Hovdey: Not much was soft about Soaring Softly

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” was a line written more than a hundred years before the 1999 Thoroughbred racing season in North America. Even so, Jimmy Toner couldn’t help but take the sentiment to heart.

For Toner and his patron, John Phillips, that was the year of Soaring Softly, when the chestnut daughter of Kris S. unfurled a campaign of near perfection. She won seven of eight starts, climaxed by a victory in the first running of the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf and an Eclipse Award, which was almost enough to quiet the wound inflicted by a Belmont Park barn fire that killed two Toner horses. Almost.

“When it happened, I started getting calls, ‘Was the big mare okay?’ ” Toner recalled this week. “The fire was actually in an annex near the receiving barn where I had three horses. My main barn was a safe distance away. I couldn’t imagine anything so terrible as a fire. But we had real good people working for me at the time, and we somehow kept it going.”

The trainer also went through a scary surgery that summer for the removal of precancerous tissue from his nose, requiring Toner to wear a bandage that made him look like Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown.” They got it all.

“It seemed like everything going on was traumatic in one way or another,” Toner said. “But Soaring Softly stayed straight on course, doing her job. She was our rock.”

The recent news that Soaring Softly sustained an irreparable injury in a paddock accident at Darby Dan Farm, her Kentucky birthplace, came as a shock to her wide circle of fans beyond the immediate family. In three seasons and 16 starts as a racehorse, she had occasional issues with her feet and ankles and was retired in January 2000 with a minor ligament strain, but during her championship run, she answered every question asked and danced every dance.

“It was one of those campaigns that you lay out early and everything goes like you plan,” Toner said. “The only hiccup was the Saratoga race. We would have run in the Beverly D. at Arlington in August, but they didn’t run the race that year, so we ended up in the Diana at the end of the meet, when the turf course was chewed up pretty bad. She just didn’t handle it.”

Even 15 years later, Toner found it hard to believe Soaring Softly was gone.

“She was not a kid’s horse,” he said. “She was a big, tough, robust mare with a mind of her own. She was very professional and did her job, but she didn’t want to be fooled with.

“I’ll never forget trying to get the tack on her in the paddock at Gulfstream for the Breeders’ Cup. She kept rearing up in the air and striking out, and Mike Battaglia was right there for the TV show asking, ‘What do you think, Jimmy? Will she run good?’ I said I had to get the saddle on her first. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was with the favorite in the biggest race of my life, and I couldn’t get her saddled.”

He got her saddled, after which Soaring Softly defeated 13 opponents representing the cream of the international training fraternity, including Andre Fabre, Bobby Frankel, John Hammond, Luca Cumani, D. Wayne Lukas, and Christophe Clement.

“For me, she was a once-in-a-lifetime horse,” Toner said.

Thayer a racetracker to the end

Bill Thayer was a once-in-a-lifetime racetracker who walked the walk and talked the talk over more than half a century of remarkable racing history. As a jockey’s agent, he handled the book of Hall of Famer Johnny Adams. He was an assistant to Hall of Fame trainer Henry Forrest. Then at some point he made the leap to management and ended up an institution at Arlington Park for a succession of ownerships.

Of all Thayer’s many racing tales, this is the one I enjoyed, set in the heady days after the 1973 Triple Crown, when every track in North America was trying to land Secretariat. Thayer, who knew everybody, made a pilgrimage to New York to break bread with Lucien Laurin.

“He told me he’d always been grateful for the favor I did him,” Thayer said. “I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I thought I’d better just dummy up.”

Eventually, it dawned on Thayer that the “favor” was merely a hospitable gesture of tickets and a table for Laurin’s Chicago-area in-laws.

“I think what they really remembered was that I gave them a couple winners,” Thayer said, always with a laugh. “I only had $100,000 to offer for a purse. Lucien says, ‘Bill, the horse belongs in Chicago. Can you make it $125,000?’ I took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, why not?’ ”

A subsequent conversation with Penny Chenery sealed the deal.

“When she said okay, I felt a chill run through my entire body,” Thayer said. “It was the shot in the arm Arlington Park needed, and you should have heard the crowd after Secretariat won. They were shouting, ‘Penny! Penny! Penny!’ as she went through the crowd, like she was Eva Peron.”

Thayer traveled far and wide representing Arlington at its best, from Secretariat to the Arlington Million to the Breeders’ Cup in 2002. He died this week at the age of 89, leaving behind a lot of good friends among the horsemen he hosted in Chicago. And they didn’t even need to bring Big Red.