Hovdey: Raging Beholder keeps coming back for more

If Beholder had been a fighter, she would have been Jake LaMotta, sometimes down but never out. She’s made more comebacks than Sinatra, had more second acts than Nixon. Just when you think you’ve seen the last of her, there she is again in the winner’s circle, mischievous and regal by turns, a fire-breathing Bambi on a mission.

Beholder will not go away.

She could have disappeared after the 2013 Kentucky Oaks when she left most of her race behind the gate, spooked so badly that she sat down and dumped Garrett Gomez right in front of the stands. She ran her race anyway, or at least as much race as she had left, and lost by half a length to Princess of Sylmar.

The psychological trauma lingered, so she was sent to the farm, dealt with her demons, then returned in the fall to win the Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Santa Anita Park.

She could have left the stage for good after the 2014 Ogden Phipps Stakes at Belmont Park, where she spent most of the race running on a back leg sliced open by another horse in close quarters. The wound was so jagged that stitches were useless, and it took her most of the summer to heal. Then she returned to win the Grade 1 Zenyatta Stakes first crack out of the box.

Beholder might as well have left the stage for good a month later, when she was knocked out of the Breeders’ Cup with an illness that was timed to diabolical perfection. I mean, why go on with a two-time champion about to turn 5? What was left to prove, other than that Beholder had become the unluckiest good horse in recent memory?

But no. She came back again last April and was poised for a seamless, profitable summer when – you guessed it – she got sick again, missing the Vanity Stakes at Santa Anita and whatever else Richard Mandella had in mind.

“At first, I thought, ‘Oh no, is there something weak with her now, that she’s going to get sick like she did before the Breeders’ Cup, something long term?’ ” Mandella said. “But right afterwards, the whole barn started snotting and coughing, so it was just a little thing, thank goodness.”

Beholder’s latest return in the Adoration Stakes on June 13 was entertaining, though rusty, and now she is poised to run another scorcher Saturday in the $300,000 Clement L. Hirsch Stakes at Del Mar.

If it’s okay with Mandella, owner Wayne Hughes, and the rest of the beleaguered Beholder fan club, though, we won’t make plans beyond Saturday. Mere saddling can sometimes be a drama, after which it is up to Gary Stevens to get her to the gate and once around the track.

Since September 2013, Beholder has been the other woman in his life, morning and afternoon. The only race Stevens missed was the 2014 Zenyatta, when he was still recovering from knee-replacement surgery. Even the simple ones, like the recent Adoration, can be an adventure.

“She was going easy, like always, but then she got to leaning in down the stretch,” Stevens recalled. “The last thing I wanted her to do was get too close to the rail, so I drew my stick left-handed and went to give her a tap. But instead, I hit the rail with my whip, and the sound made her duck right. It was a little more exciting than it was supposed to be.”

But it figured.

“She’s real good 95 percent of the time,” Mandella said this week. “The other 5 percent is like dynamite about to go off. But we know basically where that 5 percent is going to happen now. Schooling her the couple times before a race is scary. She is just aggressively tough. But then by race day she’s usually good, so thank God for that.”

In the modern history of the sport – and by modern I get to go back to the stories my grandfather told me about seeing Phar Lap at Agua Caliente – there has been only one filly who was a champion at 2, a champion at 3, and then a champion again as an older filly or mare. That was Cicada, a foal of 1959 who won 23 of 42 starts while flying the blue and white blocks of Christopher Chenery’s Meadow Stable. Later on, Secretariat and Riva Ridge did those same colors proud.

Beholder has started 17 times and won 12. She was a champion at 2 and a champion at 3, but if she is going to match Cicada in that department, she is going to need to win everything else she tries this year, up to and including the Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Keeneland on Oct. 30. But who in their right mind would think long-range with Beholder?

“In my head, I’ve got some plans,” Mandella said. “Although I’m not too big on traveling with her until Keeneland.”

The mere fact that Beholder is still in training at all, punching at a high level, looking for worlds to conquer, is a testimony to not only her class but to her ability to switch on and off, from racehorse to rehab and back again, time after time. Most mares would have been long gone by now, making babies for the market, living off past glories. But not Beholder, and to Mandella, the explanation is obvious.

“Why would you ever give up on one like that?” the trainer said.