Eye of a Jedi, Noble Drama among tough field of local handicap runners

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla – The waters are soon going to get decidedly deeper for the cream of the local handicap division as Northern-based horsemen get ready to make their annual trek south with the Gulfstream Park Championship meeting now only six weeks away. On Saturday, that group will get an opportunity at a lucrative payday before the level of competition intensifies when eight of them square off at a mile in a $60,000 overnight handicap.

The handicap, race 9, highlights a 10-race program that includes a pair of $60,000 stakes for Florida-bred 2-year-olds, the Journeyman Stud Juvenile and Khozan Juvenile Fillies Sprint.

Graded stakes winners Eye of a Jedi and King Guillermo top the handicap field, which also includes Noble Drama, who sat atop the local division for much of the summer, and the steadily improving Pro Quality. Shivaree, Glory of Florida, Girolamo’s Attack, and Quenane complete the lineup.

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Eye of a Jedi, who has started just four times this season, capped off a very strong winter campaign with a convincing 5 1/2-length victory in the Grade 3 Ghostzapper here March 27. That performance earned him a career-best 100 Beyer Speed Figure. Earlier in the winter he finished second in the Grade 3 Fred Hooper and fourth in the Grade 2 Gulfstream Park Mile.

Owner-trainer Steve Budhoo scrapped plans to take Eye of a Jedi out of town to run in the Grade 3 Pimlico Special after the Ghostzapper due to coronavirus concerns, opting instead to give his big horse the summer off before bringing him back to finish second as the odds-on favorite over a sloppy strip under allowance conditions on Sept. 17. Usually a late-runner, Eye of a Jedi showed surprising speed to set the pace before succumbing to Scar in late stretch.

“If you let him get away from you he’s hard to get back,” Budhoo said. “He is a horse that needs to come off the pace.”

Eye of a Jedi was assigned high weight of 124 pounds for Saturday’s main event, conceding from one to eight pounds to his seven rivals, with Marco Meneses back aboard for the first time since the Gulfstream Park Mile.

King Guillermo races for the first time since finishing eighth and last in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Handicap in early March. He is winless since drawing off to a one-sided victory in the Grade 2 Tampa Bay Derby during the spring of 2020. Following a second-place finish in a division of the Grade 1 Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn in May 2020, King Guillermo was sidelined for nearly the entire second half of his 3-year-old campaign.

Noble Drama, who won a pair of overnight handicaps during the spring-summer meet here, will try to rebound from a third-place finish behind winner Pro Quality in the restricted Wildcat Heir Stakes on Sept. 25. In his previous outing, Noble Drama rallied from last to check in fifth behind Breeders’ Cup Classic-bound Art Collector in the Grade 2 Charles Town Classic.

“I don’t know what happened to him last time,” trainer David Fawkes said. “Maybe he bounced a little out of the Charles Town race. One thing I do know, he was a lot closer to the pace than I’d like him to be. His best races come when he’s five lengths behind the next-to-last horse down the backstretch, and that’s where I expect him to be on Saturday.”

Pro Quality earned his first stakes win when he ran down Shivaree to register a head verdict in the Wildcat Heir, increasing his earnings this season to more than $173,000, easily best of any member of the field.