Twenty-five years ago, not to the day, but to the event, and what a way to see your first Triple Crown race in-person. Sunday Silence v. Easy Goer. Yow.
Racing was still captivating the people nationwide in the 1980s. Maybe NBCSN and the Big NBC will be able to do so again, but the attention-spans are shorter and you can gamble on anything you want on your computer from home. It will be difficult, probably impossible.
But here was the last Preakness of the decade, and it was a doozie. Everybody east of Los Angeles was in the Easy Goer camp. All that Phipps and Pat Day and Shug McGaughey 3d nonsense. Maybe only the slick Californians were rooting for Sunday Silence. Even though Sunday Silence had beaten him two weeks earlier in the Derby, the mopes in Baltimore considered it a fluke, and they favored Easy Goer, same as they had at Louisville. He was simply the better, more-talented horsey, and there was no muddy track to disadvantage the Easy Goer at Baltimore. The Easy Goer. Even his name was condescending.
We were legal to bet, free, yellow and 21 by 1988, but that never stopped us before. Risen Star in that year was a moral victory, the forces of righteousness and good, the hometown New Orleans heroes of Lamarque, Roussel 3d and Eddie Delahoussaye shoving it down the brilliant throat of Winning Colors, put on the track by the Evil Empire of Klein, Lukas and G. Stevens.
Didn’t make that one in person, 1988. Would have loved to, but as long as the New Orleans boys were beating Klein & La-La Land, it would have to suffice. Then when they rammed it home at Belmont three weeks later, Eddie D. hand-riding Risen Star with the whip out on the horse’s shoulder, just waving it ahead of his right-eye, rhythmically in a majestic procession down the lane, Eugene Klein ready to have a sweaty, sloppy heart attack in the Belmont clubhouse, that was the best. Lukas hiding in retreat behind the sunglasses. By damn, Risen Star, if he does not draw the rail in the Derby, is a Triple Crown winner, no doubt.
And again in 1989 the regional battle lines were drawn. No New Orleans this time, but this time the La-La Land was the right side to root for. Exam week was still going on in New Orleans on the first Saturday in May, so we had to watch the Derby from a bar on Maple. It was a damp track going in Louisville, and we all wanted Sunday Silence, given that he was not the favorite and that Easy Goer was so overhyped. We were OK with it.
School was out by the third Saturday in May, and we drove down I-95 to suburban Olney/Derwood, had dinner at the Copeland’s on Rockville Pike, fried crawfish tails and blackened redfish, bread pudding for desert, Dixies and Hurricanes and daiquiris all the while. Flying. Old friends, still remembered fondly if lost to time and space, always present in memory.
Lord, there must have been 12 or 13 of us that day, several cars, the locals sacrificing their rowhouse driveways and scarce frontyards to fleece the racegoers, ten or twenty bucks a car for the privilege to park. Then carrying the precious cold beverages in heavy Coleman and Igloo coolers, so weighed down with beer and ice that it felt like there must have been dead human bodies inside sloshing around. We stopped every 100 yards or so to ‘switch leads’ and let the arm that had been carrying the load take a rest.
Then waiting along the backstretch, crossing the main track and over the turf course, planks put down to keep the sod from wearing out too much, and into the infield.
It was all about the drinking and the socializing, of course, scamming on coeds, but when the minutes leading up to 5:40 p.m. EDT came around, the two of us, this writer and his best friend back then — where have you gone, Will? — and we dashed about the grounds to find some vantage from which to watch the whole spectacle.
We tried for the front apron, but there was no clear sight-line to the track. With maybe three minutes to go, we descended into some bowels of the plant, maybe below the infield, maybe below the grandstand, it was hard to tell, already drunk and spinning and sweating.
The scene was surreal, hardly about horseracing. If you’ve ever seen how they depict in the movies how the London Underground was used as a bomb shelter during the Battle of Britain, that’s what it was like. Just a bunch of citizens, hot, impatient, breathing too hard for too little air, waiting. Somehow we were able to push our way toward an overhead TV, probably a vintage Quasar with a dent in the speaker and two big dials, one for VHF tuning, the other for UHF, and we were watching the race.
It was impossible to hear on-track announcer Trevor Denman (you could look it up!) make the call. It was just the fans screaming like they were at a prizefight or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Absolute tumult.
The race was just a picture, you had to create the commentary in your head. It looked like Easy Goer was merely toying with Sunday Silence in deep stretch, ready to pull away on the rail whenever he wanted.
But Sunday Silence was Sunday Silence. What he lacked in blue blood and old money, he made up for in upstart opportunism. The horses’s heads were up-and-down, back-and-forth, inch-for-inch all the way down the final furlong, 12 or 13 seconds of alternating for the lead, stride-for-stride.
Sunday Silence hit his nose on the wire with pinpoint precision, a few centimeters in front of Easy Goer’s. On the totebard, 2-1 had beaten 3-5. The underdog prevailed.
For a split-second as the horses hit the wire and for a split-second after, the noise went out of the Pimlico Underground. A great collective exhalation followed, and then the noise started up again almost as quickly as it stopped. The fans could not believe it. Though it was close, they knew it was Sunday Silence. Though they had been beaten, as a group, when the favorite lost, they still were buzzing with excitement. They knew they had seen One for The Ages. Their horse had given everything he had, and was not at all disappointing save for the space of the very last inch of 75,240 of them; in time, the span of a couple hundredths of a second.
