Hawthorne Derby looks like three-horse race
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Without trainer Manny Perez and owner Vladimir Kazakov’s Glockenberg, there would be no Hawthorne Derby. The $100,000 race, the first open stakes race of 2023 in the tattered remains of the Chicago racing schedule, drew but six entrants. Three will walk over from the Perez barn on the Hawthorne backstretch, and without them the race apparently would not have made it onto the Sunday card.
Not that any of the Perez trio has a chance to win. It’s the other three – Really Good, Act a Fool, and Out of Deductions – who are the contenders in a race carded for 1 1/8 miles on turf.
The weather forecast Saturday night into Sunday isn’t promising, with rain expected, but the Hawthorne lawn should be able to take some precipitation, the Chicago area is locked in a protracted drought.
Really Good, the lone shipper, was made the 7-5 morning-line favorite, but it’s hard to see how Act a Fool, 9-5 on the line, isn’t the chalk.
Trained by Larry Rivelli, Act a Fool comes into the Hawthorne Derby on a three-race winning streak, all dirt routes at Hawthorne. Granted, he has not been beating stellar competition, but Act a Fool did overcome a stumble just after the start of his first-level allowance win two races ago and thumped second-level allowance foes by five lengths on June 4. Money Agent, one of the Perez three, might show some pace, but front-running Act a Fool is likely to make a clear lead and control the pace under jockey Alexis Centeno. The switch to turf should not trouble him. Act a Fool is by Oscar Performance, a turf horse during his racing days who has sired 14 winners from 44 grass runners, and Act a Fool’s lone sibling to race, Fall Moon, is a grass horse. As for Act a Fool himself, he has the sort of high knee action often associated with horses better suited to turf than dirt.
Really Good won his career debut at Saratoga last summer, but the Beyer Speed Figure he earned that day, 72, remains the highest of his six-start career. Really Good couldn’t show his best May 14 at Churchill Downs in a race carded for turf and rained onto dirt, but two races ago, on the Keeneland grass, he was a modest eighth in a first-level allowance. On the plus side, Really Good ran his final furlong that day in 11 seconds, fastest among 12 contestants, while trying to rally from the rear of the field on a course favoring speed at the time. Yet it’s also worth noting that since Red Knight won the Man o’ War on May 13 at Belmont, trainer Mike Maker has gone 1 for 23 in turf stakes.
Out of Deductions is the greater threat to Act a Fool. A Team Block homebred trained by Chris Block, Out of Deductions improved massively with blinkers added for his second start, an 11-length turf maiden romp May 21 at Hawthorne, where Out of Deductions ran a final quarter-mile in 23.52, far faster than any of his nine foes. Out of Deductions’s 75 Beyer could sell him short: Choked Up, a distant second behind him with a 57 Beyer, returned to capture a Hawthorne turf-route maiden with a 72.
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