HOLLYWOOD PARK : Silver Ending Was a Steal at $1,500

At the 1988 Keeneland September yearling sale, Wayne Lukas spent $2,042,000. Sheikh Mohammad al Maktoum spent $1,355,000. Jan, Mace and Samantha Siegel spent $604,500, and Allen Paulson spent $495,000.

Ron McAnally spent $2,000.

No, make that $1,500. On the morning after he had bought a son of 1977 Santa Anita Derby winner Habitony for just $500, McAnally got a call from the sellers.

“We’ve got some bad news,” McAnally was told. “The colt came down with colic and died at the clinic last night. The good news is, we’re not going to take your money.”

That left McAnally with his $1,500 extravagance, a flaxen-tailed bay colt who has become known to the California racing world as Silver Ending, one of the horses to beat in Sunday’s $1-million Hollywood Futurity.

It will cost McAnally and his partner, restaurant owner Angelo Costanza, 33 times the purchase price to get Silver Ending into the Futurity. Because they failed to nominate him last April--who would have thought?--the late fee is a cool $50,000 for the chance to win more than half a million.

Now, $1,500 doesn’t get you much around the race track these days. You could board a horse with Charlie Whittingham for maybe three weeks. You could van a horse from Hollywood Park to Bay Meadows and back about 3 1/2 times. Or you could bet $500 across on a 4-5 favorite and pray you break even.

Good horses can come from anywhere--or so the race track saying goes. But an Eclipse Award-winning trainer with a high profile and clients to match is not supposed to be able to sneak a stakes horse out of the world’s most famous sales ring for pocket change. What did McAnally do on that September day in Lexington, wear a funny nose and glasses?

“There couldn’t have been 15 people in the pavilion when Silver Ending sold,” McAnally recalled. “When I drove up, the parking lot was almost empty. I thought I had the wrong day.”

As it turned out, the supposed dregs of the eight-day marathon sale were bunched during the first 700 or so yearlings to go on the block. Silver Ending, a son of the unproven stallion Silver Hawk, wore No. 644 on his hip.

When McAnally first set eyes on him in the holding ring outside the sales arena, he had to force back a smile.

“Everything I like in a young horse, he had it,” McAnally said. “Nice head, nice body, good bone structure, well balanced, and very correct legs. I looked around and nobody else was there, and I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I can steal this one.’ ”

McAnally went to Kentucky that week predisposed to favor the Silver Hawks. Hawkster, a promising 2-year-old by the same sire, was back home in California, preparing for the Del Mar Futurity. Hawkster’s sister, Silver Lane, had established herself as a stakes horse in France.

“Had there been a few more trainers there that day, no way would I have gotten the colt for only $1,500,” McAnally said. “The people who consigned Silver Ending were the same ones who sold the Habitony colt. They came up to me afterward shaking their heads, saying how I stole a nice one.”

Six days after buying Silver Ending, McAnally was still in Kentucky, sorting through the hundreds of yearlings for sale. Back at Del Mar, Hawkster finished fourth in the Futurity. No matter, thought McAnally at the time. Silver Ending still could be the bargain of the century. Nothing has happened since to change his mind.

Last Christmas, when Silver Ending was just a work in progress at Cash Asmussen’s training ranch in southwest Texas, McAnally and his wife Debbie decided to share the colt with Costanza. A longtime friend of the McAnallys, Costanza is the proprietor of the Cheyenne Supper Club in Arcadia and a hard-knocking handicapper who has dabbled as a horse owner.

“I’d had a couple of horses for Angelo, but they never even made it to the races,” McAnally said. “I thought if anybody deserved a chance to get lucky, he did. So we sold him half for $750.”

When the colt made it to the races last summer at Del Mar, he showed promising speed while finishing third in two sprints. And, as a grandson of an English Derby winner on one side and a turf marathon champion on the other, sprinting was the last thing Silver Ending was bred to do.

He got his chance to run long during the Oak Tree meeting. Gary Stevens came aboard for the 1 1/16-mile event and dismounted a few minutes later wearing a broad grin. Silver Ending had lost ground around the first turn and had to come from far back, but he had broken his maiden by nearly three lengths.

“He’s a genuine runner,” Stevens said without hesitation.

Silver Ending came right back to win by daylight on opening day at Hollywood Park in a mile turf race. The colt with the trademark tail was beginning to act like anything but a $1,500 throwaway. He was driving people back to their day runners, wondering why they hadn’t been at Keeneland on that fateful September afternoon.

The McAnallys and Costanza have turned down a $400,000 offer for Silver Ending, and they have had nibbles for even more.

“I know what a tough game this is, and how tempting the quick money can be,” McAnally said. “One bad step and you’re finished.

“But this is a sound colt. He’s never had a drop of bute (butazolidin, an anti-inflammatory medication). And if he continues to improve into next spring, who knows what kind of offers we might get.

“I remember a Derby-age colt for sale out here a few years ago,” McAnally added. “People were pulling up in limousines to look at him. I had an owner ready to give $50,000 at the time, but I told him he’d have to go home and bring back a whole lot more. That’s what happens when Derby fever hits.”

Horse Racing Notes

The case against trainer Roger Stein for allegedly having a horse that tested positive for cocaine more than a year ago will be reconsidered by the California Horse Racing Board at today’s meeting at the Los Angeles Airport Hyatt Hotel. . . . Ron McAnally reports that Oak Tree Invitational winner Hawkster has bounced back from his fifth-place finish in the Japan Cup and will be pointed for the $500,000 Strub Stakes on Feb. 3 as his first major goal of 1990. . . . The sale topper at the 1988 fall Keeneland auction was a Copelan colt named Paris Doctor, who cost $623,500 more than Silver Ending. He has yet to run a race.