OAK TREE AT SANTA ANITA : The Grass Remains Greenest in Arcadia for 4-0 Super May

Super May is a horse with fragile ankles, distances beyond 1 1/4 miles are not his forte and he doesn’t seem to care for soft turf. But the real reason Super May hasn’t done much winning lately is that he hasn’t been running at Santa Anita.

Back at his favorite track, Super May won Monday’s $171,200 Carleton F. Burke Handicap on the last day of the 32-day Oak Tree season. Trainer Richard Mandella will look at some races at the Hollywood Park meeting that opens Wednesday, secure in the knowledge that Super May will have to wait only until Dec. 26 for Santa Anita to start running again.

Corey Nakatani, knowing that the 1 1/4-mile Burke lacked any bona fide front-runners, put Super May on the lead at the start. Boldly Excellent, a horse who doesn’t test the stakes waters too often, tried to run with him down the backstretch, but there was no real pressure on Super May at any time.

In the run to the wire Boldly Excellent dropped back and finished seventh in a nine-horse field, and Algenib, the 3-2 favorite, didn’t have enough of a finishing kick. Algenib finished second, beaten by three-quarters of a length, and was a head better than Pride Of Araby.

Super May, winner of three consecutive Santa Anita races during the winter of 1990, is now unbeaten in four starts, all on grass, at the Arcadia track. Otherwise, his record is five victories in 21 starts, and this year he had won only one of eight--a minor stake at Hollywood Park--before the Burke.

“He can’t beat everybody, but don’t let him relax in a race,” Mandella said. “He’s a horse who always tries hard every time.”

While Mandella, who has had a poor year, savored the victory, Wally Dollase, the trainer of Algenib, stood on the track, angrily staring ahead. Dollase said that he had told Laffit Pincay, Algenib’s jockey, to stay closer to the pace, but the Argentine champion was seventh after a half-mile.

“I can’t get a jock to ride this horse right,” Dollase said. “The closest we’ve come was when Kent (Desormeaux) rode him in Chicago (to a second-place finish in the Arlington Million). This horse is not easy to ride, he’s a goer, but you can’t fight him. Today, Laffit was restraining him all the way.”

Dollase said that after the Arlington race and a fifth-place finish with Desormeaux aboard in the Man o’ War Stakes at Belmont Park, Algenib’s owners, Juan Manuel Bauer and Robert Oliver, wanted to switch to Pincay. Pincay rode Algenib to a fourth-place finish in the Budweiser International at Laurel on Oct. 19, a day when the turf was soft. Super May ran sixth.

“He was a little tight going around the first time, covered by horses,” Pincay said after the Burke. “I had to wait to get through in the stretch, then he exploded. When he got to the winner, I couldn’t get him to go by.”

Dollase was beaten by Nakatani, who is married to the trainer’s daughter, Michelle. Nakatani used to regularly ride Itsallgreektome, last year’s male turf champion, for his father-in-law, but in another decision dictated by an owner, Nakatani was replaced by Jorge Velasquez at Churchill Downs on Nov. 2. Itsallgreektome finished second, a half-length behind Miss Alleged, in the Breeders’ Cup Turf. Itsallgreektome’s owner, Jheri Redding, was upset when Nakatani rode Lite Light at Del Mar instead of taking the assignment on Itsallgreektome in the Arlington Million.

“He (Mandella) told me to ride him like I own him,” Nakatani said of his prerace instructions Monday. “He said that if they go too fast, sit back with him, and if they don’t go fast, then take him around as slow as possible. The last time I worked him, he went real fast and easy, so I knew he was going to run good.”

Bred and owned by Jack Kent Cooke, Super May is a 5-year-old son of Super Concorde and Maytide, a Naskra mare. His time was 1:58 2/5 and he paid $7.60 as the second choice.

Horse Racing Notes

With betting on the Santa Anita races offered at Hollywood Park and Los Alamitos for the first time, overall daily average attendance for the Oak Tree meeting increased by nearly 8% overall, but declined by more than 27% at the track. The average overall handle was up 2%, with betting at Santa Anita slipping 35%. On-track per-capita betting declined more than 10%, probably an indication that some major players took their betting to satellite facilities. The on-track daily per-capita average was $202.70, compared to $226.23 last year. On-track, the Oak Tree daily averages were 15,839 for attendance and $3.2 million for handle. The overall averages were 30,417 and $6.7 million.

“The new simulcast system serves the public better by making racing more convenient in an expanded market,” said Ray Rogers, executive vice president of Oak Tree. “We feel we need to look at it for at least a year, otherwise short-term factors can alter the numbers somewhat.” . . . One ticket, sold at the Del Mar satellite facility, had all the winners in Monday’s Pick Nine and the payoff before taxes was $552,450. . . . Kent Desormeaux, with 46 winners, was the Oak Tree riding champion for the second consecutive year. Gary Jones led the trainers with 16 winners. Jones also won Oak Tree titles in 1976 and 1987 and his father, Farrell, was a four-time Oak Tree champion, including the first year the association ran a meeting, in 1969. . . . Pat Valenzuela won four races Monday.

An electrical fire in the West toteboard building in the Santa Anita infield was extinguished by four firefighting units in about an hour, shortly after Monday’s last race. Track officials did not say what caused the fire, and were unable to immediately estimate the damage. Most of the crowd of 22,105 had left the track when the smoke from the building began to appear.