While Big Brown's foot is in the hands of experts, the rest of us are left to ponder his place in history, should he recover and win the Belmont. Bearing in mind that the penny is practically worthless, here's my two cents on how the quality of a Triple Crown winner should be measured.
Not by the Triple Crown.
TUCSON, Ariz. - That knocking at the door is the feds, and they want in.
Growing impatient with the inability of horse racing to stop its chemist trainers, a few members of Congress, led by Kentucky's Rep. Ed Whitfield, are stirring the fires of federal intervention. Racing's fear is that if they huff and puff long enough, they may blow the house down.
This terrifies racing, as it always has, but soon comes the time for decision: Let them in, or continue to bar the door.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Gamely and Bill Shoemaker made a perfect pair back in 1967 when he was aboard the mountainous Bold Ruler filly to win her first race at Santa Anita, the Princess Stakes at Hollywood Park, and then the historic Alabama Stakes at Saratoga.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Don't be misled. Richard Mandella knows how to train horses that were foaled in the 21st century. Why, just last year he won both the Norfolk Stakes and the CashCall Futurity, and his 2-year-olds of 2008 promise to be heard from later this summer.
So it is only a coincidence that Mandella will try to win Monday's $250,000 Shoemaker Mile at Hollywood Park with 9-year-old Perfect Drift after winning last year's Shoemaker Mile with The Tin Man, who was also 9 at the time.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC's "Countdown," delighted in the Preakness infield custom of brave young lads racing across the top of a row of porta-potties while being pelted by beer cans.
Sam Shepard, who played Frank Whiteley in the Ruffian biopic, has a new play called "Kicking a Dead Horse" hitting off-Broadway in June.
The Onion, a satirical newspaper and website, broke the story that Nike had signed the Derby and Preakness winner to a $90 million deal to endorse a new Air Brown line of horseshoes.
Who says horse racing isn't mainstream?
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - There was a column all teed up and ready to bang down the middle of the fairway, summoning the golden memories of the great stayer Quicken Tree in honor of the running of the 1 1/2-mile Quicken Tree Stakes on Friday night at Hollywood Park.
It would have made great reading, too. Quicken Tree was a sight to behold. A sun-bleached chestnut with four long stockings and a forthright blaze, he was a bag of neuroses who used to freeze with stage fright in the gate, which made him, by default, the most electrifying stretch-runner of his era.
With the victory of Big Brown in the Preakness, racing and its media remoras now move briskly from reform to ritual. The memory of the death of Eight Belles will grow dim, experienced only as an occasional gulp of acid reflux in the otherwise festive coverage during the next three weeks. You think the Jenna Bush wedding was a big deal? Wait until the Dutrow-Desormeaux show hits Broadway.
BALTIMORE - Thoroughbred racing always is hungry for a new hero. And the sport particularly is desperate for a hero after the death of the filly Eight Belles tarnished the Kentucky Derby and produced a torrent of bad publicity. So it was understandable that Big Brown's victory in the Preakness on Saturday would be greeted with elation and lavish superlatives.
"In 27 years of riding, I never saw a horse accelerate like this one," declared Gary Stevens, the Hall of Fame jockey who now is an NBC television commentator.
NEW YORK - How fast is too fast and how much is too much?
Those are two fundamental questions about horse racing that are a lot more complicated than critics of the sport have represented them in the wake of the Eight Belles accident after the Kentucky Derby.