STAN ISAACS
Out of Left Field
 Sometimes the most interesting stories aren't about winners |
 Point Given, a disaster at the Kentucky Derby, won the Belmont Stakes with a powerful display of speed. |
This is the story of an owner with a genuine passion for his horse
By STAN ISAACS of TheColumnists.com
I saw my first Belmont
Stakes in 1944 when I was 15. I have covered or seen all but
a few of them since then. It is New York’s greatest horse
race, it is my favorite horse race.
My way of covering the race is to amble out to the barns early
in the morning a few days before the race and mosey around looking
for a story angle. Last Wednesday at the barn of Belmont contender
Invisible Ink I came upon some NBC people doing an interview
with John Fort, Invisible Ink’s owner. I eavesdropped.
I was struck by the passion of the owner for his horse. He followed
up on the story of his horse that first came to the attention
of most of the nation on the NBC telecast of the Kentucky Derby.
The horse, which was bought for $105,000, suddenly came down
with a terrible illness. The horse was near death and would have
been put down if not for Fort’s refusal to give up. He found
a veternarian who recommended an old-fashioned cure. The vet
told him to go to get buttermilk at a farm, put the buttermilk
in the sun for flies to get to it and get a crust on it which
would produce a kind of bacteria that could be applied to the
horse.
Invisible Ink recovered, got to the racetrack and won three straight
races. He was good enough to be entered in the Kentucky Derby.
He made a late run to finish second at odds of 55-to-1. Even
the owners of the winning Monarchos could not have been happier
than Fort at the finish of that race. And now he was standing
outside Barn 31 telling the NBC people about the impact his horse
had made on many people.
“After that race I got 30,000 e-mails from people who identified
with that horse. I got a call from a man who was seriously ill
like Inky and said he would use buttermilk the same way. I got
a letter from a man in prison who said how much it meant to him
to see the horse do so well. There were so many people who felt
that they had come back from serious illness who said they yelled
their lungs out for him.”
John Fort is a South Carolinian who comes from money. He rode
polo ponies. When he decided to get involved with thoroughbreds,
he went up to the Belmont barns and asked for a job as a hot
walker with the famous Calumet Stables. “There is nothing
lower on the racetrack,” he said, “than a hotwalker.
But I wanted to learn the business. The first day there they
gave me a horse to walk around in a circle. We were behind a
big horse and I asked who that horse was. It was Alydar, the
great Alydar.”
Fort said that New York meant the most to him because he started
here. So it was the Belmont Stakes that he has most set his sights
on winning. “Even though we went in the Derby, it has always
been the Belmont for me.”
It is not exactly a usual thing for a six-foot-five inch white
man with a shock of white hair, a man of distinguished bearing
to ask for a job as a hotwalker at a racetrack. One trainer told
me, “I wouldn’t hire such a guy. I would figure he
was an undercover inspector or something looking to find unregistered
aliens or whatever.”
Fort said “I think I am better for having worked at such
jobs. I think it is important to know what all the people on
a racetrack have to go through.”
On the NBC pre-Derby feature, Fort’s eyes had welled up
as he told the story of the horse’s recovery. “It was
the most incredible recovery of all animals I have ever seen,”
he said. Now, as he talked about what a horse can mean to people,
how a horse touches basic emotions in these days of technology,
his eyes welled up anew.
“When I checked into the hotel in Garden City for the Belmont,”
he said, “the doorman said, “Mr. Invisible Ink. How’s
Inky” Fort beamed.
The NBC people talked to Fort for some 20 minutes. They ran the
piece before Saturday’s Belmont Stakes. Yet, television
being television, they ran about three minutes of it at best.
It all would have had a glorious ending if Inky had gone on to
win the Belmont. No such luck. He went off at odds of less than
10-to-l, broke nicely, settled back as is his wont, and never
seriously threatened. He finished fifth in the nine-horse field.
No shot.
After the race I wandered the half-mile from the grandstand into
the backstretch to the corner of War Admiral and Citation Ave.
where Barn 31 stands. Fort wasn’t there for some time. A
hot walker walked the blanketed Invisible Ink around the 80-yard-long
barn. Groom Will Hooks, who had been drssed in a spiffy gray
suit when he took Inky to the paddock, now was in a black tank
top as he readied Inky’s Stall No. 11. Trainer Todd Pletcher
said, “Point Given dominated. I watched the replay. We were
only five lengths behind the second horse.” He shrugged.
Pletcher, mostly to keep himself busy, swept some dirt out of
his office at one end of the barn. He watched the race following
the Belmont on his office television set. Outside the barn a
rooster on the well-kept lawn crowed.
An hour after the race, Fort drove up with his wife in a road
vehicle. He put his palms out. “Point Given was too much
horse,” he said. “We finished only five lengths behind
second, but that doesn’t amount to much, does it?”
He said, “I never thought we would win. But when we were
in a gap behind four horses as they went into the final turn
I thought maybe he was getting set to make a charge. But John
[jockey Velasquez] said he never gave him much. He was just even
all the way. Maybe we have to think the whole thing over. Maybe
we shouldn’t have waited five weeks since the Derby.”
Well-wishers came by to commiserate. “Don’t give up,”
a woman said.
“If you give up after losing,” he said, “you don’t
belong in this game.”
And he added, “Well, maybe it all came together for us at
the Derby.”
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs.
You can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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