Chris Baker Joins Three Chimneys P9
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Chris Baker joins Three Chimneys p9 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2013 732-747-8060 $ TDN Home Page Click Here SAY GOODBYE TO HOLLYWOOD MR SPEAKER UPSETS DANIA BEACH By Bill Christine Phipps Stable=s homebred Mr Speaker (Pulpit) surged No better way to write about 32 years of memories through an opening along the rail and spurted clear to at Hollywood Park than by donning one of the old take the GIII Dania Beach S. by 2 3/4 lengths over the souvenir Zenyatta caps. It sounds corny, and the cap is Gulfstream turf course Saturday. Sent off at 10-1, the on life support, but it works. Zenyatta is a bookend for dark bay colt was taken in hand soon after the break all things Hollywood Park. She won eight of eight starts and settled near the back of the pack as Bon Accord there, and in 2010 single-handedly accounted for the (Showing Up) set the early pace. Mr Speaker inched last day that the place had that big-race feel of closer down the backstretch and angled to the rail yesteryear. nearing the turn. Forced Long before the Los Angeles Times began sending me to wait for room under out to Hollywood Park in 1982, I had been a sometime- a patient Jose Lezcano, visitor to the track, more as a horseplayer than a he burst through an journalist. In the 1960s, I wondered what a Sweet opening along the rail in Young Thing known as "The Goose Girl" was doing, the final furlong and wandering around the infield lakes, strewing poseys powered clear, from a wicker basket in her wake. Glomming the crowd completing the mile in in the Turf Club set me straight. There was Dick Allen, 1:36.60. Cabo Cat the droopy-lidded baseball slugger, with a full-length fur (Kitten=s Joy) rallied on coat on his back and a starlet on his arm. A few years the outside to be second. Pleuven (Fr) Mr Speaker before, Bo Belinsky, who had just pitched a no-hit Kenny Martin game, was denied entrance because he was without a (Turtle Bowl {Ire}), necktie, but then his companion, Walter Winchell, dawdled briefly at the intervened. In those days, this was indeed break and was last for much of the contest before HOLLYWOOD Park. All they had to do was switch on flying late to be third. AHe showed me a lot of class the klieg lights. down the stretch,@ Lezcano said. AI think he=ll get better (Years later, I would interview a long-retired Allen, with maturity, too. We had a good trip. He broke good who was paying fealty to his horseracing passions as and was relaxed down the backside. I let him pick it up an upstart breeder and bloodstock agent, wannabe a little down the backstretch and he got me inside. As jockey's agent and what have you. He would call the soon as the hole opened up, he shot right through. He office to complain, of all things, that I had written too showed me a lot.@ Cont. p8 much about his baseball derring-do, not enough about his new life in horse racing). Cont. p3 The opening-day crowd at Hollywood June 10, 1938 Hollywood Park photo In This Issue A Dozen in the Malibu 60 Broad St., Suite 100 Red Bank, NJ 07701 Fields were drawn yesterday for Thursday’s opening day card at Santa Anita. (732) 747-8060 Gary and Mary West’s Flashback (Tapit) faces 11 sophomores in the (732) 747-8955 (fax) GI Malibu S., while GI Test S. winner Sweet Lulu www.thoroughbreddailynews.com (Mr. Greeley) looks to www.thetdn.com return to the winner’s circle while facing six in the GI La Brea S. A field CO-PUBLISHERS of 10 was entered for the GII Sir Beaufort S. Barry Weisbord, President [email protected] • @barryweisbord Sue Finley, Vice President Full fields p9 [email protected] • @suefinley Flashback BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Benoit Sweet Lulu Gary King, Director of Business Development A Coglianese [email protected] EDITORIAL [email protected] Jessica Martini, Editor-in-Chief Chris Baker Joins Three Chimneys Alan Carasso, Managing Editor Steve Sherack, Racing Editor Longtime Spring Hill Farm general manager Chris Baker has been named Brian DiDonato, Racing Analyst/Soc. Media Dir. Chief Operating Officer at the Borges Torrealba and Clay families’ Three Justina Severni, Associate Editor Chimneys Farm. Christie DeBernardis, Assistant Editor Heather Likins, Assistant Editor Page 9 Catlyn Spivey, Assistant Editor ADVERTISING [email protected] Alycia Borer, Director of Advertising Lia Kusch, Senior Advertising Designer Op/Ed Feedback Sarah K. Andrew, Senior Advertising Coordinator/Director of Distribution Readers provide feedback to Barry Irwin’s Op/Ed piece in Saturday’s TDN. Amanda Crelin, Advertising