Royal or Spoil?

Cue the historians. Tell casting nobody there will be needed. Forget about quiet on the set. Turn on the Klieg lights. Have scenery take the day off. The key grip can stay home too. Cameras ready? This is the 131st running of the Belmont Stakes, and they’ll do this one in a single take.

If Charismatic wins this afternoon at Belmont Park, it will be a piece of history: a 12th Triple Crown champion and the first since Affirmed in 1978. If the filly Silverbulletday wins, the significance shrinks, but only slightly. Only two females have won the Belmont, and none since Tanya in 1905.

Ten other 3-year-olds--all male--are running, and several of them are not simply along for the ride:

* Menifee, so far a Triple Crown bridesmaid, will be trying to copy what his stablemate, Victory Gallop, pulled off last year, when he won the Belmont and scotched Real Quiet’s Triple Crown.

* Stephen Got Even, fourth in the Preakness after a disappointing Kentucky Derby, could very well be winging it on the lead, which is a departure for him.

* Best Of Luck, who won the Peter Pan after skipping the first two Triple Crown races, has the profile of the occasional Belmont upsetter.

As for the others, you may read about them in Sunday’s paper, but not today’s.

Only a trainer with extrasensory perception would know whether he has a 1 1/2-mile horse. The next longest Triple Crown distance is the 1 1/4-mile Derby, and Silverbulletday, running against boys for the first time, has never been farther than 1 1/8 miles. In Louisville and Baltimore, trainer Bob Baffert’s filly was the warmup act, winning the Kentucky Oaks the day before the Derby and the Black-Eyed Susan the day before the Preakness.

“There aren’t many fillies that belong in the Belmont, but she’s one of them,” said trainer Shug McGaughey, whose Easy Goer won the 1989 Belmont, thwarting Sunday Silence in his Triple Crown bid.

McGaughey, who doesn’t have a horse in this Belmont, was the last trainer to run a filly in the race, when his My Flag was third, behind Editor’s Note and Skip Away, in 1996.

“My Flag was a big, strong filly with a lot of talent,” McGaughey said. “This filly has a lot of talent too. I saw her for the first time in the Black-Eyed Susan, and I think she’s a real threat in this race. They’ve got nothing to lose by running her. She’s got a lot of natural speed, and that could make her dangerous.”

Because of the distance, the Belmont doesn’t draw as many fillies as the other Triple Crown races. My Flag was only the 20th filly--and 10th in this century--to run. The last filly to run in all three Triple Crown races was Winning Colors, who was third in the Preakness and last in the Belmont after winning the Derby.

“This is a one-shot deal,” Baffert said. “You can’t run a filly in all three of these races, because they can’t take it.”

Winning Colors was trained by Wayne Lukas, who with Charismatic is going for his fourth Belmont win and his 13th Triple Crown event victory. Lukas wouldn’t second-guess himself about running Winning Colors in all three.

“There’s no temple of regret inside me,” he said. “But the truth is, I wasn’t real comfortable going into the Belmont, because the Preakness had been a real hard race on her. This race is a hell of a test. Silverbulletday? It’s an ambitious shot they’re taking.”

Baffert kept Silverbulletday out of the Derby when he saw that 19 horses would run. Two weeks later, she was entered in the Preakness, but Baffert scratched her after she drew the outside post in a 14-horse field. Silverbulletday drew the more favorable No. 3 hole for Belmont Park, a wide track with sweeping turns that level the playing field.

With Gary Stevens now under contract in England, and riding Beat All, one of the favorites, in today’s Epsom Derby, Jerry Bailey takes over on Silverbulletday as she goes for her 12th win in 13 starts. Bailey has ridden Silverbulletday once, winning the Ashland Stakes at Keeneland on April 3, and was instrumental in Baffert’s Belmont decision.

“Am I reaching?” Baffert asked Bailey on the phone a couple of weeks ago.

“No, you’re not reaching,” Bailey said.

Baffert, who trains Real Quiet and Silver Charm, another Derby-Preakness winner who lost the 1997 Belmont and missed out on a $5-million bonus, said he wouldn’t have considered today’s race but for Bailey’s encouragement.

Silverbulletday has earned $2.2 million for Mike Pegram, the fast-food mogul from Mount Vernon, Wash., who bought her at a yearling auction for $155,000. As moguls go, the down-home, congenial Pegram hardly looks the part. He drinks Coors Light from aluminum cans that are called “silver bullets,” and it would be ironic if he aced Bob and Beverly Lewis’ Charismatic out of the Triple Crown. Pegram and the Lewises are friends, sharing Baffert as a trainer, and Bob Lewis sells Budweiser.

