All These Guys Hear Hoofbeats on the Horizon

The way I see it, horse owners getting ready for the 1992 Kentucky Derby are waiting for word from Europe about Allen Paulson’s Arazi. They’re not worried about whether he can run--they already know that--but whether he can talk. He’s not a horse, he’s a haunt, to hear people talk about him. He does things no mere horse could do--like come over to this country, run here for the first and only time, run on dirt for the first and only time, run counterclockwise for the first and only time--and win by five widening lengths after getting shuffled five-horses wide all the way around.

A horse who can do that makes the scalp prickle on the back of your neck. If this horse pulls another stunt as he did last November, he doesn’t belong on a race track, he belongs in the Smithsonian. Or in the movies. He should be packing the Lone Ranger around, not Patrick Valenzuela. Or he should have his own sitcom: Son Of Mr. Ed.

But Arazi is in Europe, recuperating from two knee operations. If he’s limping, the rest of the 3-year-olds have a chance the first Saturday in May. If he’s running, it might be the biggest defeat for American cavalry since Custer. We might lose auto races, tennis tournaments and Masters golf tournaments to foreign contingents but, so far, the Kentucky Derby has been safe.

Arazi’s route to Kentucky has been, to say the least, quaint. No one has ever prepped for it around the Champs Elysees. Churchill Downs is not exactly the Bois de Boulogne.

A more traditional route will be taken by the half dozen or so Kentucky hopefuls who tee it up in the Santa Anita Derby on Saturday.

Eight Santa Anita Derby winners went on to win the Kentucky Derby. Eleven horses who started in the Santa Anita Derby went on to win the Kentucky Derby. (Back in 1940, Gallahadion finished 13th in the Santa Anita Derby, then won the Kentucky Derby over Bimelech. In 1982, Gato Del Sol finished fourth at Santa Anita but first at Kentucky and, in 1986, Ferdinand was third at Santa Anita and won in Kentucky.)

The biggest gamblers in horse racing are never the moonshooters who bet the rent on a 30-1 shot or the bridge-jumpers who mortgage the farm and bet a 2-5 shot on the nose. They are the high-rollers who pay $13.5 million for a four-footed animal as a British bloodstock agency paid for a yearling named Seattle Dancer seven years ago.

Now, when you pay $13.5 million for a four-footed animal, you should make sure it can talk--or, at least, run. Seattle Dancer could do neither.

Collecting has become a mania in our world, but when you pay $13 mil for, say, a Utrillo, you can at least hang it in the bathroom. It was a good place for Seattle Dancer, all things considered, but he can hardly be expected to bring anything at Park Sotheby’s auctions.

David Harum wouldn’t give you $13.5 million for Man o’ War, but buyers at horse auctions don’t even look at the teeth.

They look at the breeding, which is a pretty silly way to go about it when you stop to consider how few grandsons or great-grandsons of Abraham Lincoln made the White House, how few descendants of Ty Cobb steal home in a World Series and how often royal blood was hemophilic. But horses are as inbred as the Mad King of Bavaria and often as erratic.

Investing in Florida swampland or buying gold bricks from a door-to-door salesman are shrewd investment decisions compared to bidding at auction for an unnamed foal with a number on its hip. My friend Jack Disney figures that someone would go to jail on the stock exchange if he unloaded the equivalent of horses named Snaafi Dancer ($10.2 million), Imperial Falcon ($8.2 million), Jareer ($7.1 million), Laa Etaab ($7 million), Amjaad ($6.5 million) and Obligato ($5.4 million) on unsuspecting buyers. I mean, how’d you like to buy a used car from these sharpies? They make Jesse James look philanthropic.

There is nothing with a shorter shelf life than a thoroughbred race horse. But the ownership of a fast racehorse is irresistible to certain types of men, notably oil-rich sheiks. Some men collect rare old coins or pre-Columbian artifacts, these guys collect slow horses.

Which is another reason this Saturday’s Santa Anita Derby will be a landmark turf event. There is a horse in here who cost his owner, Japanese businessman Tomonori Tsurumaki, $2.9 million. Only 24 yearlings in history have cost more.

A.P. Indy (the name derives from his owner’s passion for auto racing) is no Man o’ War. He may not even be an Arazi. But he’s as blueblooded as the Count of Monte Cristo. If he were human, he’d wear a monocle.

His challenge this week is to beat Bertrando, whose claim to fame is finishing second to Arazi in last year’s Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.

Bertrando is not exactly a butler. But neither did he cost $2.9 million. He has earned $691,665 to date (versus A.P. Indy’s $447,555). The only race he lost was to Arazi (A.P. Indy lost to something called Sharp Bandit in his only defeat and no one ever mixed up Sharp Bandit with anything that could talk).

So, unless Arazi glows in the dark or can stop and do card tricks in the stretch and still win, the Santa Anita Derby Saturday may produce its 12th Kentucky Derby winner or its 22nd winner of a Triple Crown race or even its second Triple Crown winner. But it all depends on Arazi turning out to be merely equine, after all.