HOLLYWOOD PARK : Opening-Day Card a Modest Teaser

Hollywood Park’s richest races this fall might be on the grass, but the Inglewood track opens its 30-day season today with merely a tease, a modest $60,000 stake for fillies and mares at one mile on the resodded turf course.

The bigger grass races--eight of them worth $2.65 million--won’t kick in until the Thanksgiving weekend, when there will be two a day, highlighted by the $700,000 Matriarch on Nov. 26. The last major grass stakes of the meet is the $500,000 Hollywood Turf Cup on Dec. 10.

There are two grass races on the opening-day card. Whereas Santa Anita struggled with its grass layout during the recent Oak Tree meeting after a major reconstruction, Hollywood Park’s rejuvenated Bermuda course has received favorable early notices from horsemen since it was opened for training a week ago. The racing department’s condition book lists 23 grass races for the first 10 days of the meet.

Hollywood’s opening-day Flawlessly Stakes--named after the distaffer who won the Matriarch to clinch Eclipse awards in 1992 and 1993--is a comeback opportunity for Twice The Vice and Phone Chatter, talented fillies who have had reversals since they won major stakes early in their careers.

In 1993, Phone Chatter was good enough to beat Sardula and Heavenly Prize in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies at Santa Anita and was voted an Eclipse Award as the best in her division. Heavenly Prize went back to New York and was voted best 3-year-old filly in 1994.

Phone Chatter cracked a cannon bone in the Breeders’ Cup race and has struggled ever since, undergoing surgery after she cracked another bone in a stall accident at Santa Anita earlier this year. Since her Breeders’ Cup victory, Phone Chatter has won only one of seven starts and is on a six-race losing streak. Trainer Richard Mandella didn’t switch her from dirt to grass until last summer.

Twice The Vice, who won the Del Mar Oaks on grass last year, ran three good but losing races at Santa Anita last winter and will be making her first start in more than nine months.

“There were no serious problems, just some little things that required time off,” trainer Ron Ellis said.

Ellis is coming off a strong Oak Tree meet. He saddled two winners on the final day, and finished with 11 winners and tied Mike Mitchell for the trainers’ title.

Gary Stevens, who hasn’t ridden Twice The Vice since they won the Del Mar Oaks in August 1994, has regained the mount today. Stevens led the fall meet at Hollywood last year, beating Kent Desormeaux, 36 winners to 35.

The Hollywood Park season runs through Dec. 24, with a Wednesday-through-Sunday schedule. On five of six Fridays, racing will be at night, with a 7 o’clock first post. The Nov. 24 post time is 12:30 p.m. Thanksgiving post is 11 a.m. Other first posts are 12:30 p.m.