“Win, lose or draw, we’re invited to a big party Bob [Lewis] is throwing [tonight],” Baffert said. “There are no hard feelings. Bob knows that Mike likes him, and he knows all Mike’s doing is to try to win the race. Silverbulletday’s times equate to faster times than the colts have run, going all the way back to last year [in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies], and there’s no place else to run her.”

The only other option, never seriously considered, was Friday’s one-mile Acorn Stakes, a $200,000 race here.

“If the Acorn had been a million-dollar race, we would have run in it,” Baffert said.

At $1 million, the Belmont is worth $600,000 to the winner. Even second place--worth $200,000--pays more than winning the Acorn.

“We need a down payment on that $5 million that got away last year,” joked Pegram, who also owns Real Quiet.

Baffert, who moved full-time from quarter horses to thoroughbreds in 1991, waded into this year’s Triple Crown with another filly, Excellent Meeting. She was fifth in the Derby and a pulled-up last when she couldn’t handle dirt in the face in the Preakness.

The only other time Baffert can remember running a thoroughbred filly against colts was last Monday at Churchill Downs, where the precocious Chilukki won the Kentucky Breeders’ Cup Stakes for 2-year-olds.

Silverbulletday finished her training at Churchill Downs on Tuesday, then was flown here--on the same plane as Charismatic--on Wednesday. Waiting for her was barn No. 1, near a tall chain-link fence that fronts Hempstead Avenue, a busy thoroughfare along the front of Belmont Park. Baffert quickly called an audible and moved the filly to barn No. 50, in the hinterland of the sprawling Belmont backstretch.

“It was too loud where we started out,” Baffert said. “That first barn was like being next to the freeway.”

The last Belmont horse to come from the boonies where Silverbulletday is stabled might have been Affirmed, the last Triple Crown winner.

“My filly is ready,” Baffert said. “She’s got a tremendous lung capacity, but you still don’t know about that last eighth of a mile. None of us do. When Real Quiet hit the eighth pole last year [with a four-length lead], I started thinking about my winner’s speech. Then in the last 50 yards, a nice loser’s speech popped into my mind.”

Horse Racing Notes

Charismatic, who wasn’t favored in either the Derby or the Preakness, is the 2-1 first choice on the morning line, followed by Menifee, 7-2; Silverbulletday, 4-1, and Best Of Luck, 6-1. . . . Trainer Nick Zito, who’s running Stephen Got Even and Adonis in the Belmont, doesn’t agree with the decision to run Silverbulletday. “I don’t like it, but then that’s just me,” Zito said. “I know she’s won 11 of 12 and is an unbelievable filly, but I still don’t think it’s the thing to do. She’s just one more that we’ll have to beat.” Zito, a New York-based trainer, has won the Kentucky Derby twice, with Strike The Gold and Go For Gin, and the Preakness with Louis Quatorze, but he’s winless with eight starters in the Belmont.

The crowd probably won’t break the Belmont record of 82,694, set in 1971 when Pass Catcher won, spoiling Canonero II’s Triple Crown sweep. New York is also buzzing with the Mets against the Yankees all weekend and the Knicks against the Pacers tonight. A radio station is offering a prize that will send a fan, via helicopter, to the race, the baseball game and the basketball game. . . . The last two Belmonts have drawn 80,162 and 71,026.

Jockey Chris Antley, talking about Charismatic: “[Wayne Lukas] says he misjudged him. I misjudged him too. I didn’t think he was capable of that strong move he made in the Preakness.” . . . At the barn one morning, Bob Baffert reminded reporters how monumental today’s race is. “It’s like a heavyweight title fight,” he said. “It’s a unique historical happening. The best filly in the country taking on the best colt. Forget about the money, there are serious bragging rights at stake. This is so big, it ought to be on pay-per-view.” . . . The forecast is for clear skies and temperatures in the high 70s.

Chasing the Triple Crown

Charismatic is trying to become only the 12th horse to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes.

BELMONT STAKES

* POST: 2:30 p.m. PDT today

* WHERE: Belmont Park, Elmont, N.Y.

* TV: 1:30 p.m. PDT, Ch. 7

* GLOSSARY: PAGE 11

* CAPSULES: PAGE 11