In a Big Race, Take Charlie to the Bank

Write this down. Repeat after me. Make book on this. Take this as gospel:

Never, never--I say, never!--bet against a Charlie Whittingham-trained horse in a big race he has to win and has time to get ready for.

I don’t care if the horse is 1-5 or 5-1. If the horse can run some, if he’s got some breeding, if all he needs is the careful bringing along of a man who has been around race horses since Pancho Villa was riding them, Whittingham will do the rest.

If you want a game pitched, get Orel Hershiser. If you want a violin played, get Perlman. If you want a guy knocked out, Mike Tyson is your man.

But if you want a horse fitted up for a $3-million race, see if Charlie has a place in his barn.

Movies are a director’s medium. Football is a coach’s medium. But horse racing is a trainer’s medium. It belongs to the conditioner. The greatest jockey who ever rode can’t do anything with an unfit horse.

The sixth running of the Breeders’ Cup Classic was Dempsey-Tunney, Notre Dame-Army circa 1946, Budge-Perry in tennis, a Yankee-Dodger World Series. The two best horses in the hemisphere slugged it out in the stretch at Gulfstream Park in the best traditions of a Hollywood movie.

Sunday Silence, the great black beauty from the tracks of the Pacific, and Easy Goer, the beautiful, copper-colored darling of the polo set on Long Island, hooked up in the run for the wire Saturday in racing as it should be run. For the third time in their four meetings, Sunday Silence beat Easy Goer, got to the wire first.

They take a lot of convincing back where Easy Goer started his racing, the sidewalks of New York and the hedges of Southampton. They said Easy Goer lost the Kentucky Derby because he didn’t like the track. They said he lost the Preakness because he reared in the starting gate. They said he won the Belmont because he was the best horse. Case closed. Where’s the Eclipse Award?

Sunday Silence was not exactly of peasant stock. His Daddy, Halo, is in the Jockey Club stud book, all right. He’s not the valet.

But nobody really wanted Sunday Silence. They kept shopping him around like a used car or a hot diamond. Fortunately for them, there weren’t any takers. Even at a markdown, the buyers passed.

So, Charlie Whittingham got him.

Knute Rockne got Notre Dame. Vince Lombardi got the Green Bay Packers. Paderewski got a piano. And Charlie got Sunday Silence.

Charlie had seen enough bad horses to know a good one when he saw him. Charlie’s reputation is with older horses, but he put every trick of racing lore he has ever picked up in nearly 70 years around a racetrack into the conditioning of Sunday Silence. He was to be Charlie’s Triple Crown horse, the exclamation point to a long, distinguished career that had unaccountably never included one.

After two grueling races in Kentucky and Maryland, Sunday Silence wasn’t up to the marathon at Belmont three weeks later.

Suddenly, it was as if the first two wins were flukes. Sunday Silence went back to California to lick his wounds, Easy Goer went around winning Whitneys and Travers and Woodwards, races named after the New York Big Rich. Charlie went to something called the Super Derby, a Louisiana upstart, a race Easy Goer’s people turned up their noses at.

A Breeders’ Cup is scheduled for precisely this turn of events.

The very real fear was, it might be stolen by some horse who was in the field as a part of the chorus line--like a club pro winning the Open, or lousing up an Academy Award script, where the best friend gets the girl instead of Gable or Tracy.

For one thing, older horses are supposed to beat 3-year-olds--and there were grizzled veterans in the Classic field. Slew City Slew has been in 41 races in his career. He hasn’t won many of them (11), but he has learned a few moves around a track. Present Value has teed it up 37 times on tracks from Beulah Park to Monmouth. Canny old horses are like crafty pro football linemen. They teach the rookies lessons.

The 3-year-olds, Sunday Silence and Easy Goer, acted as if those other horses weren’t even there. “I looked over and saw (Angel) Cordero (on Blushing John) wasn’t concerned with the leader in the race, Slew City Slew--so I wasn’t concerned with him, either,” Sunday Silence’s rider, Chris McCarron, was to explain.

Easy Goer wasn’t concerned with anybody but Sunday Silence. He could get to him. He couldn’t get by him.

He didn’t exactly have what the jockeys call “a golden trip.” Easy Goer seemed to come out of the gate sideways. The No. 1 post is not all that desirable in an eight-horse field. But great horses can win from a hall closet.

Easy Goer seemed on the edge of ranging up alongside his rival periodically but was slow to put the throttle to the floor. He seemed to like it back in the caboose of the race. Until too late. “Sunday Silence started to move, but my horse was a little slow to pick up on it,” said Easy Goer’s rider, Pat Day. “Still, it was a magnificent effort, and it was a great race. It was good for racing. It’s sad somebody had to lose, and I’m saddened it was us.”

Ernest Gaillard, one-quarter owner of Sunday Silence, summed up the race best: “He broke alertly. He dragged Chris up to the front. When the time came to run, he ran.”

Trainer Whittingham’s instructions were equally succinct. “Don’t hit him, unless you absolutely have to,” he instructed McCarron. “This horse will do his best without taking a switch to him.”

McCarron took the hint. “I shook the whip at him a few times. But he was doing his absolute best. Did I have horse left at the end? You bet. He was responding.”

Could Easy Goer have drawn even at another few jumps? Well, it wasn’t a 16-round fight. The conditions called for a mile and a quarter to be run. When they got there, Sunday Silence was in front. As he had been in the Derby and the Preakness. Carl Lewis doesn’t have to run a half-mile, just 100 and 200 meters.

If you’re a horse trainer, you train the horse for the conditions of the race, you get him ready for the race the racing secretary wrote.

If you’re Charlie Whittingham, you get him ready for the winner’s circle. Sunday Silence, the colt nobody wanted, is horse of the year. Charlie Whittingham is the trainer of any year. Whatever you do, don’t bet he isn’t. Ever.