For Fink, Wise Dan's feats are treasured memories

On the face of things, it will be a fairly standard Saturday for Mort Fink. He and his wife, Elaine, in their suburban Chicago home, will flip on a racing channel and place some bets.

The Saturday gambling used to happen at Arlington’s simulcast parlor. Fink is 87. He’s long dealt with diabetes, and there have been more recent setbacks. “I have no balance and can’t walk by myself,” he said. It got to where he couldn’t stand feeling folks’ pity when he and his wife went to play the races.

Elaine Fink dabbles in pick threes and pick fours. Mort Fink always has been the more conservative of the couple. He’ll play to win. The Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita will be on. Mort Fink is not a man prone to displays of emotion, but at this moment in his life, how will he suppress such stirrings during the Breeders’ Cup Mile?

Tepin will be trying to win the Mile for the second year in a row Saturday, and three years ago – it seems so much more recent – Mort and Elaine were at Santa Anita, watching Wise Dan, Fink’s horse, win his second Mile.

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Wise Dan, the robust chestnut gelding, starred in the 2012 and 2013 Breeders’ Cups, and Fink, an elfin wisp of a man, played a strong supporting role. The travel, the bustle of race day, exhausted him both years. His body wavered in the winner’s circle, but beneath his physical shell, Fink always has projected strength and confidence. “If there’s anyone who can beat this horse, I’d like to see who it is,” Fink said in the winner’s circle after Wise Dan’s first Mile.

“He wasn’t afraid to race against anybody,” Fink said. “Such a smart horse. He still is. They take him around and people get their picture taken with him. He hams it up. Sometimes I almost thought he was human.”

Fink keeps Wise Dan in his mind’s eye. Charlie LoPresti, who trained Wise Dan, can look out his window and see the champion any time he wants. On the cusp of an attempted three-peat in the 2014 Mile, after winning the Shadwell Turf Mile at Keeneland, Wise Dan developed filling in a tendon. He had suffered a bout of colic early that year that required surgery and had come back from that still blazing, but the tendon was it.

The two-time Horse of the Year, a winner in 21 of 33 starts and 16 of his last 18, left the track and went to live in a 20-acre field at LoPresti’s farm near Lexington, Ky. He runs in a paddock with his older brother, Successful Dan. Big brother bosses him around.

“Successful Dan is king of that field,” LoPresti said. “Wise Dan is No. 2 in this case.”

LoPresti has taken Wise Dan to several events in the last year. He paraded at Churchill Downs this summer before a race named in his honor. There is talk that he could spend time, perhaps next summer, as an attraction at the Kentucky Horse Park.

“I think he has a great life,” LoPresti said. “He let down pretty easy. He’s 100 percent sound; his legs look great. Every once in a while, we’ll ride him around with a set of yearlings.”

During Wise Dan’s years racing, LoPresti won 26 graded stakes and raced in 67 of them. In 2015, he went 0 for 5 in such races, and he hasn’t started a horse in a graded stakes this year. The Breeders’ Cup back at Santa Anita jolts blurring memories into focus.

“It’s hard thinking about it. I miss that part of it,” LoPresti said. “I miss taking him out there, taking him to Woodbine, taking him to Saratoga. We’d go to Santa Anita, he’d stare at the San Gabriel Mountains when he got off the plane. It didn’t matter where he went: Woodbine, Saratoga, Santa Anita, he’d stand on his vibration plate in his stall and look out the window trying to see the races. He knew what racing was all about. I’ll never be around another horse like him. He was a different athlete, a different beast.”

Fink used to own a large band of breeding and racing stock, but he was down to just one horse, Lisa Danielle, kept as a broodmare because she was named after Fink’s granddaughter and had produced Wise Dan. While the rest of us wait to see if Tepin can win her second Mile, the whole marvelous, improbable Wise Dan story will flicker through Fink’s mind late Saturday afternoon.

“I didn’t make it up when I said Wise Dan kept me going,” Fink said. “How many people get to have a horse like him?”

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