Hovdey: Shirreffs goes whistling by the Graveyard

You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Saratoga. Year after year, they hustle the best 3-year-olds in the country to run a damp, testing mile and a quarter in front of a rollicking house packed to the rafters with a sweltering congregation of seasonal pilgrims.

The incentives are mixed. There’s a chance to join a list of legends, many of them recorded on parchment or engraved in stone. Your colors will be painted on a rowboat. The winner could be hailed as another Native Dancer, Gallant Man, or Sword Dancer. As impressive as Damascus, Arts and Letters, or Honest Pleasure.

Then again, he could he lumped with Lights Up, Young Peter, Oh Johnny, or Piano Jim, none of them exactly a household name. They were also Travers winners, with better horses behind them. But the Travers is a gunfight, and woe to those who only bring a knife.

Every schoolchild knows that, among other things, Saratoga is known as the “Graveyard of Champions.” This is hardly the letterhead you want on the invitation you send to, say, Ahmed Zayat, the owner of American Pharoah, and I’m sure the graveyard angle was passed off by New York Racing Association officials as a creation of dipso newsmen half a century ago. Anything for a headline.

And yet the track unapologetically embraces its graveyard reputation with the running each summer of the key local prep for the Travers. The history behind the Jim Dandy Stakes is fascinating and not lost on John Shirreffs.

“You mean Jim Dandy, the one who beat Gallant Fox in the Travers at 100-1?” Shirreffs said Thursday from Saratoga. “I think it was an off track, but I don’t know the trainer.”

The trainer was James B. McKee, of minor repute but a man who knew his horse. Jim Dandy had won the 1929 Grand Union Stakes over a heavy Saratoga surface, and now he had the same footing again for the 1930 Travers. He also had Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox in the field and Whichone, a top colt in his own right.

Jim Dandy was owned by Chaffee Earl, who was 22 at the time and living the high life with his cut of the family fortune acquired by his father. Edwin Earl had invented the refrigerated railcar and sold his company at the turn of the 20th century for millions, then bought two newspapers in Los Angeles. His youngest son owned racehorses, among other things.

The 1930 Travers was a nightmare for Gallant Fox from the start. He was carried far out to the crown of the track by Whichone and raced at an exhausting pace over the deep track while Jim Dandy cruised along, saving ground. By the time they reached the stretch, Gallant Fox and Whichone were out of gas. Jim Dandy galloped through along the inside to beat the Triple Crown winner by eight lengths, thus assuring his place in graveyard history.

Shirreffs loves the tale, for more than one reason. On Saturday, he will be sending out Arnold and Ellen Zetcher’s Curlin Stakes winner, Smart Transition, against American Pharoah with high hopes that their colt will run well. Shirreffs has not, however, had any of the premonitionary visions attributed to Chaffee Earl that his colt would accomplish the improbable, although he would be a gracious winner if it happens.

“After you pick me up off the ground, right?” he corrected. “American Pharoah’s got that high cruising speed that’s so good. He keeps himself in a good position on the racetrack. Anyone who wants to push him, they’re cooked. And if nobody pushes him, he can gear down one little notch and just cruise around there.”

Smart Transition is a homebred son of Smart Strike out of the mare Zardana, who was trained by Shirreffs to defeat reigning Horse of the Year Rachel Alexandra in the 2010 New Orleans Ladies Stakes at Fair Grounds.

“He was the best 2-year-old we had from the very beginning,” Shirreffs said. “But until the Curlin, he never got the trip he needed to really show himself. Everything went his way in that race.”

Although Smart Transition displays plenty of Smart Strike influence, the apple didn’t fall far from the dam’s tree either.

“Zardana wasn’t very big, but she had perfect conformation with perfect musculature,” Shirreffs said. “Smart Transition is a lot like that.

“Zardana was also the toughest horse I’ve ever seen to gallop,” Shirreffs added. “I tell my riders, ‘Don’t ever teach this colt to pull, because if you do, you’ll never hold him.’ He’s in his prime right now, but we’ve been careful. Yesterday, he galloped around out there in about 14 seconds for every eighth. He’s strong.”

Shirreffs had yet to see American Pharoah on the track.

“We’re in a different state over here in Oklahoma,” he said, referring to the Saratoga barns surrounding the training track of the same name. “It’s nice and quiet. There will be no crowds for us.”

If there were, he could handle them. As the ringmaster of the Zenyatta era, Shirreffs was as welcoming to visitors as the American Pharoah team has been during its current run at the top. One of Zenyatta’s biggest fans was Bob Baffert, who was stabled next door to Shirreffs at Del Mar.

“Bob claimed that Midnight Lute was bigger,” Shirreffs recalled. “He came over one morning with the stick to measure her, and of course Zenyatta was a little bigger. He went back to his side, and back to the drawing board.”

And look what he came up with.