Names for thoroughbred horses can sometimes be like solving crossword puzzles. There's a clue in the name, and your job is to divine the answer.
Take some of the horses from yesterday's card at Belmont. Horse names can often be a bit of a portmanteau based on the sire and dam's names. And if you buy a decent past performance, those names are there to see, as well as the grandsire's names on the sire and dam's side. If there's one thing that's true in thoroughbred racing, breeding counts.
Naming a horse is a function of the breeder, the person or farm that is responsible for matching the sire to the dam. Breeders can be owners, but usually they arrange the union, have the foal trained, then sell the foal at an auction, or yearling sale. By the time someone owns a horse they've also bought the name, a name governed by he naming conventions of the Jockey Club, an organization somewhat like the Internet domain naming group that governs the length (no more than 18 spaces, blanks counted) and the appropriateness, no politically charged names or overt sexual innuendos, and no reference to reserved named of former champions. You can't be Secretariat II.
Occasionally, a name seems to sneak through that carries someone's long-held sentiments. Consider Effinex, a seemingly innocuous name that sounds like a chemical ingredient in your toothpaste, but when sounded out aloud clearly expresses someone's disdain for their former spouse: Effin' Ex. Get it?They're not always that clever.
Most names tend to be prosaic, and have no discernible relation to the breeding or the breeder's message. Or, they can be an obvious reference to their breeding, e.g. Awesome Indra by Awesome of Course, sired by Awesome Again. Yawn.
Then there are those that are subtle, and perhaps head scratchers. Take Mosienko. Just a Slavic name, right? Well, the New York breeder Anthony Grey reached somewhere in his memory because the sire of Mosienko is Hat Trick. Yeah, so?
Well Bill Mosienko was the captain of the Chicago Black Hawks who in 1952 against the hapless New York Rangers, playing with their third string goaltender called up from the Eastern League in the final game of the season, scored a hat trick in 21 seconds. (Three goals)
Stan Fischler, that octogenarian hockey maven and historian wrote about it in 2017 and was at the game as a 20-something year old Ranger fan, the vice president of their fan club.
Stan's piece rings all the bells of my memory of the "Old" Garden. I'm nowhere near as old as Stan, but I have distinct memories of the place. Apparently for that final game, the Garden management knew fan interest would be low so they closed off all the upper sections, the side and end balconies, where Stan and myself would be to watch the games.
Side balcony was $1.50 when I went in the '60s, and because of the way the Garden was built for boxing sight lines, offered an obstructed view of the ice as soon as you were in row B. The end balcony was better for viewing, and was $2.00. I knew a friend in high school who had season seats, side balcony, Row A. As soon as I sat behind him, a quarter of the ice was invisible to me.
Stan recalls watching the game from the End Arena seats as part of a crowd of 3,254 rather than the usual sellout of 15,925. In that era of the six-team NHL, the first four teams in the standings made the Stanley Cup playoffs. I think the season then was 50 games, so a final season game in late March makes sense. (How times change!) The Rangers were pretty much perennial cellar dwellers, but that season it was the Black Hawks who were in last place, with the Rangers just ahead of them.
I have to admit I never read anything about Mosienko's goal details until Greg Wolf and Richard Migliore mentioned Mosienko during a Racing Across America telecast. I caught that they made a fleeting reference to Mosienko's sire, Hat Trick, and that it had something to do with Bill being a hockey player. At the outset they didn't know about his 21 second record.
As for the horse Mosienko, she's a hard knocking 4-year-old $25,000 claimer who doesn't have a bad record: 14 starts, 3, 3, 2, winning $105,498 so far lifetime. Because she brings home part of the purse she's often claimed, meaning different people get to own her.
Perhaps fittingly, although Mosienko didn't win on Monday, she does have three career wins: a hat trick.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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