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 A staff artist depicts SUMMER BIRD, winner of the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, chowing down on some hay while Calvin Borel no doubt chews his own cud and wonders what he did wrong to let this rival horse get past his favored horse, MINE THAT BIRD. |
Sidewalks of New York
Did in A Sweet Country Guy
of TheColumnists.com
I fear the bright lights of Broadway and what I claim is the Stock Exchange jinx foiled country guy Calvin Borel at the Belmont Stakes.
Instead of spending his time the week of the Belmont riding races at the foreboding, only mile-and-a-half track in the western world, he was the sweetheart of the media. He hobnobbed with TV’s David Letterman, he walked through Times Square for an ABC camera. And at a time when the New York Stock Exchange doesn’t rate high in the esteem of the battered populace, Borel and trainer Chip Woolley tempted the fates by ringing the Stock Exchange bell one morning. The bell tolled for them.
Kenny Mayne and Hank Goldberg, the ESPN-ABC-TV voices, previewed what might happen in the Belmont. Mayne said, “Borel is setting himself up as a scapegoat” by not riding in races before the Belmont. Goldberg said he pressed jockey Stewart Elliott on the same subject and that Elliott reluctantly admitted he might have done better had he ridden at Belmont Park before he lost the 2004 Belmont Stakes and a Triple Crown aboard Smarty Jones.
The post-race verdict was that Borel moved too early on Mine That Bird in the Belmont. The horse was rank and wanted to move and went to the lead too soon. Borel said he thought he would win when his horse took the lead on the turn into the stretch.
The question here is this: if Borel had a better sense of that 1,100-foot stretch, might he have been able to restrain his eager mount? A second-guess, but that’s what makes horse racing.
Borel is such a sweet, ingenuous man, people tended to go easy on him after the race. He deserves that kindness.
Kent Desormeaux, the winning jockey aboard Summer Bird, had a big day in many respects. He was keen enough to suggest that Borel was being “naïve” in not testing the track before the race. He rode a flawless race in moving later than Mine That Bird. Desormeaux made up for making a too-soon move on Real Quiet in the 1998 Belmont.
And he showed himself to be something of a wordsmith. Before the race he said that for a horse to win the Belmont “he has to have heart, class, determination, the will to win and stamina.” After the race he talked of “beauty, class and elegance.”
TV rode the talents of a poet of the turf by inserting some taped commentaries from Bill Nack, the former Newsday writer who came into his own chronicling the career of Secretariat. These are some of the Nack lines on the glory of the Belmont:
He called the Belmont “ground as hallowed as any in sport.”…”a place where Triple Crown dreams oft go to die, where fortunes are lost in a swirl of dust.” “where Secretariat left behind the ultimate measure of the sport, 31 lengths of daylight that stretch across history, defying greatness for all who followed.”
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ESPN did a five-hour lead-up to the ABC telecast which took over for an hour-and-a-half before the race. One feature tickled me.
It replayed New York track announcer Tom’ Durkin’s call of a recent race won by a horse with the outrageous name of Doremifasollatido. Durkin called the horse leading down the stretch and when the horse crossed the finish line victorious, Durkin bust into song, “Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti”--and then a full-throated “DO.”
Priceless.
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Mine That Bird wound
up with 1-2-3 finishes in the Triple Crown races. The good thing
about him is that he is a gelding, so he won’t be rushed
away from race tracks to try to make millions as a stud. With
luck, he will win more big races and join treasured geldings
like Kelso, John Henry and Forego. All kept winning long enough
for the general populace to appreciate them.
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Here’s a pet peeve of an admitted old fogey. For years, “Sidewalks of New York” (starting with the lines, “East, Side, West Side, all around the town…) was the theme song of the Belmont Stakes. With some intense lobbying by a transplanted Englishman at The New York Daily News, “New York, New York” became the theme song of the race.
Coises.
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In 1920 Man o’ War suffered the only loss of his legendary career in the Travers Stakes at Saratoga. The horse that beat him was Upset. With that the word “upset” entered the language. The first week of June saw the upset of Rafael Nadal by Robin Soderling in the French Tennis Open and then the upset victory by Summer Bird in the Belmont. There was no upset, however, in the Paris Open final as Roger Federer trounced Soderling in three sets to finally break through and win the clay tournament that eluded him for many years.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted June 8, 2009.
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