Take my Tweet to Melissa Hoppert, a NYT reporter who is also an editor. Ms. Hoppert had the boxed exacta picked in both the Derby and the Preakness. Following her would give you a positive ROI. I had the Derby exacta of Justify and Good Magic, but fell short in the Preakness when Good Magic couldn't hold second place and got passed by Bravazo and Tenfold just before the wire, setting up a tight four-horse finish.
Justify was getting caught, and if the Preakness were the Derby distance he would have been easily passed before the wire. But, that's hypothetical. Justify won, and now sets his sights, like many others before him, with an attempt to win the Triple Crown by taking the Belmont Stakes at the formidable distance of a mile and a half—once around Big Sandy—on June 9th, the day after my second daughter's wedding.
My oldest daughter Nancy got married on the day Birdstone swept past Smarty Jones in "the shadow of the wire" and upset his bid for the Triple Crown in 2004. I remember starting the day by relaxing with the Daily Racing Form and kicking myself for not betting Nick Zito's horse in the first race, who won. Nicky of course won with Birdstone, for Mary Lou Whitney, who in a true sporting fashion expressed a little regret that her horse stopped Smarty Jones. She said something about the connections to the effect, "they're such nice people."
So, my family has a predisposition of scheduling nuptials around The Belmont Stakes. At least this time I'll be able to watch the race because the wedding is the day before the Belmont. Thus, I'm set up to watch the 150th Belmont rather than having to rely on a radio broadcast as I did for the 2004 race. The 150th Belmont is my 50th anniversary of going out to the races.
My last attendance at a Belmont was 1999, when Lemon Drop Kid pulled off a huge upset. The gang and I stopped trying to attend Belmonts when the seat prices got too ridiculous and the exiting from the track proved ridiculously difficult. In 1989 it took us over an hour to get out of the parking lot, and we stayed for all the races. It was a disaster. I wrote letters and accused them of holding us hostage—kidnapping us— by not allowing an efficient egress. My last Belmont in attendance.
Ms. Hoppert's piece in yesterday's piece was all about the road ahead for Justify. Three weeks to prepare for the next race of his extremely short racing career. He already became the first horse to win the Derby without competing as a two year-old since a horse named Apollo back the 19th century.
Ms. Hoppert's piece at the outset told us Justify is being pampered. "...his feet were picked and his legs were wrapped while he enjoyed a cool breeze from the fan outside his stall."
Huh? I don't know everything about the care of thoroughbreds, but I'm not familiar with the term "picked." Did she mean "packed?" That wouldn't sound good. The tone of the story is that everything is fine with Justify, and there is no hoof bruise like he suffered after the Derby.
If the word were "packed" then images of the rumor surrounding Secretariat in 1973 come to life. Just before that race there were detractors that claimed Big Red's legs were standing in buckets of ice—he wasn't sound. Secretariat's sire was Bold Ruler, basically a sprinter whose distance breeding qualities were questionable. As we know, Secretariat answered all those questions.
A lookup in the OED for the word pick yielded a definition that fit the context. It sounds like his hoofs were trimmed, not unlike a trip to the nail salon. Whether little designs were applied to his hooves is unknown.
[Proving that there is no end to what you can find on YouTube, Melissa was kind enough to forward me a link to, what else, an instructional video on cleaning your horse's hooves. And, I might add, it's hardly the only video on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsxNOM_tiMw]
And here is the uncanny part. My Tweet to @melissahoppert mentioned that as always something reminds me of something else, and the use of word "pick" made me think of dialogue in the 1971 movie The French Connection where Popeye Doyle, the lead narcotics detective played by Gene Hackman, confronts drug pushers for information and roughs them up a bit and goes into a sing-song that goes,"do you pick your toes? Do you pick your toes in Poughkeepsie?"
Picking the toes refers to injecting drugs into the foot between the toes, but the meaning of the Poughkeepsie reference has always alluded me. And everyone else, until you latch onto an analysis of the movie at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmihQf9WmDk. It was a non sequitur used by the real-life NYC narcotics detective Eddie Egan to confuse suspects.
