President Obama gave his State of the Union address on Thursday night. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was scheduled to make his State of the League speech Friday.
Now, there’s no official talking head for the Las Vegas sports betting industry giving a speech this weekend, but if there were, they would be giving a very upbeat and optimistic one indeed. The key points of that speech (I’m available to moonlight as speechwriter):
Celebrity statistician Nate Silver has characterized the Seahawks-Broncos matchup in the Super Bowl on Sunday as one of only eight times in the XLVIII-year history of the game that the two best teams from the regular season have made it to the big day.
“The numbers say it’s going to be a tie,” Silver told Stephen Colbert this week.
Art Sherman woke up last Saturday morning hoping his horse would get a decent piece of a $250,000 pot offered for Cal-breds to be run later that day at Santa Anita.
He went to bed that night wondering about hotel rates in Louisville.
Shared Belief remains the clear Kentucky Derby favorite until one of the contenders starts running triple-digit Beyer Speed Figures or Shared Belief makes his 2014 debut and does not run back to his 2013 form.
Still, I am watching all the horses trying to catch up and have been quite impressed by what I am seeing. From Jan. 18 to Jan. 25, I watched three performances that suggest this class of 3-year-olds may have quality and quantity.
Trainer Todd Beattie usually does not leave his Penn National base unless he thinks he has a horse who is very live. So, when Taris, a 2-year-old filly, showed up at Aqueduct on Dec. 21 to make her debut, it should not have been a complete shock that she ran off the screen, winning by nearly 12 lengths and getting an 88 Beyer Speed Figure.
In 2013, Beattie started 81 horses out of town. He had 22 wins, 9 seconds, and 15 thirds. He won another 45 races at Penn from 171 starters.
It is easy to tell the horseplayers at the National Handicapping Championship in Las Vegas this week from the horseplayers on Esquire Network’s new show “Horseplayers.” The Vegas cast is real. No edits allowed. The Esquire gang is “reality.”
So what does Gary Stevens do for an encore? Join the circus? Ride sidesaddle? Set himself on fire?
Fairy tales are supposed to be fantasies, but Stevens abused the privilege. During his comeback year of 2013, most of it spent at the age of 50, his horses won the Preakness, two Breeders’ Cup races, 15 other graded stakes, and just shy of $11.4 million. Stevens also rode two champions and was a finalist for the Eclipse Award, doing it all from just 369 mounts and 66 wins.
LAS VEGAS – Welcome to the 14th annual ROI Awards.
The Eclipse Awards were held at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla., last Saturday to honor horse racing’s best from the 2013 calendar year. While we in Vegas politely applaud the athletic ability of the champion horses, we cheer loudest for our money, so this weekend we present the ROI Awards.
When the Jockey Club announced last August that it was sponsoring nine one-hour racing telecasts on Fox Sports 1 this year, and that “the race series spotlights many horses that previously competed in Triple Crown races,” fans, including this one, began looking forward to something resembling the American Championship Racing Series of a generation ago: an organized series of America’s most important dirt races for older horses leading to the Breeders’ Cup Classic at season’s end.
One month after its going-out-of-business, final day of Thoroughbred racing, a call was placed to the main number at Hollywood Park. The cheery, recorded message imparted the following information: “Watch and wager on exciting live racing from Betfair Hollywood Park now through Sunday, Dec. 22 . . . general admission is $10, and Turf Club admission is $20 . . .
Okay, so the message hadn’t been updated. Never mind. Who hasn’t called the home of a good friend, recently passed, and gotten goose bumps from the sound of his voice on the answering machine?
