Niggle-and-Dime Effort Puts Silver Charm Up One Notch

For jockey Gary Stevens, “niggling” was the operative word. Stevens niggled at Silver Charm down the backstretch, he niggled him on the far turn, and he was still niggling at the top of the stretch.

When the niggling was over, Silver Charm cast out all those nightmares from Del Mar with an authoritative move through the center of Santa Anita’s 900-foot stretch. The gray 5-year-old might have been 8 1/2 lengths behind after a half-mile, and he might have still trailed by 3 1/2 with an eighth of a mile to go, but at the end of the $200,000 San Pasqual Handicap he was 1 1/4 lengths better than Malek, the second-place finisher, and that was all that mattered.

For his 12th win in 20 starts, Silver Charm earned $120,000, an amount that raised his career total to $6.6 million. At the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, someone should tell the retired John Henry that he has now relinquished the No. 4 spot on the money list. Silver Charm is only $46,236 behind Alysheba, the third horse on the list, but the two ahead of him won’t be as easy. Cigar is No. 1, only $185 short of $10 million, and Skip Away was retired in November with $9.6 million.

“These things are damn important,” said Bob Lewis, the co-owner of Silver Charm, who bought the horse as an unraced 2-year-old for $85,000 in 1996. “This is just another milestone for this horse. Beverly and I also raced Serena’s Song, who’s won more than any filly [$3.2 million]. Wouldn’t it be ironic if someday we could say that simultaneously we’ve had the all-time winning [male and female]?”

In running for the first time since two Churchill Downs races in November--a second-place finish to Awesome Again in the Breeders’ Cup Classic and a win three weeks later in the Clark Handicap--Silver Charm showed Stevens and his trainer, Bob Baffert, a late-running dimension that hadn’t been needed in his other races. When Silver Charm fell so far behind Sunday, both horsemen had dyspeptic flashbacks of last July at Del Mar, where the Lewises’ horse ran the worst race of his life, finishing last in the five-horse San Diego Handicap.

“I’ve never had the guts to take him that far back,” Stevens said after the San Pasqual. “But this was as easy as he’s ever won a race. We may have found a new ace in the hole for this horse today.”

Silver Charm carried 125 pounds, six more than Malek, in the San Pasqual, and his presence surely accounted for an on-track crowd of 20,706, which was almost 9,000 more than the attendance for the race last year. Trainer Richard Mandella and jockey Alex Solis were enthusiastic about Malek’s late run, since it came in the first start for the 6-year-old Chilean-bred since he ran fourth while Silver Charm was winning the Dubai World Cup 9 1/2 months ago.

“It was a good way for him to come back,” Mandella said. “Any time you can run that way against Silver Charm, you’ve got to feel good about it.”

Crafty Friend and Dramatic Gold, who ran ahead of Silver Charm in the early stages while setting snailish fractions, were third and fourth at the end, with Young At Heart finishing last in the five-horse field. Silver Charm ran 1 1/16 miles in 1:41 3/5, compared with the stakes record of 1:40 1/5, and paid $2.60.

Baffert plans to run Silver Charm in the $500,000 Donn Handicap at Gulfstream Park on Jan. 30. It will probably be the $1-million Santa Anita Handicap, on March 6, before Malek gets another shot at Silver Charm.

“He only ran about three-eighths of a mile [Sunday],” Baffert said. “I was a little bit nervous after a half-mile, but I could see that Gary hadn’t moved with the horse. At the quarter pole, I told myself that this was a great horse and he was going to catch the others. This horse likes a cat-and- mouse game, and when he passes the other horses, he thinks the game is over. There should be no doubt in anybody’s mind about how great he is.”

Baffert was wearing a Band-Aid on his right pinky, covering up a nip that he took from Silver Charm at the barn last week. All in all, it’s a reasonable price to pay.

Horse Racing Notes

The countdown to 6,000 for jockey Eddie Delahoussaye reached 5,992 when he won the fifth race with Round Four. . . . Gary Stevens won the two races before the San Pasqual, one of them as the result of a stewards’ disqualification.