There Isn’t Any Buzz Now, Just Real Quiet

On this morning of the Belmont Stakes, it is time to finally place the blame on those most responsible for horse racing’s funk. Without them, the sport might not be constantly wringing its hands, or tying itself in knots.

Racing would be able to point with pride to a Triple Crown that people under 50 would be able to remember.

The blame goes to Quiet American and Really Blue, the father and mother of a horse named, fittingly, Real Quiet, who would have won the Triple Crown in 1998, had the parents provided just a tiny bit more, say half an inch, of their good genes. Sure, their son, Real Quiet, could run like the wind and showed it in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness that year. He was pretty too, and a mostly model citizen, as horses go.

But he needed more on that June day in New York in ‘98, when a horse named Victory Gallop was taking exactly that in the stretch of the grueling mile-and-a-half race that serves as the third leg of the Triple Crown. At the wire, Real Quiet needed a longer nose.

Mike Pegram, the owner, can’t forget.

“When he turned for home, he looked like Secretariat,” Pegram said.

Bob Baffert, the trainer, doesn’t try to forget.

“This time of year,” Baffert said, “I get all the questions about it, and I end up watching the film three or four times a day sometimes. And every time, I still think he’s gonna win.”

Horse racing has a Breeders’ Cup and hundreds of graded races for millions of dollars all over the country every year. It has Saratoga. It has Del Mar. Life is not all bad.

But the Triple Crown is its Holy Grail, and without an occasional success story, racing is left with a Super Bowl called after the third quarter. A Triple Crown winner every year wouldn’t be good. But none since Affirmed in 1978 is a creeping downer.

There are sportswriters, most of them now using walkers to get around the rest home, who will talk about the 1970s and the Triple Crowns. Secretariat won in ‘73, then Seattle Slew in ’77 and Affirmed in ’78. They thought it was always going to be like that. But Affirmed was the last of the 11 who have done it.

Worse, there has been the tease of the last decade.

When the field leaves the gate at Belmont Park today, it will be only the fourth time in the last 10 years that there hasn’t been a horse with a shot at the Triple.

It started with Silver Charm in 1997, and included Charismatic in ‘99, War Emblem in ‘02, Funny Cide in ’03 and Smarty Jones in ’04. But the one that really slipped away, the closest call, was Real Quiet in ’98.

“You can look at 10 different photos of the finish, in 10 different time frames, and we’d win nine times,” Pegram said.

Baffert said, “Everybody around me was telling me that we won it, but I know about racing and how things go, so I wasn’t quite ready to do handstands.”

During the wait for the official results, there was discussion that Real Quiet had interfered with another horse earlier in the race, and Baffert said the stewards told him later they could have taken Real Quiet’s number down if he had won.

“The fans would have burned the place down,” Baffert said.

There was also discussion, and a consensus of experts’ opinions, that jockey Kent Desormeaux had started Real Quiet’s final run too soon. But neither Pegram nor Baffert has ever publicly criticized him.

“There is a lot of pressure on everybody in a race like this,” Baffert said. “Whatever you do, good or bad, it is over.”

Gary Stevens, who’d been aboard Silver Charm, the victim of a late pass by Chris McCarron aboard Touch Gold at the wire in the ’97 Belmont, was riding Victory Gallop in ’98. He told Baffert later that as soon as his horse drew even with Real Quiet, Real Quiet lunged in front again. But they were past the finish line. It is possible, then, that the only time Real Quiet trailed was the split second when Victory Gallop got his nose in front.

“It is amazing how one bob of a head can change everything,” Pegram said.

That bob, that half-inch, also cost Pegram the $5 million that Visa was awarding back then as a bonus to the next Triple Crown winner. But he said that mattered less than his trip back to Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby Museum two weeks after the Belmont.

“That’s when it really hit me,” he said. “I looked at the banners up there for each Triple Crown winner, and I realized how truly close we had come.”

Close indeed. In the last 10 years, racing’s best sniff.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.