All roads are connected. The Tweet generated a response from @POkPopCulture with a YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9wsek4BeA&feature=youtu.be to a 2:11 minute scene from the movie that carries the "pick your toes" dialogue.
So, my reference to Poughkeepsie generates someone with the @PokPopCulture handle to link me to the French Connection scene. Tell me we don't live on a Mobius strip.
Will Justify justify all the hype he'll get and win the Belmont and thus become the 13th horse to win it all? On May 21, 2002 Mike Lopresti of USA Today wisely wrote:
There were but 11 Triple Crown winners in the last century, only three in the last 54 years. And with Seattle Slew's passing the other day, all of them are dead. This we know because living Triple Crown champions are kept track of like ex-presidents and Titanic survivors.
Now of course with American Pharoah's achievement in 2015 there are 12 Triple Crown winners. Will Justify make it 13?
My own sense is he won't. His immediate breeding doesn't scream distance. But, then again, Secretariat didn't scream distance either.
Nevertheless, the freak of nature that it takes to complete the Triple is not produced often. After Secretariat in 1973, there were the back-to-back years of Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in 1978. Seattle Slew was undefeated going into the Belmont, and of course emerged still undefeated after the Belmont. I was there for all those Triple Crowns, and it is exciting. Secretariat's of course will forever stand out because of the incredible time he completed the race in—a record that still stands
Joe Drape, the senior racing reporter fro the NYT returned a Tweet that picks Audible for the victory. An Audible victory would give the owners—and there are A LOT of them—the distinction of being an ownership group winning the Triple Crown, but with two horses. Asterisk time?
To the uninitiated, the ownership group for Justify and Audible is WinStar, China Racing Club, Starlight Racing and Head of Plains Partners. The China Racing Club is a likewise conglomerate of fractional ownership people. WinStar is a leading breeding operation, headed by Elliot Walden who gave up training for training of a different sort. Kind of like going from manager to general manager in baseball.
With all those "connections" the winner's circle at the Derby and the Preakness resembled the look of two Greyhound buses that developed engine trouble that had to get all their passengers off and onto the side of the road to await help.
My own sense is that someone with significant distance breeding will prevail in the Belmont. Of the horses that have so far run, this points to Brazano, whose sire is Awesome Again, an undefeated four year-old who won the Breeders' Cup Classic in 1998. A leading sire.
Brazano is trained by D. Wayne Lukas, the octogenarian Hall of Fame trainer who has won 14 Triple Crown races. Lukas knows his way around many race tracks. Brazano finished a very fast closing second in the Preakness, just the kind horse who can win the Belmont, especially if the front-runners tire at the end, like Smarty Jones, and many others who try, but don't succeed.
The Triple Crown is almost like what Arctic exploration was at the start of the 20th century. Attempts, with some eventual success. Mount Everest.
The other distance bred possibility is Tenfold, another closer in the Preakness who finished third in a the tight bunch of four at the wire. Good Magic dueled Justify, but faded with the effort, and his trainer Chad Brown was not happy with the trip. Don't look for Good Magic in the Belmont.
Tenfold boasts Curlin as his sire, a Preakness, Breeders' Cup Classic and Dubai World Cup winner. A formidable horse who is trained by Steve Asmussen, another Hall of Fame trainer.
Will I be right? Will Joe Drape be right? Will Melissa pick the exacta again? Or, will we have a completely "new shooter" like Tonalist who upset California Chrome's attempt at a Triple Crown?
One thing is for sure. The day after Susan's wedding and on the 50th anniversary of my hitting a cold $2 Daily Double (the only exotic bet at he time) that hooked me onto handicapping and making me wonder "how long has this been going on," and my now becoming someone who is a grey-haired codger wearing a giveaway cap (bill forward) who "dopes" out the form and can sing most of the lyrics to Fugue for Tinhorns from the musical Guys and Dolls, I will have hit the exacta with two married daughters and so far two grandchildren.
How long can this go on?
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
I don't think Justify can do it - I will look for a hunch relating to your daughter's wedding - a come from behind and hope it's not a muddy track.
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