Row. In a poker game at Narragansett one night, he let slip the word he was going to take a chance and drop this stake horse in a cheap claimer the next day to make some quick money in that Depression year, and Odom, overserved at the table, tipped his poker-playing buddies to get in on it at the windows. One of the poker players was theReno gambler, A.A Baroni. He not only bet the horse, he claimed him, got rich with him, won the Santa Anita Handicap with him.

Charlie grew up in that era when there wasn’t a half-million-dollar stake every other race day, when you had to win with sore horses on rock tracks with crooked riders. Charlie got to know more about horses than DeBeers does about diamonds.

If Charlie had a quirk, it was that the romance of the game eluded him. Charlie had enough trouble making a buck without worrying about making history. Charlie’s great strength was in taking older horses, often imported, getting them fit and winning races with “Santa” or “San” at the front end of their names.

Charlie thought the Kentucky Derby was for dilettantes, people who used horses to chase foxes or jump hedges. Charlie stayed west of the Tehachapis, where he was a legend.

Damon Runyon would have loved Charlie, but the New York papers thought he was just another one of those California trainers whose horses ran downhill for about seven furlongs, then needed a van.

Charlie just shrugged. All the way to the bank. He sent the Easterners home in a barrel when they came on his turf, but he left the east bank of the Mississippi to them.

Until he got ahold of Ferdinand. Now, no one ever mixed up Ferdinand with Man o’War or even Seabiscuit; he was kind of a lazy, easy-going dude but he could run some. Charlie took him east. He put the venerable Bill Shoemaker, who was almost as old as Charlie, on him, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Bill and Charlie--and Ferdinand--found a hole on the rail and kept Ferdinand interested enough to finish first by daylight in a Kentucky Derby as sentimental as a Loretta Young movie. The sob sisters pulled all the stops. Bill and Charlie became the Sunshine Boys of the turf.

To the surprise of a lot of people, including himself, Charlie became a kind of media darling. And got good at it. He kind of liked it. He had won something like $100 million on a racetrack over his career and he might as well have been wearing a mask. He won the Kentucky Derby and he’s getting his picture taken with the President.

Charlie thought as long as it was that easy, he might as well do it again. So, he did. He brought the horse Sunday Silence back to Kentucky and shocked the establishment one more time.

Once you’ve won a Kentucky Derby, the only thing left is the Triple Crown. Ferdinand couldn’t keep interested long enough, but Sunday Silence topped his Kentucky Derby with a gritty 9 1/2 furlongs in the Preakness.

Then, the bottom fell out in the Belmont. Humbled in the first two legs, Easy Goer rose up and mugged the tourist from California by 8 1/2 lengths. The Eastern sigh of relief was all but audible. Order had been restored. Class will tell. A mistake had been corrected.

The beauty of a Breeders’ Cup is it keeps an historical matchup like this from going into a horsemen’s limbo. Under the ordinary course of things, Sunday Silence would have run out his string on the West Coast, Easy Goer in the East--and never the twain shall meet. Trainers despise match races, and both Whittingham and Easy Goer’s trainer, Shug McGaughey, ruled one out categorically.

The Breeders’ Cup Classic at Gulfstream Park Saturday is actually a complicated match race--Easy Goer vs. Sunday Silence. And a bunch of spear carriers.

For Charlie Whittingham, it’s the headiest kind of notoriety. He’s already discarded his five-gallon hat for a floppy golf bonnet, his hard boots for crepe-sole shoes. He’s on TV as often as Dan Quayle, and the prospect is he’ll be wearing gold chains and no socks next and saying, “Let’s do lunch,” instead of “Yup” or “Nope.” He is on record, “If I’d known winning that horse race (the Kentucky Derby) caused this much commotion, I’d a done it a long time ago.”

The old-time trainers can only lament another good man gone wrong. Look at it this way: If he wins the Breeders’ Cup Saturday, the chances are Charlie will never be able to saddle another 80-1 shot again as long as he lives.