INGLEWOOD, Calif. - The movie pitch for the life of Gary Stevens, who is retiring this weekend, would probably go something like this:

Take a kid from the sticks, a real Huckleberry, who spends more time on horseback than doing chores around the homestead. Picture the young Clark Kent meets "Green Acres." But instead of super powers that he uses on the sly, give him some kind of weird childhood disease, a bum leg or something, that turns him into a feisty little James Cagney kind of scrapper who you don't want to look at crosswise or else he'll go after you with his crutch.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Jon Court had a week that would drive a lesser man to distraction.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Those who judge a book by its cover usually end up reading trash. Splashy wrapping goes only so far, then it comes time to test the quality of the product inside.

The same warning holds true when passing judgment on a Thoroughbred racehorse. Sure, the million-dollar babies look great on paper, and some of them even can run. But using only the cover price as a guide is the lazy way out. It's more fun to find the hidden treasures.

NEW YORK - There are three possible outcomes to the murky future of New York racing when the New York Racing Association's franchise expires in 2007 or if the organization runs out of money before then.

The first is the continuation of the current NYRA or some reconstituted version of the not-for-profit model that began in 1955; the second is the sale of the franchise to an outside company such as Churchill Downs or Magna; the third is the takeover of the operation by the state of New York and the administration of racing by the government.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Ronnie Virgets can be forgiven, just this once, if he feels the weight of some great, dark juju curse bearing down upon his everlasting soul, firing warning shots across his weathered bow and otherwise playing havoc with a life not intended to hurt anybody.

It was bad enough getting flooded out of his New Orleans home when the waters of Lake Pontchartrain broke through the levee of the 17th Street Canal and swamped his beloved neighborhood, just east of the sprawling City Park.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - It's mid-November in Southern California. The sun is shining, and temperatures have been running on the high side of average. The weather is perfect for a lot of healthy activities, but at Hollywood Park such benign conditions mean only one thing:

It's grass-growing time.

The truly serious competition at the current Hollywood meet is not taking place among horses and riders on the main track. It's out there on the freshly laid grass course, where nearly nine acres of GN-1 bermuda is waging a quietly desperate race against both time and the elements.

TUCSON, Ariz. - It is not exactly Gulliver's Travels, but there are strong overtones in racing events in recent weeks of Jonathan Swift's satiric tale of the little men of Lilliput.

In the current version it appears the nation's jockeys finally have tied down their Gulliver, L. Wayne Gertmenian. But in this version - Gertmenian's Travels - the big guy is not the good guy. The jockeys, more than 200 of them from 12 different tracks coast-to-coast, have swarmed over Gertmenian like the Lilliputians over Lemuel Gulliver.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - The dreamers among racing's most ardent followers are rarely satisfied with a feel-good movie. They want the real thing. So they invest their hopes in the season to come, with its promise of Stevie Wonderboy, Henny Hughes, and First Samurai among 3-year-olds to be, and a mouth-watering list of approaching 4-year-olds to flesh out the drama.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - It was tough enough to watch Bay Area weather descend upon Hollywood Park for its opening under its new ownership, the Bay Meadows Land Co. Then, just to rub in the irony, who should walk off with two muddy races on last Wednesday's opening day card but Mike Pegram, the man who stands ready, willing, and able to replace Hollywood Park on the Southern California racing circuit.

NEW YORK - These days, racetrack operators do a jig when handle is merely flat compared to the prior year, and a gain of a few percent is reason to uncork the champagne. By those standards, Churchill Downs should throw itself a ticker tape parade for what happened the first Saturday in November.