Designer Amanda Foster, Advertising Assistant Page 11 CUSTOMER SERVICE [email protected] Vicki Forbes, Director of Customer Service INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Robert Williams, Director of IT [email protected] Gregg Casillo, DB Administrator, Programming [email protected] WORLDWIDE INFORMATION Kelsey Riley, International Editor [email protected] Sean Cronin, Newmarket Bureau, Cafe Racing Tom Frary, Newmarket Bureau, Cafe Racing [email protected] EST Race Click for TV 1:25a Arima Kinen-G1, Nakayama TVG pps TVG TDN P HEADLINE NEWS • 12/22/13 • PAGE 3 of 11 • thoroughbreddailynews.com A ‘Wild’ First Breeders’ Cup... As it should be, the best was saved for last. Wild By the 1980s, the star power in the seats at Again, Gate Dancer and Slew o= Gold tried hammering Hollywood Park had been pretty much reduced to an one another into submission in the Classic, in the most aging Ed McMahon, rip-roaring finish to any horse race, anytime, anywhere. Vince Edwards in a Pat Day, with marching orders to avoid the whip, kept rumpled brown suit, and the stick to himself and rode Wild Again to an those indefatigable improbable win. His cagey owners had put up handicappers, Dick Van $360,000 in supplemental money just to make their Patten and Mel Brooks. horse eligible, causing Mickey Taylor, one of the But for one day, the owners of Slew o' Gold, to say before the race: "Man, inaugural running of the all that money for a 30-1 shot? Those guys are what's Breeders' Cup in 1984, known as dead game." the CEO Marje Everett The Wild Again crowd, known as Black Chip Stable, called in a few markers was cocksure to a man. Hours before the race, in a and rustled up enough hotel room along Century Boulevard, Bill Allen's future A-list celebrities for a wife Nina stepped out of the bathroom dressed to the reprise of the Good Old 9s and asked Allen how she looked. Days. Midway through "Perfect," Allen said. "You're very pretty. But there's the card, I bumped into A stirring and controversial finish in one thing." Neil Papiano, the track's the inaugural Breeders’ Cup Classic "What?" she said. "The purse," Allen said. "It's not legal counsel. "I've never breederscup.com big enough. It's not big enough to hold all the money seen anything like it," he we're going to win out there today." said. "I just got finished escorting Elizabeth Taylor to Incredibly, the supplemental fee for Wild Again was the winner's circle for the presentation. When the only part of the gamble. His owners bet with both crowd saw her, they parted like the Red Sea." hands at the track and in Las Vegas, where they were When the overnight sheet came out, Roger Laurin, yet to commingle the pools. Vincent Timphony, Wild trainer of Chief's Crown, looked at the entries and said: Again's trainer and a part owner, went to his grave "My horse is in the first half of the Daily Double. Can without saying how much they collected, but there you beat that?" (Chief's Crown would win the have been reports that it might have approached the Juvenile). $1.35-million purse that their horse won. Cont. p4 TDN P HEADLINE NEWS • 12/22/13 • PAGE 4 of 11 • thoroughbreddailynews.com Ron Volkman, another of the owners, was delegated to count and distribute the on-track winnings. He went into a stall in one of the men's rooms to sort out the swag. "I was shaking so bad, I was lucky the whole thing didn't fall into the toilet," Volkman said. Wild Again's dramatic win was not without a 10-minute stewards' inquiry. When they decided to leave Wild Again's number up, but disqualify Gate Dancer from second to third place, the owners of both Gate Dancer and Slew o' Gold soured. They planned to appeal the outcome to the state racing board, and the civil courts if necessary. The morning after the race, the stewards called a hearing and invited all parties. A reporter asked Marje Everett if the press would be able to sit in. "Hollywood Park has no secrets," she said. The hearing lasted 45 minutes. The stewards were Pete Pedersen and the retired jockeys Alfred Shelhamer and Hubert Jones. They had already earned their pay the day before, disqualifying a filly owned by Earl Scheib in the second Breeders' Cup race ever run. Coincidentally, Scheib, who painted cars to pay for his racing stable, had bought time on NBC for a 30-second spot that ran shortly after the disqualification was announced. Scheib was the pitchman in his own commercials ("No ups and no extras"). "You can't imagine," he said later, "how many people called to say how composed I was on the commercial, considering I had just had a million-dollar race taken away from me.