THOROUGHBRED RACING : Exbourne Makes It Through Rough Stretch After Surgery

Exbourne looked as if he had just gone the distance with Jake LaMotta.

The left side of his face was scraped raw. His left front foot was wrapped in duct tape, and his right foreleg was swathed in a thick bandage from the knee down. A drainage tube snaked out of the bandage to a plastic bag hanging around his neck. The bag was filling slowly with watery red liquid.

The big, black horse pawed gingerly at the floor of his stall with his right front hoof, as his trainer, Bobby Frankel, sat on a bag of shavings across the shed row and shook his head in amazement.

“I thought he was dead,” Frankel said. “Last Tuesday, the day after his operation, I really thought we were going to lose him. He’s a real warrior.”

Exbourne, one of the leading turf horses in the country for the last two seasons, underwent surgery on Memorial Day after rupturing the ligaments supporting his right front ankle in a workout the morning of May 21. The cannon bone (shin) and ankle were fused and a plate was attached to the front of the leg with wires and screws, effectively replacing the ruined support system.

The hours and days immediately after such extensive surgery on any thoroughbred are fraught with peril. Veterinary surgeons such as Larry Bramlage, who operated on Exbourne, can work sophisticated miracles with bone and tissue. But they are helpless if their 1,100-pound patient does not cooperate.

Exbourne emerged from the surgery without incident, but later Monday night was in trouble. At one point, he was thrashing around in his stall, stumbling into the wall and scraping his face as he fought the waves of pain.

“He was laying on his side, about halfway out of his stall underneath the webbing, sweating and gasping for air,” said Humberto Ascanio, Frankel’s assistant trainer.

“It was a rough night and a long day after the surgery,” said Dr. Helmut Von Bluecher, who assisted Bramlage and supervised the post-op care. “There was definitely some abdominal pain, but most of it was his resistance to the cast.”

After consultation with Bramlage, who returned home to Ohio, Von Bluecher and his local team removed the cast and replaced it with heavy bandaging. Exbourne heaved a sigh of gratitude, but then began showing signs of colic, a condition that nearly killed the big horse last summer.

The veterinarians were caught in a vicious game of Ping-Pong. Tranquilizers helped ease Exbourne’s leg pain, but they also slowed the normal function of the intestines, threatening a blockage. It was a round-the-clock high-wire act, but finally Von Bluecher and Frankel’s crew pulled Exbourne through the worst of it.

“We can only do so much,” Von Bluecher said. “Mostly, it is up to the horse.”

The prognosis for Exbourne is guarded. The real fear is laminitis, or founder. A horse with an injured limb will shift more weight to the opposite foot, playing havoc with the circulatory system. Exbourne has been fitted with a special shoe on his left forefoot to help reduce undue pressure.

“He’ll make it,” Frankel said as Exbourne buried his nose in a bucket of bran feed. “One thing he hasn’t lost through all of this is his appetite. He was even trying to eat his straw while he was laying down in pain the other day.”

Had Exbourne been a basketball player, he would have been Bill Walton. As a young racehorse, he was a fretful, high-spirited prodigy who overcame a series of injuries and ailments to gain rank as a true star. When he arrived at the Frankel stable in 1990 from England, he came equipped with a medical history that stretched around the corner of the barn.

“I feel terrible when any of my horses gets hurt,” Frankel said. “But this guy, he’s special. We put in a lot of time with him.

“There’s some guilt, too. With all the problems he had, you feel bad sometimes about going on with him at all. But then, we never would have found out just how great he was, would we?”

Horse Racing Notes

Once the horse is out of the woods, Bobby Frankel and owner Khalid Abdullah of Juddmonte Farm will entertain offers for Exbourne’s stallion career. Frankel thinks the son of Explodent would be a hit in California. . . . Three Peat, the California flash who won the Bay Shore Stakes at Aqueduct in March, has recovered from a subsequent illness and is heading back to New York to run in the $100,000 Riva Ridge Stakes at Belmont Park on Belmont Stakes day, June 6.

Bertrando--remember him?--has been getting light gallops and a roll in the sun pen every day for about three weeks. The Skywalker colt was knocked out of the Triple Crown with a lung infection that had him on the sidelines for five weeks after his second-place finish to A.P. Indy in the Santa Anita Derby. Trainer Bruce Headley hopes Bertrando can be ready for the $300,000 Del Mar Derby, Aug. 29.

Friday’s Hollywood Park feature is headed by Martessa, the German superstar who defeated Colour Chart, Polemic and Fire The Groom in the Prix de l’Opera in Paris last October. Ron McAnally trains the 4-year-old filly, who will have her hands full with Heart Of Joy, two-time Santa Anita stakes-winner, in the one-mile turf event.