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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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 Big Brown, the "surefire" Triple Crown winner, comes in dead last at Saturday's Belmont Stakes, dashing the hopes of millions. |
Big Brown made fools
of many, including us
of TheColumnists.com
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Among other things,
the long ago darling New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia is
remembered for saying, “When I make a mistake it’s
a beaut.” I reacted to the hyperbole trying to put some juice into the telecast. I labeled as ridiculous the comments by more than one of the announcers that it was harder to win the Triple Crown of racing than to win grand slams in tennis or golf or for a baseball hitter to win the batting average/home run/runs batted in Triple Crown. (Note: only Bobby Jones has won golf’s grand slam, only Rod Laver and Steffi Graf have won tennis’ grand slam and there have been 11 modern era baseball triple crown winners, the same number as the 11 horses that have won the Triple Crown) By my lights this Belmont was little more than a walkover (a race with only one entrant). It was bad enough that none of the horses had any kind of credentials, but the prospect of a close contest was made even more unlikely by the loss of the unbeaten Japanese horse, Casino Drive, who came up with a sore foot the day before the race. Brent Musberger is an old hand at huckstering so it didn’t surprise me when he opened the ABC telecast saying, “We have not heard buzz like this since Smarty Jones tried to win the Triple Crown in 2004. Can Big Brown win the Triple Crown? We’ll soon find out.” In my opinion, the buzz by knowledgeable people at the track would have been only about the loss of Casino Drive, who represented the only real threat to Big Brown. Casino was a dark horse because he had won his only two races, one of them impressively in the Peter Pan Stakes at Belmont two weeks ago. He was suspect for sure, but intriguing exactly because he was an unknown quantity. Though Big Brown would face eight rivals, they were so undistinguished, I felt his task loomed less strenuous than Count Fleet facing only two horses in 1943; Whirlaway competing against only three in 1941, and Secretariat having only four rivals in 1973. Well, Left Fielder meet Fiorello LaGuardia. Big Brown, the 30 cents-on-a-dollar favorite, came up just about empty and Da’ Tara, at 38 ½-to-one, the longest shot in the race who had won only one in seven, took the lead at the start, led all the way and won by more than five lengths.
A good thing that ABC didn’t call on me for expertise as it did with my onetime Newsday colleague Bill Nack and former Sports Illustrated wag Rick O’Reilly who tried to mine comedy in a “Big Brown can’t be beat” routine. ABC long has ignored pre-race attention to outsider horses. The network did it again this time, hardly showing Da’ Tara on screen before the race. I had laced into the network for this several times before--it was one of the reasons Howard Cosell used to call me “Sleaze One”--but I would have been just as off base as ABC and ESPN were this time. Even the day afterward we were still waiting for an explanation about how the horse got its unusual name. People like to cheer stars, but in a way it was a mixed blessing that Big Brown didn’t win. Had he won there would have been question about whether the steroids he had been given--at least until April according to trainer Rick Dutrow--had been a factor in his victory. Even if he wouldn’t have had the benefit of steroids in this race, there is the argument that steroids help horses and humans build up muscle in training that has a longtime effect. There has been as well resentment that the horse was owned by a financial syndicate whose purpose is to be an equine hedge fund that delivers profits to its investors. And whose head had a checkered background on Wall Street. This didn’t have the appeal of Funny Cide, owned by ordinary Saratoga blokes or Smarty Jones, the pride of Philadelphia-Delaware folk or the ill-fated Barbaro. And, finally, trainer Dutrow’s “we-can’t-be-beat”
arrogance came back to haunt him. Nor did he win any compliments
for refusing to be interviewed before the telecast ended. Native Dancer came in second, the only loss of his storied career. The guy, as far as I recall, went to the clink. The irony of it was that he would have made as much money betting on place or show, because Native Dancer was so short-priced he would have paid no more for win than place or show. Big Brown seemed to be healthy after the race, so nobody had a good reason for his failure to take hold. My friend, Bobbie Bobrove, had as good an explanation as any immediately afterward. She said, “We kept hearing from his
people that Big Brown was an ‘intellectual’ horse.
Well, if he was so smart, he knew better than want to run in
the 97-degree heat.” |
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustrations of Big Brown and Da'Tara are a staff artist's rendition of news wire photographs. This column first posted June 9, 2008.
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