Time Simply Hasn’t Been on His Side

Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!” As a Yale graduate and a member of its faculty, David Milch might be expected to be familiar with these words of John Greenleaf Whittier’s.

If he didn’t, he was to become so.

It would have made a good sitcom or Disney flick. “The Professor and the Derby Winner.” Sure-fire stuff. Maybe a remake of an old Loretta Young movie.

You know how we ink-stained wretches of press row keep hoping for the odd angle. Racehorses usually belong to rich types--bankers from Pittsburgh, oil men from Texas, movie magnates from Hollywood. We always hanker to see an old Indian show up with a range horse on a rope, or a cowboy with a full brother to Trigger, or a nun with a thoroughbred left to the convent by the town skinflint.

A horse owned by a Yale man who teaches (or taught) English Lit and Creative Writing is the next best thing.

Usually, Yale men gear up for a career in the State Department--or even the White House--but Milch yearned for a different winner’s circle. He didn’t want to win the Electoral College, he hankered for the Triple Crown. Let George Bush go to Congress, he wanted to go to the Breeders’ Cup.

You get all the fix you need about Milch when you know that he was recruited out of his classroom at Yale to write scripts for “Hill Street Blues” and, when he wrote a script about the rape of a nun that won an award of $15,000 for most uplifting screenplay, he used it to buy a racehorse!

Every horse owner dreams of going out to the workouts one morning and finding a clockbreaker in the mold of a Citation, Secretariat, Affirmed or any son of Man o’ War.

Milch, by now a scriptwriter for the “NYPD Blue” TV series, thought he had exactly that in his barn when he first got a clock on a colt trainer Darrell Vienna had bought for him at auction.

Gilded Time, a glorious chestnut by Timeless Moment, had “athlete” written all over him the first look Vienna got of him. “A horse like that is as hard to spot as a fire in the desert night,” Vienna told him.

“We couldn’t believe this horse,” Milch recalls. “Exercise boys came back whistling.”

It was quickly evident he was a bargain at $80,000. His works were so eye-popping, he went off at odds of 7-10 in his first start.

“He got left at the post by 15 lengths. He was nine horses wide at the head of the stretch. And as if he didn’t have enough to do, he started to look around at the crowd there. He still won easily in 1:10,” Milch says.

In his second start, at Monmouth, he ran the fastest six furlongs, 1:07 4/5, ever run by a 2-year-old.

By now, Milch and his partners, Jack and Mark Silverman, knew they had an equine Carl Lewis in the stables. They ran him in the slop of the Arlington Park Futurity in Chicago, posting $25,000 in supplementary fees to do so. Gilded Time won by almost six lengths.

That race was a mile. So, the stable had no qualms about entering Gilded Time in the 1992 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile a month later. This time, he beat the best 2-year- olds in the country. He even overcame a troubled trip to do it.

It all looked like Boola Boola and March, March On Down the Field for the old Eli after that. Gilded Time became the winter-book favorite for last May’s Kentucky Derby. He won the Eclipse Award. He was the Toast of the Coast. Move over, Man o’ War. Dust off the Triple Crown.

Gilded Time never got the Triple Crown. He got a limp. Whittier had it right. The saddest words of tongue or pen in the paddock were, “Does that horse look sore to you?”

Gilded Time never got to Kentucky or the Preakness or the Belmont. He got to see those races split by lesser horses while he healed.

They saddled him up for this year’s Breeders’ Cup again and were heartened when, in spite of a year’s layoff, he ran a creditable third in the Sprint, beaten by less than a length by horses who ran six furlongs in a little more than 1:08.

Visions of a smashing 4-year-old campaign next year, maybe even a Santa Anita Handicap, began to dance in his owners’ heads when they put him in the Malibu Stakes at the opening of Santa Anita on Sunday. It was to be a kind of tightener.

Gilded Time tightened all the way to sixth. The Malibu was won by Diazo, a horse who did get to the Kentucky Derby this year, finishing a game fifth. Gilded Time coughed it up in the stretch Sunday. The Racing Form was ruthless. “Gave way steadily in the final furlong,” it sniffed.

So much for happy endings. Shed row is full of might-have-beens. Kentucky might have been beyond the abilities of Gilded Time. But for the proverbial brief, shining moment, it had looked as if he was about to have his name in gold on the paddock walls at Churchill Downs. He would go to join that equine elite.

Milch, who might be the only guy who ever went to the tables down at Morey’s or the place where Looey dwells with a Racing Form and a tout sheet, is philosophical: “Charlie Whittingham says racehorses have about the shelf life of fresh strawberries.”

Even so, you can’t help closing your eyes and thinking of what might have been. Who knows? A Harvard man might beat him to it.