OAK TREE : This Gift Came Wrapped With a Yellow Ribbon

A 1,000-pound Christmas present is hard to package. And when the gift also happens to have four legs, one ribbon won’t do.

Sid Craig, who spent $650,000 on an Irish-bred, Italian-raced filly for his wife, solved the problem. Rather than try to squeeze Alpride under the tree, he handed Jenny Craig a box of the horse’s winning races in videotape form. It beats taking the chance of looking a gift horse in the mouth.

“She had run some very impressive races,” Jenny Craig said. “Nine wins out of 13 races. She looked like she would be a very nice filly.”

There’ll be a new tape for Jenny Craig’s collection after Sunday’s $600,000 Yellow Ribbon Stakes at Santa Anita. Ridden by Chris McCarron, Alpride came from just off the pace to beat Angel In My Heart by half a length in the 1 1/4-mile grass race. The Craigs are well on the way to recouping their investment, because Sunday’s $360,000 pot gives Alpride winnings of $607,500 in four races for trainer Ron McAnally.

The Craigs, who run their network of weight-loss clinics from a building not far from the Del Mar track, began buying high-priced, foreign-bred horses in the 1980s. The only other horse they’ve exchanged has been Dr Devious, who ran seventh in the 1992 Kentucky Derby but then won the English Derby after Jenny Craig bought the colt for $2.5 million and gave him to her husband for his 60th birthday.

Alpride’s job in the Yellow Ribbon was made easier when trainer Bobby Frankel scratched the favorite, Possibly Perfect, to wait for the $700,000 Matriarch at Hollywood Park on Nov. 26. Frankel still ran two other horses Sunday, and they were 7-5 favorites as a betting entry, but Wandesta finished sixth and Privity was seventh in the 12-horse field.

Angel In My Heart, a French import making her American debut, went off at 15-1 and came from eighth place to finish a head in front of Bold Ruritana, the Canadian contender who set the early fractions. Alpride lurked behind Bold Ruritana all the way before McCarron turned his filly loose. Alpride, paying $8.60, was timed in 2:01 3/5.

Alpride broke from the outside post position, but with little speed in the race, McCarron was able to position her early. McCarron racked up his 11th stakes win, having already broken the meet record with two stakes victories on Saturday.

“I was optimistic even before Possibly Perfect scratched,” McCarron said. “My filly couldn’t have been coming up to this race any better. The times may not have reflected it so much, but she had been working out of this world. She had filled out, just looked sensational, and at the barn she was bursting through her webbing wanting to run.”

Angel In My Heart, ridden by Cash Asmussen, was sent to Frankel’s barn after the Yellow Ribbon and will continue to race in the United States.

“She ran a big race,” Asmussen said. “The turf was good. I’d watched film of a race here, and there seemed like there was a lot of kickback [of sod], but there wasn’t much [Sunday]. My mare was getting a good hold of the track and I had no excuses. This was one of her best races.”

Frankel could run both Possibly Perfect and Angel In My Heart in the Matriarch, and McAnally will monitor Alpride’s recovery powers before deciding about running her again so soon.

“She’ll tell us,” McAnally said. “It would be tempting. Possibly Perfect will be a dead-fit filly for that one, but then we should have a dead-fit filly too.”

Possibly Perfect would be undefeated in six races this year if Alpride, in her debut for the Craigs and getting a nine-pound break in the weights, hadn’t beaten her by 1 3/4 lengths in the Beverly Hills Handicap at Hollywood on July 2. After that race, Alpride was beaten twice by Possibly Perfect, while running fifth in the Ramona Handicap at Del Mar and coming in a close third in the Beverly D at Arlington International.

Possibly Perfect has won three major races this year and is the favorite to win the Eclipse Award for females on grass, but if Alpride beat her again, she could give the voters pause.

“It’s only conjecture what might have happened had Possibly Perfect run in the Yellow Ribbon,” McCarron said. “But I’d like to think that my filly could have beaten her. Maybe we’ll find out in a couple of weeks.”

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The entry of Hidden Source and Raintrap, owned by Juddmonte Farms and trained by Frankel, is the 2-1 favorite in today’s Carleton F. Burke Handicap, the feature race on the closing card for the Oak Tree meeting.

Between them, though, Hidden Source and Raintrap have only one win in 11 tries this year, and that victory, by Hidden Source, came on dirt in a maiden race in April. Raintrap hasn’t been close since winning the Rothmans International at Woodbine in October 1994.

The high weight in the Burke, Patio De Naranjos at 117 pounds, is a Chilean colt whose U.S. debut resulted in a fifth-place finish in the Oak Tree Invitational on Oct. 8.

Santa Anita hasn’t been using its slowly maturing hillside turf course, so the Burke will start on the backstretch and the distance will be 97 feet short of its listed 1 1/2-mile distance.

Horse Racing Notes

Trainer Gary Jones said he came close to scratching Lakeway Saturday before she overcame a sloppy track to win the Budweiser Breeders’ Cup Stakes at Churchill Downs. “We were 100% sure we were going to scratch her,” Jones said. “We just didn’t want to run her over that stuff anymore. But Kent [Desormeaux] rode in an earlier race, and said that the track was wet but safe. So at the last minute we decided to run.” In her previous start, Lakeway ran third on a muddy track at Belmont Park in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff.