DEL MAR, Calif. - Compared with the handful of significant main-track races open to all comers at 1 1/4 miles, the Pacific Classic is a toddler. Or, technically, a teen, this being the 14th running of the million-dollar race coming up on Sunday.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Bettors playing Saratoga were howling in the rain Thursday, demanding the heads of track officials after it was announced that the sixth race was being taken off the grass as the horses were being loaded into the gate for the fourth. The players had every right to be furious at the time, but there was more to blame than a tardy announcement.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Want to make an easy five bucks at Saratoga? Defy any horseplayer in town, even among the most avid students of the game, to tell you the weights carried by the horses in the Whitney Handicap last Saturday.
Handicap weights are an anachronistic leftover from a bygone era in racing. No one knows or cares that Roses in May carried 114 while Perfect Drift carried 117 and Bowman's Band 114. No one knows whether it had anything to do with the outcome of the race, and no one bet on or against anyone because of the small differences in the weight assignments.
DEL MAR, Calif. - The worst thing about summertime at the races is that there is no time to sit down with a good book. The sport goes hard, six days a week, and barely rests on the seventh. Distractions abound, what with the tempting proximity of the Lake, the Shore, or the Beach, depending upon your taste in bodies of water. Cocktails arrive long before sunset, Mike Pegram shows up, and then, suddenly, it's tomorrow again.
TUCSON, Ariz. - Here in Tucson, Doug Reed of the University of Arizona School of Racing sits in well-deserved shiny new quarters, planning his highly successful December talkfest, the annual Symposium on Racing.
I have a suggestion, and a threat, for Doug.
First, the threat:
After Smarty Jones, if I hear a breeder talk about the betterment of racing and improvement of the breed, I'll get sick and mess up the big show right in front of hundreds in the rotunda of the Ventana Canyon Resort, the fancy digs where the Symposium is held.
The suggestion:
DEL MAR, Calif. - He's not quite the Giant Killer Jr. And even though you'd get an argument from Cigar, Del Mar still has a long way to go to be called a graveyard of favorites, at least in the Saratoga sense. But that was still a head-scratching, Hail Mary piece of work turned in by trainer Luis Seglin last Sunday, when the 6-year-old Miss Loren - the "other" Argentinean in the Grade 1 Clement L. Hirsch Handicap - mowed down a chorus line of accomplished opponents like they were nailed to the sixteenth pole.
DEL MAR, Calif. - The Clement L. Hirsch Handicap, named for one of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club founders, used to be the Chula Vista Handicap, and the Chula Vista Handicap used to be nothing more than a restricted race on the grass for older horses who had nothing better to do that afternoon.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Last Tuesday at Saratoga, about 60 of P.G. Johnson's friends and relatives gathered at the racetrack to remember his wife of 59 years, Mary Kay, who died in May. Though he was stuck in a wheelchair from two long bouts with cancer that had weakened his body and reduced his raspy growl to a barely audible whisper, he was alert and feisty as ever. His shoulders rocked with laughter at an old story about stealing a Christmas tree in his younger days, and he warmly greeted his favorite racetrack running buddies, fellow trainers Allen Jerkens and Barclay Tagg.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - What a difference a week makes. Wasn't it just Aug. 1 or so when Smarty Jones's owners were still candidates for sainthood after repeatedly saying they wanted to race their colt as a 4-year-old - while Azeri's camp was being fitted for tar and feathers for cruelly continuing to race a clearly finished champion?
DEL MAR, Calif. - A good trainer knows when to say "go" and when to say "whoa," which is why David Hofmans will merely be an interested spectator this weekend, when Del Mar offers the Sorrento Stakes for 2-year-old fillies and the Clement L. Hirsch Handicap for slightly older fillies and mares.