Cal Cup Is Hoisted to Future

California is famous for a lot of things--movies, oranges, sunsets. But racehorses aren’t one of them.

Italy breeds singers, France, lovers--but if you want a race won, you go to Kentucky. That’s where champion thoroughbreds come from.

Eighty-nine of the winners of 117 Kentucky derbies were foaled in Kentucky. Only three came from California.

That’s not a very good record when you consider non-racing states such as Tennessee and Virginia have had as many and even Canada and England each produced two winners.

A Kentucky Derby is not the only yardstick to measure the worth of a thoroughbred, but in the minds of the public it is. Every other race, with the possible exception of a now-and-again Belmont or Preakness, is merely the eighth race somewhere. The Kentucky Derby is for the heavyweight championship of racing. Everything else is only a semifinal.

For it to be won by a non-Kentuckian is considered an affront by every hardboot in the backstretch at Keeneland or Churchill on the order of a stock Edsel winning the Indianapolis 500. A Derby is not for the peasantry or Hollywood kooks. It’s for the aristocracy, people with banks in their background.

It was widely considered a fluke when California won this race for the first time in 1922. California didn’t even have racing at the time and most thought the only horses they had out here had Indians--or Tom Mix--on them.

Morvich was well-bred enough, but he did have these kind of donkey’s ears, which gave rise to the wisecracks around the winners’ circle that this was the first time a grandson of a burro had won the roses.

The evidence that it was a fluke was overwhelming. California was not to win it again until 1955.

We sent failure after failure back over the mountain, movie moguls’ horses who loomed briefly to the head of the long stretch, then faded like yesterday’s roses. The wise guys snickered. California tracks all ran downhill, they said. California time was kept by speeding up the soundtrack. Jockeys who rode California horses brought a book.

It was Swaps who made the laughter die in their throats.

I always thought that Swaps was the greatest horse I ever saw close-up. He had this glorious, burnished golden color and he ran so smoothly you could have put a glass of water on him all the way round and not spilled a drop.

Even Louisville fell in love with Swaps. First of all there was his owner, Rex Ellsworth. Gary Cooper would get the part--10-gallon hat, boots. He looked like the marshal of Dodge City. Trainer Meshach (Mish) Tenney, looked like his faithful old sidekick. Bright dark eyes, friendly, soft-spoken, Mish plated all his own horses and, if he had smoked, would have rolled his own cigarettes and slept on his saddle by a campfire. He did sleep in the stall with his horse when he got to Churchill.

They said “yep” and “nope” and called everybody “m’am,” but there was nothing about horses David Harum knew that these two didn’t.

Swaps’ victory was the greatest for California racing ever. Decidedly was to win this race seven years later and become only the third (and last California-bred) to win it. But Decidedly had never run in California. The state was surprised to find he was born here.

Swaps, on the other hand, was a native son all the way. He had never run anywhere else and he was in the gate in Kentucky against the lordly champion of the east, Nashua, owned by the obligatory Long Island types with old money and a stud farm with white fences around it and blue grass under it and limestone water running through it.

Nashua was Establishment through and through. Swaps came into focus as a horse they found running through the purple sage and couldn’t get a rope on till he was 2.

It wasn’t quite that melodramatic, but when Swaps won the Santa Anita Derby that winter, Sports Illustrated’s headline was “California Gets A Gleam In The Eye.”

In Kentucky, Swaps led wire to wire as if a posse were after him. Nashua ranged confidently up alongside him in the stretch, ready to put him away, when suddenly Swaps spurted away to win by a length and a half. “Swaps just went swo-o-o-sh!” the rider on Nashua, Eddie Arcaro, was to tell the press later.

I bring this up because last Saturday at the Oak Tree meet at Santa Anita they had a whole card for California racers. All 95 entrants were native sons of the golden West.

Breeders’ awards are not uncommon, but this was a more ambitious effort to spur California breeding. Over a million dollars was posted in purses. All phases of racing--sprint, distance, male, female, dirt, grass--were featured.

It is an audacious attempt at improving the breed. You don’t need white fences and rolling blue grass to get a champion--Swaps, who grew up in a grass-less corral in Chino, proved that. We grow half the major league baseball players out here, about half the pro football rosters, why not horses?

Best Pal, the gelding who finished second in last year’s Kentucky Derby, got nosed out by another 3-year-old, Charmonnier, in the feature, the $250,000 California Classic.

But the point of any breeding program is the future. And here, while the Juvenile was won by the classy gelding Ebonair, the show was stolen by the Turkoman colt, Coco’s Main Man, a slow roller who trailed his field by a gaping 30 lengths most of the way around, then suddenly put it into high gear and came bursting in fourth, beaten by only three lengths.

It was a finish not seen since the heyday of Silky Sullivan. That’s another thing Cal-breds are not supposed to be--come-from-behinders. The time was freight-car slow, but any horse that can make up 15-30 lengths in a little more than a quarter of a mile doesn’t have to apologize for being from California any more than Ted Williams did.