Birthday Party in the Winner’s Circle

It was the age-old question: What do you give the man who has everything?

Sid Craig wasn’t the Rolls-Royce type. He had all the villas and condos he would need, clothes were not a priority, travel was not tempting, he had practically lived in a plane for parts of his business life.

He lived, quite literally, off the fat of the land. With his wife, Jenny, he had set up one of the most prominent and lucrative chain of weight-loss salons in five countries.

But, wife Jenny Craig was in a quandary. Sid’s 60th birthday was approaching and she wanted to mark so special a milestone with a memorable gift, something so out of the ordinary it would stand alone even in a jaded world. A Rembrandt was out of the question. All the Shakespeare folios were in libraries.

Then, she had it. How about the Kentucky Derby? Now, there is a gift a sultan might envy. No home should be without one.

The trouble with a Kentucky Derby is, it’s not strictly for sale. You can’t just walk up to a counter and tell them to put it on your American Express card. Horse owners spend their entire lives--and, sometimes, fortunes--trying to win the Derby. They never seem to find a formula.

Only a handful of Kentucky Derby winners have sired Kentucky Derby winners. Scholars of the sport of kings have pored over genealogical tables, identified as “dosage indexes,” trying to find the secret, the right bloodlines to ensure the correct amounts of speed and courage in an animal to make him a winner at what is probably the hardest race to win in America and maybe the world.

A horseman wins one and believes he has the puzzle together. R.C. Ellsworth and Mesh Tenney win with Swaps and believe they have a barn full of successors. But they never win another. Laz Barrera wins two times in three years and can’t wait to get back to Louisville with a similarly bred colt. But it doesn’t work that way.

The ownership of a great racehorse, like the ownership of a fine library, is, in a way, a shortcut to immortality. You win a major stakes race, you get half a million dollars. You win a Kentucky Derby, you get your name on a wall forever.

It’s America’s oldest continuous sporting event. There have been a little more than 100 winners. No horse can repeat. You win a Kentucky Derby, you’re in a very exclusive club.

The classic way to get a Derby winner is out of a breeding shed or at one of those fancy full-dress auctions in Kentucky where millionaires bid on a spindly-legged yearling with the appropriate royal lineage in the hopes he can be another Secretariat or Affirmed or Seattle Slew or Citation. It’s a moon shot. The chances are not good he will ever get on a race track. The chances are astronomical he will get to a Kentucky Derby. Many are foaled, but few are chosen. (Out of 50,000 foals, a little more than a dozen make the Derby starting gate).

Jenny Craig had no clear idea of the wheel she was bucking when she went to trainer Ron McAnally and said: “I want to get Sid a horse that can win the Kentucky Derby.” To his credit, McAnally didn’t turn pale and suggest: “Why don’t we just go find Amelia Earhart or the lost continent of Atlantis instead?” He bravely set about to canvassing the possibilities.

A “horse with a good chance to win” is a tall order even for a $20,000 claiming race at Calder. A horse with a chance even to get in a Kentucky Derby is a search for the Holy Grail by comparison.

Horses aren’t like new cars. There aren’t too many Derby hopefuls sitting in showrooms with manufacturers’ suggested retail price hanging on them. Ron McAnally didn’t get excited till, on a trip to Europe, he found a for sale sign on an animal who had many of the things he was looking for.

Dr. Devious was an Irish-bred with some credentials as a runner. He had won four times in England and finished second in his other two races. He was regally bred, and his times were acceptable.

He didn’t come cheap. His price tag was $2.5 million.

Now, this may be a bit more than most of us would spend on a birthday gift--a new tie might be more our speed--but Sid Craig had already demonstrated that he had the other essential ingredient to success on the track: luck. He had won eight of 10 stakes races entered in one eight-month period.

Sid had an interesting dosage index of his own. Vancouver-born, he started public life as a member of Hollywood’s Our Gang comedies. His mother had hoped he would be the next Spencer Tracy but, at college (Fresno State, where he roomed with Jerry Tarkanian, no less) he became, of all things, a ballroom dance instructor, teaching the cha-cha for the Arthur Murray Studios, which he later bought.

Drafted into the Navy, he was nonetheless able to keep a night job with Arthur Murray, where he began to realize women not only wanted to be good dancers, they wanted to be thin dancers. He sold his interest in the Arthur Murray studios and opened a chain of reducing salons called Body Contour Inc., which he sold for big bucks. But, before he did, he merged with another fitness expert, Jenny, whom he met and married when she was director of operations for Body Contour. Together, they set up the international weight-loss conglomerate now known as Jenny Craig International, which has about 550 centers in the United States and more than 100 others in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Mexico. As long as there is sugar--and size-8 dresses and size-15 collars--in the world, Sid will be in business.

He has had some good horses but, like every owner, he wants to smell the roses in the winner’s circle on Derby Day. That’s where every owner, trainer, jockey, groom and their wives and friends want to be.

Is this gift horse good enough? Or should he look him in the mouth?

Dr. Devious will be flown to Louisville for the Derby with Arazi, the wonder horse. The wags say that’s as close as Dr. Devious will ever be to him.

But, a Derby is a hard race to win. Ask Native Dancer. Nashua. Or, any 4-5 shot who chased a winner across the line.

Of course, if Dr. Devious wins the Kentucky Derby, he’s not a gift horse any more. He’s a capital gain. If he wins the big prize, maybe next year we can get Jenny to buy Sid the Rams.