No Crying Matter for Baffert--Again

From his vantage point in the box seats Saturday at Belmont Park, Bob Baffert saw Victory Gallop charging down the stretch a short time before Kent Desormeaux did and a long time before Real Quiet did.

“No,” Baffert cried.

“No, no, no, no.”

An eternity later, while waiting for the stewards to study the photo and declare a winner in the Belmont Stakes, the trainer tried to console his young daughter, whispering hopefully in her ear, “We got it. Yeah, we got it.”

He was right the first time.

So Baffert is not the king of the world.

Still.

For the second year in a row, he came to the Belmont with a horse who had a chance to win horse racing’s elusive Triple Crown. For the second year in a row, he leaves less than a length short.

Last year, after his Silver Charm lost here by three-quarters of a length to Touch Gold, Baffert was as affable when he greeted the media as he had been before.

“No one died,” he said.

And so it was Saturday that, after his Real Quiet lost in a photo finish to Victory Gallop, Baffert again joked about being stood up on a date with destiny.

“I’m getting closer,” he said. “Last year, it was three-quarters of a length. This year, it was a nose.”

It took no more than that to end the debate about whether Real Quiet is a great horse worthy of joining Secretariat, Citation and Affirmed among the 11 Triple Crown winners or merely a good horse in a below-average year for 3-year-olds.

“He’s really not a super horse, we have to say,” said one of Victory Gallop’s owners, Jack Preston. “This proves that he, like some people have thought, is not a Triple Crown horse, or else he wouldn’t have let us beat him.”

It was, however, a super race, one of only three in 130 years of Belmont Stakes history won by a nose and, perhaps even more significantly, one desperately needed to attract attention to a sport that is losing its grip even on the betting public. As one Thoroughbred Racing Commission official said Saturday, “We’re barely a blip on the screen anymore.”

One thing horse racing has that baseball doesn’t is a commissioner. So that’s a start. A man named Tim Smith was appointed this spring to revive the sport, but, in only a couple of months, all he has had time to do is commission a commercial in which actress Lori Petty runs from one end of the grandstand to the other during a race while pleading, “Go, baby, go!”

Meantime, horsemen have turned to the sport’s hottest trainer and said, “Go, Bobby, go!”

The silver-haired, silver-tongued Baffert hasn’t let them down.

As long as there was anyone outside his barns to listen from Churchill Downs to Pimlico to Belmont Park, Baffert was there to spread the word about his $17,000 horse nicknamed “The Fish” who overcame two operations to correct crooked legs and became a Triple Crown contender.

All indications are that the public bought it. In a week when not even Don King could sell more than 7,500 tickets for an ill-fated heavyweight title fight at Madison Square Garden, a crowd of 80,162, the second-largest in the Belmont Stakes’ history, was at Belmont Park on Saturday.

An hour before the race, Baffert was still selling.

He and his entourage had just returned from eating a cheeseburger and fries at the Belmont Diner across the street, where he had startled the other customers when he entered by asking, “Is there a TV here so we can watch the Belmont?”

The conversation outside Barn 9 turned to the previous night’s game at Yankee Stadium. George Steinbrenner gave Baffert a ball autographed by Joe DiMaggio, leading to a story about the day at Bay Meadows when Baffert met the Yankee Clipper.

“I said, ‘Joe, you were a hell of a pitcher,’ ” Baffert recalled. “He said he didn’t pitch. I said, ‘Never?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Not even one pitch?’

“I didn’t know. Growing up in Nogales [Texas], we didn’t have TV or nothing.”

Baffert’s brother, Bill, interrupted, saying it was time for the long walk to the track.

“Time to grow up,” Baffert said.

Again, his horse lost. Again, no one died.

He even resisted a losing trainer’s greatest temptation, to blame the jockey. He refused to accept Desormeaux’s mea culpa for an early move.

“You rode him great,” Baffert said. “You just ran out of horse.”

He admitted he might not have reacted with the same aplomb if the stewards had taken down Real Quiet’s number, which they said they probably would have if he had won because he lugged out to bump Victory Gallop twice down the stretch. Desormeaux said he moved the horse outside to get his attention, to let him know that Victory Gallop was closing fast, and lost control.

“Whew!” said Victory Gallop’s trainer, Elliott Walden. “That would have been a bad situation.”

Baffert didn’t disagree, saying, “I would have been throwing chairs.”

The photo made it a moot point.

“Until then, I was seeing the headlines, ‘The Fish Does It,’ ” Baffert said. “Now, I guess it’s ‘The Fish Flounders.’ ”

Where have you gone, Secretariat? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. But maybe not for long. Baffert said he’ll be back.

“Eventually, I’m going to win this thing,” he said.