The Song Remains the Same
Just because you stop training a horse doesn’t mean you stop loving him. Not when he has been with you practically from auction. Not when he ran his heart out for you. Not when he ran his hoofs off, even with ankle frailty so acute that the veterinarians shook their heads and said how terribly sorry they were that this great gray gelding would never run again.
The horse is whiter now. Seven years old, head held high, his bearing remains as majestic as some jousting steed from Camelot, groomed to be mounted by men garbed in armor rather than silk. Five years have passed since this horse with the lyrical appellation of Music Merci has been suitably fit to compete in a Breeders’ Cup race, no entrant ever having been away longer. The old gray, well, he ain’t what he used to be.
Bet him anyway, Armando Lage advises.
“You watch,” he says. “His number will be on the tote board.”
Music Merci has been in the money in 23 of his 34 races. He was trained by Lage during much of this time, but was turned over recently to Bill Spawr after the horse’s owner had to surrender title to him for financial reasons. Spawr is the one prepping Music Merci for a sentimental journey in Saturday morning’s card-opening Breeders’ Cup Sprint, and from his barn at Santa Anita a few days before the race, Spawr is pleased to report: “The horse couldn’t be doing any better.”
This is music to Lage’s ears, too. As he takes a break from walking another animal outside Barn 116, the trainer is far removed from Music Merci logistically, but never far from him in spirit. He came to love the gelding for his fighting nature, for the way he endured endless layoffs, ice treatments, home remedies, then ultimately a surgical procedure that removed fragments from one ankle and some of the fiber that helped hold it together.
Around the backside of the track, there is a running gag about Music Merci that refers to him as “the horse with the Bill Walton ankles,” a not very sympathetic joke to man or beast. Troublesome bone spurs in his feet were what interrupted and prematurely ended Walton’s career in basketball, when whatever sheer will the athlete had could not overcome what he lacked in mobility. Music Merci’s game seemed similarly doomed.
“I wouldn’t think any other horse in the entire world would have taken everything this horse has taken and kept on trying the way he has,” Lage says with lingering affection.
Trainers old and new are in complete agreement on this point.
In his barn down the way Tuesday morning, it is clear that Spawr, too, has developed a fondness for this horse. With advancing age having made Music Merci so docile that it is difficult to conceive of him being prepared for a sprint, Spawr explains that looks have rarely been so deceiving, saying: “He’s like a pet in the stall, but in the afternoons, winning is everything. That’s why everyone likes this horse so much. He just tries so damn hard.”
From the beginning, when the Canadian-bred was brought to California to be sold at auction, the horse’s spirit was evident. Lage was conscious of it early on, soon after the animal was gelded. He and the owner, Lawrence Pendleton, agreed that perhaps the Kentucky Derby would be too severe a test for their promising three-year-old, particularly with thoroughbreds so able as Sunday Silence and Easy Goer in the hunt. Instead they shipped the horse to the Illinois Derby, where the ride proved so rocky that Music Merci was nearly knocked over.
He won anyway.
Their horse grew gamer but lamer. Once so frisky, as during the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile race of 1988, when he gave chase to 3-to-10 favorite Easy Goer and ran out of the money on a day when longshot Is It True would not be beaten, Music Merci’s legs began to give out. The ankles got worse and worse. Lage went to the farm to check out the horse’s condition and reported to the boss that Music Merci probably had “one chance in a hundred” to ever wear another racing saddle.
“I told him, ‘You must be extremely patient.’ The horse was turning 5 years old and I needed to train him for maybe eight more months before I could get him to run again. There was lots and lots of therapy to do.”
There were setbacks, X-rays, operations. There also came the debt that led to Spawr’s taking over as trainer. Merely the age and infirmity of the horse lessened the risk of placing him in a $50,000 claimer, but with another dedicated old-timer, Laffit Pincay, taking the reins, Music Merci won twice at Del Mar. Then he was vanned to Santa Anita for the Oct. 17 Ancient Title Handicap, in which he finished a fast-closing second to Cardmania and looked forever young.
No horse has ever gone five years between Breeders’ Cup races. Music Merci’s days as a juvenile are far behind. He will be an aging, raging, great white hope of a dark horse come Saturday morning, streaking six furlongs in pursuit of Cardmania, Meafara, Alydeed, Thirty Slews and others, all of whom will find out exactly how well the old-timer can still get around.
