ECLIPSE AWARDS : Black Tie Affair Horse of Year; Day, McAnally Also Honored

Trainer Ernie Poulos won’t be spilling soup on that lucky black tie anymore.

“We’ve retired the horse, and now I’m retiring the tie,” Paulos said Saturday, minutes after his Black Tie Affair became horse of the year for 1991.

Black Tie Affair was a landslide winner after 283 track racing secretaries, turf writers and Daily Racing Form representatives cast their ballots. A horse needs to be supported by at least two of the three voting groups to win an Eclipse Award, and Black Tie Affair swept all three blocs, getting 187 votes.

Dance Smartly, the Canadian filly who won all eight of her races last year, finished second with 51 votes, followed by Arazi with 27, In Excess with 13, Hansel with three, and Farma Way and Morley Street, the steeplechase champion, with one vote apiece.

Dance Smartly still won an Eclipse, winning the 3-year-old filly title with 269 of the 283 votes. Arazi, the runaway Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner and future-book favorite for this year’s Kentucky Derby, did even better than that, winning the 2-year-old colt title with 274 votes.

Hansel, winner of the Preakness and Belmont Stakes, was voted best 3-year-old colt. Black Tie Affair took a second Eclipse Award, finishing first in the older-horse division.

Other winners were Queena, top older filly or mare; Tight Spot, best male on grass; Miss Alleged, No. 1 female grass horse; Housebuster, the champion sprinter; and Pleasant Stage, best 2-year-old filly.

For the fourth time, Pat Day was voted the Eclipse for best jockey. Other winners: Mickey Walls, apprentice jockey; Ron McAnally, trainer; John and Betty Mabee, breeder; and Ernie Samuel’s Sam-Son Farm, owner. Samuel bred and raced Dance Smartly and McAnally trained Tight Spot, Festin and other horses who earned more than $8 million total. Day rode a record 60 stakes winners, six of them aboard Dance Smartly.

Shortly after hearing that he won the trainer award for the second time, McAnally stepped into a hotel horse book in Las Vegas and watched on television as his Sea Cadet won the $500,000 Donn Handicap at Gulfstream Park. Sea Cadet is owned by Verne Winchell, who also races Tight Spot.

Unlike the other awards, the top breeder was selected by a six-member committee from the three sponsoring organizations. The Mabees, whose Golden Eagle Farm is located near Del Mar, bred 24 stakes winners in 1991, one of them being Best Pal, who raced in the Mabee colors and finished third behind Hansel and Olympio in the vote for 3-year-old colt.

Jeff Sullivan, Black Tie Affair’s owner, said of Poulos’ talisman: “Yeah, that tie’s been around. I think Ernie spilled something on it every time he had a meal.”

Poulos, who will turn 66 later this month, is a 280-pound former semipro football player who traveled the country with Black Tie Affair, logging about 14,000 miles, as they won stakes in Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey and Illinois, where Poulos’ horses are stabled in the Chicago area.

“The moving around was harder on the trainer than it was on the horse,” Poulos said.

Black Tie Affair, a Miswaki-Hat Tab Girl 5-year-old who was bought by Sullivan for $125,000, the most the Chicago-area auto dealer has ever paid for a horse, capped his season with a wire-to-wire victory in the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Churchill Downs. Black Tie Affair finished with seven victories, one second and one third in 10 races and earned $2.4 million.

“I was fairly confident that we were going to win (horse of the year),” Sullivan said. “But then so many people started telling me that I was going to win, and that’s usually when you lose. Ernie did a good job with the horse all year. He had him peaking in the fall when it counted.”

Black Tie Affair was retired after the Breeders’ Cup and will begin a stud career this month at The Vinery near Lexington, Ky. Sullivan still owns the majority of the horse’s breeding rights. He said that the farm has received about 200 applications from prospective breeders, about five times the mares that an average stallion services in a single season.

On Saturday, Poulos described watching Black Tie Affair win the Breeders’ Cup race.

Poulos appeared to be nervous, and as the horses were being loaded into the starting gate, a security guard standing next to him said: “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right,” Poulos said.

When the horses hit the top of the stretch, with Black Tie Affair trying to hold off his rivals, Poulos felt something give in his right leg.

“Zing, zing, zing,” he said. “I went down right in front of that guard. I had to pick myself up.”

On Saturday night, Poulos picked up a gold-plated Eclipse trophy.