Filly From Nowhere Comes to Forefront

It is the conceit of men who dabble in horse racing that there is a super strain of horses which, if found, can lead to all kinds of fame, glory and riches in the sport.

In other words, they believe implicitly in an aristocracy, that certain families, whether by divine right or cluster of genes, are destined to dominate lesser beings.

It is a notion that, in human terms, died out with the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns in a miasma of hemophilia, psychoses, insanity and all the other dubious rewards of inbreeding.

Horsemen remain unpersuaded. All men may be created equal, they allow, but all horses? Hell, no! If you can breed Man o’War to Nellie Flag or Secretariat to Genuine Risk, they are convinced to a man, you will have the game by the throat. The super-race theory may be discredited elsewhere but not on a race track.

The evidence to the contrary is at least whelming, if not over. Man o’War’s descendants are running in a lot of Grade I handicaps. But they are also running in a lot of cheap claimers at Evangeline Downs. Some of them can’t run anywhere. It’s no mirage at all to see a horse winning a Triple Crown race while his half-brother--or even full brother--can’t keep up with allowance company in Pomona.

The Eclipse Awards are racing’s Oscars and are usually given to horses who are as royally bred as Charlemagne, the ones who have kept the peasants in their place in the recent season.

But the Eclipse cup for 2-year-old fillies this year just might go to a little lady who was born in the cinders or the maid’s quarters and who, if she were human, might have spent her time scouring pans and waiting on her stepsisters.

Dominant Dancer wasn’t the result of any grand union between crowned heads of racing. Jamie Schloss bought her dam, Domini Arlyn, for the claiming price of $20,000. Now, if you know racing, you know what you get for 20 grand. What you do, you first make sureit isn’t a burro.

Then, owner Schloss arranged a romantic tryst for his mare with a stallion called Moscow Ballet. Now, we’re not talking Romeo and Juliet here or Lady Di and Charles. First of all, the assignation cost $5,000. You get some idea of how far over the tracks this mating comes from when you know that an interlude with Alydar might cost you $275,000, and Mr. Prospector commands $260,000. Seattle Slew wouldn’t even dance with you for less than $100,000.

Dominant Dancer was so earmarked for the scullery that when she was weaned and broken, Schloss sent her not to tracks where the claiming price might be $70,000, but to Stockton. If this was baseball, that would be the Three-Eye League.

Schloss thought he had a minor league horse. “One morning, at 6 or 6:30, I get this call from my trainer, Don Harper,” Schloss says. “Now, ordinarily when you get a call at 6 o’clock in the morning, it’s bad news. But this time, Don says, ‘We just worked your filly, and I’ve got two words for you--Eclipse Awards.’

“She went a half so fast--44.3--that the clockers went around checking each other. They thought their watches broke.”

Adds Schloss: “Don used to gallop horses for Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons and he exercised Carry Back. So, he knew a superior horse when he saw one.”

The public didn’t. They looked at the breeding, not the clocking. “We took her to Golden Gate (Fields), and even though she ran sensational works in the morning, they let her get away at 9-1,” Schloss says. “All she did was win by three lengths and come within three-fifths of a second of King Glorious’ record for the distance. Her second race, she bled. So, they let her get away at 12-1 in her third race. We put her on Lasix, and she ran off and hid from colts. But she was the Rodney Dangerfield of the track. She couldn’t get any respect. They kept saying it was a fluke. I said, ‘Well, she just ran five flukes in a row.’ ”

Racing reporters were more impressed. They named her filly of the meet at Golden Gate, Hollywood Park, Santa Anita and Canterbury Downs. At Canterbury, she broke the track record for fillies and beat the third horse in the race by 19 lengths.

“They said, ‘Well, she beats cheap horses.’ So we took her to Santa Anita, and she wins the Grade I Oak Leaf easily,” Schloss reports. “What do they want her to do--sing?”

Of course, what “they” really want her to do is win the Hollywood Starlet at Hollywood Park Sunday. Jamie Schloss thinks he has the best 2-year-old filly in the land. But so does Trainer Wayne Lukas.

Lukas’ filly, Stella Madrid, was the favorite for the filly juvenile crown (and Eclipse Award) in the Breeders’ Cup. But she unaccountably got beat by Go for Wand, a horse who had never won anything but an allowance race and whom Stella Madrid had beaten.

Trainer Lukas and owner Schloss agree on one thing: Whichever of their horses wins the Starlet should be Eclipse filly of the year. Go for Wand is the One Play O’Brien of the horse set, in their view.

Dominant Dancer skipped the Breeders’ Cup because of a melancholy set of circumstances. Schloss did not nominate her as a weanling for one major reason: He did not have the $500 at the time--certainly not to waste on his little half-breed.

After her stunning debut, he was perfectly prepared to put up the supplementary fee of $120,000 (his filly has won $412,470 for him), but she came out of the Oak Leaf race with a hematoma on her shin.

Schloss is overjoyed at the chance to race against Stella Madrid, saying: “My horse has beat a lot of these $600,000 horses. You’ve never seen a story like this one!”

Oh, sure we have. Disney does them all the time. It’s a remake of that one where the prince is running around looking for the glass slipper to fit. It’ll have a happy ending, too. If Cinderella can go a mile.