Pleasant Tap Has Typical Big Finish : Horse racing: He comes from 11 lengths off the pace to win Malibu Stakes as Santa Anita’s winter meeting opens.

Pleasant Tap had a pleasant return to Santa Anita Wednesday, coming from far back to win the $112,600 Malibu Stakes by 1 1/4 lengths.

It was last April that trainer Chris Speckert decided Pleasant Tap should bypass the Santa Anita Derby. Because the track favored front-runners, Speckert shipped his late-running colt East to prepare for the Triple Crown.

The plan made a lot of sense. Horses coming from off the pace were unable to overhaul Mister Frisky in the Santa Anita Derby, while Pleasant Tap ran a game second in the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland, and at 40-1 he finished third, behind Unbridled and Summer Squall, in the Kentucky Derby, which his sire, Pleasant Colony, had won nine years before.

Pleasant Colony was also a Preakness winner, and two days before Pleasant Tap was to run in the second Triple Crown race, he suffered a tendon injury at Pimlico and was sent to Thomas Mellon Evans’ Buckland Farm in Virginia to recuperate.

After coming back in September, Pleasant Tap won only an allowance race in four starts. He was even switched from dirt to turf, and going 1 1/2 miles he ran eighth in the Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park.

But this is a different season and apparently it’s a different Santa Anita, where horses were breaking down at an alarming rate this fall. There’s less sand in the track’s composition, and on Wednesday, as the track opened its 54th season with a crowd of 45,176, form was holding while horses won from on the lead as well as off the pace.

Pleasant Tap was one of the latter, as he came from last place early, 11 lengths behind the pace-setting Restless Con and Magical Mile, to win the Malibu with a powerful, sustained run on the far turn.

Bedeviled, trying to give Chris McCarron his fourth win of the day, finished second, 1 1/2 lengths ahead of Due to the King.

Next came Restless Con and Magical Mile, who was running for the first time in about nine months, and Profit Key, the 5-2 favorite, wound up sixth in the 10-horse field that was reduced by the scratches of Past Prince and Burnt Hills.

Pleasant Tap, earning $67,600 and paying $9.40 to win, ran seven furlongs in 1:21 3/5, which has been the winning time in the Malibu four of the last five years.

Alex Solis rode Pleasant Tap, and when he returned a half-hour later to win the last race by a nose aboard Histrion, three San Gabriel Valley residents were $250,000 richer.

Using a $64 ticket that included single plays in the second, fourth, seventh and ninth races, the trio picked all nine winners. Because the pick-nine pool was only $27,229, the winners normally would have received about $21,761, but Golden Eagle Insurance Co. paid them the approximate $228,000 difference based on a policy that Santa Anita had taken.

Coincidentally, Golden Eagle Insurance is owned by John Mabee, who bred and owns Centennial Time and Personable Joe, respective winners of the third and fourth races.

As Santa Anita had announced regarding a potential payoff a week ago, track officials and their insurer will review whether the $250,000 guarantee for nine winners is continued when racing resumes Friday.

One of Wednesday’s big winners said he had attended 40 of the last 42 opening days at Santa Anita. “I don’t usually play the pick nine,” he said, “but when I read that there was a guarantee of $250,000, I called my friends Tuesday night and said we should go out early and play it.”

Despite warmer weather, with temperatures in the 60s, the crowd was the smallest for a Santa Anita opener since 1977. The total attendance was also the smallest, by more than 5,000, for an opener since off-track betting started in 1987. The last time Santa Anita opened on a Wednesday, in 1984, the crowd was almost 50,000.

Pleasant Tap has won four of 14 starts, all but one of the victories at Santa Anita. He broke his maiden in a stake, the Sunny Slope, in October of 1989, and he won an allowance on an off track in Arcadia last February.

After the pre-Preakness injury, Pleasant Tap was sent to Ross Pierce, who trains for Evans in the East. Shortly after the Breeders’ Cup on Oct. 27, the colt was sent back to Speckert, who saddled him for a second-place finish in the Native Diver Handicap at Hollywood Park on Dec. 1.

“This is satisfying,” Speckert said Wednesday. “It’s satisfying to bring this horse back, after the injury, after he ran a mile and half, and to have him win going seven-eighths. The Preakness injury might have been a blessing in disguise, because it was serious enough that we noticed it, but not serious enough to endanger his career. If we don’t notice it, we might have run him and something very serious could have resulted.”

Despite the short distance, Speckert told Solis to drop back with Pleasant Tap as usual. “We’re planning for a mile and a quarter (the Charles H. Strub on Feb. 10), so why try to be clever?” Speckert said. “This will be the last time this horse ever sees seven furlongs.

“For a while, I didn’t think the speed was coming back. There’s a lot of difference in the track. I gallop horses, and I can tell that this is a safe track. The horses are getting a hold of it better.”

Solis, matching McCarron’s three-victory day, rode Pleasant Tap for the first time in the Affirmed.

“He seems to like it when you ride him hard,” Solis said. “He finished great. He dropped way back and came flying home.”

Before the Strub, Pleasant Tap will run in the 1 1/8-mile San Fernando on Jan. 19.

Horse Racing Notes

Henry Chavez, chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, and Dennis Hutcheson, the board’s executive secretary, met with a group of trainers at Santa Anita on Wednesday. “We were interested in better communication with the racing board and it was a good meeting,” said Don Johnson, who represents the horsemen. Johnson said that the board is developing guidelines for handling the several recent cases involving trainers whose horses tested positive for cocaine. The full board will have a special meeting Jan. 11 in Los Angeles to discuss the situation.

Marje Everett and R.D. Hubbard, who are battling for control of Hollywood Park, both took out full-page ads in Wednesday’s Daily Racing Form. Everett’s ad questioned Hubbard’s sincerity in leaving Hollywood Park a public company. Hubbard’s ad questioned Everett’s sincerity in recently suggesting the sale of Hollywood Park. Hubbard said that in the past year Everett has twice rejected plans to change the structure of the track without presenting the options to her full board. He said that Marvin Davis, once a Hollywood Park board member, made overtures to buy the track, and that Santa Anita proposed a co- operative venture involving the two tracks. . . . Earlier this week, in an amendment to a lawsuit he had already filed, Hubbard challenged Hollywood Park’s ability to delay its annual shareholders’ meeting until February. According to state law in Delaware, where Hollywood Park is incorporated, the annual meeting must be held within 13 months after the end of the year, and February would be the 14th month after the end of 1989.

Peace, the horse that gave Bill Shoemaker his 1,000th stakes victory by winning the Premiere Handicap at Hollywood Park in 1989, died of an apparent heart attack Tuesday after a morning gallop at Santa Anita. The 5-year-old Charlie Whittingham trainee, who earned $361,950, hadn’t run since finishing second in the Inglewood Handicap on June 17. . . . Only five horses are entered in Friday’s San Miguel for 2-year-olds. Formal Dinner, who ran next to last in the Hollywood Futurity, will be joined by Roman Envoy, Apollo, Intimate Kid and Sondeed. . . . Santa Anita is dark today.