That was the first, and it always will be the best. Yes, two more visits to Pimlico followed in 1990 and ’91, with the unremarkable Hansel in that latter year returning a better price and a more mutuelly satisfying overlay than Sunday Silence did in 1989.
Sunday Silence and, yea, verily, Easy Goer will live forever. We still talk about them vividly 25 years later, and if racing somehow persists for another 75 years from today, surviving its own infirmities — nevermind climate-change and the Kanyassians and the unrelenting trend toward narcissism — or even if it does not, those who are left should simply bring up the running of the 1989 Preakness and say without need for boast or conceit, ‘This was a horse race’…
Best wishes for a prosperous and half as memorable Preakness Day 2014.
Free ones: Rundown…
Belmont 9
Calder / Gulf Calder 8, Gulf 8, 10
Santa Anita 2, 5, 7, 9, 11
Pay-side: Today…
Arlington 5, 6, 7, 9
BelTerra 2, 5, 8
Churchill 5, 8, 9, 10
Delpark 3, 6
Golden Gate 3, 4, 5, 10
Louisiana 1, 6
Lone Star 3, 4, 5, 10
Monmouth 5
Suffolk 5, 7
Woodbine 8
Today’s Stakes Pageantry: Eight big events for your Preakness Day at Pimlico. Racing!
SA 9 on the free page.
CD 10, WO 8 on the pay-side
#4 Kauai Katie is one of ’em Triple Threat Horseys in Bel 10. Now what? Likewise #1 Slim Shadey in Mth 11.
Wild-open in Cby 8. #7 Blues Edge, #6 Happy Hour Honey are two 6-1 morning-line chances who are not out of it.
Avoiding the morning-line chalk in FL 6 via #1 Mom’s Law, #6 American Trilogy, #7 Clear Pasaj, #3 Miss Rubycubes.
Over to Northlands for another Triple Threat Horsey: #2 Saturday Nite Ride, aptly named.
And in Prairie 8, #5 Shock Hazard is preferred to the favored coupled-entry.
Yesterday’s Activity: As always, Welcome to The Home of The Runner-Up Finish, this time nearly led by Mondai Mondai in the opener at Golden Gate.
Mondai Mondai, 14-1 in real life from a morning line of 15-1, was top of the V6 Betting Line and OK on the LifeLiner Speed Column analysis. He just could not get by the 7-5 fave, losing by 1½ lengths in a creditable effort. The winner was also OK on LifeLiner, and the saver exacta paid $48, 7-5 over 14-1 in a six-horse rumble.
Now for some winners. BelTerra 4 went to Olympic Street, $14.80.
Over at the Belmont, back-to-back Bonkersmate jackers in Races 3 & 4, Mad Props ($21.20) in the former, Giantinthemoonlite ($9.40) in the latter, yielding your winning daily double, which returned 50¢ shy of $200-even, for $2.
Finally, last but hardly least, to the Churchill, at which two races were touted, three horseys total were touted, and two of those won. In Race 6, Barber Shop Rock came through at $22.40.
And in the nightcap, it was Metz winning at an amazing $126.60.
Metz, third-choice on your V6 Betting Line at Fair Odds of 5-1, was also third-top on the LifeLiner Speed Column analysis, barely, with an 80.
Metz, 15-1 on your morning line, somehow was shunned like a three-hoofed leper on the toteboard, 62-1.
Metz, in touch all the way around, got by the 13-10 fave in the stretch — these crazy maiden-claimers! — and won by a lunging neck at, as reported earlier, a lovely $126.60 up top.
The 13-10 fave, top of LifeLiner but perhaps a little lower than that in the Intestinal Fortitude Column analysis, completed a $376.60 exacta. The third-place runner also was OK on LifeLiner, with the trizacta returning three bucks shy of $1,500, for $2. The fourth-place runner also was LifeLiner-approved, and your super-duper returned a jackpot $5,389, again for $2.
Sorry, the fifth-place runner was not OK on LifeLiner. We missed the quintafecta. Regretsz!
Oh, yeah, one more thing. This all happened in the last race of the day, meaning that, yea, verily, this was one of ’em KING OF THE NETCAPPER BULLIESZ SPECIALSZ!
As always, hope you had ’em.
WMF Report:
Early
Arlington 6f
Churchill 1 1/16m
Chas. Town 4½f, 6½f
Emerald 5½f, 6f
Evangeline 6f
Exhibition 6½f
Indiana 5½f
Los Alamitos 4½f
Mountain 6f
Northlands 6f
PennNat 6f
Keystone 6f
Prairie 6f
Santa Anita 6f
SunRay 4½f, 6½f
Nocturnal Submission: Sifting through the wreckage…
Thank you. Best wishes. Goodbye. Next time!
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First Post: Saturday, May 17, 2014
Twenty-five years ago, not to the day, but to the event, and what a way to see your first Triple Crown race in-person. Sunday Silence v. Easy Goer. Yow.
Racing was still captivating the people nationwide in the 1980s. Maybe NBCSN and the Big NBC will be able to do so again, but the attention-spans are shorter and you can gamble on anything you want on your computer from home. It will be difficult, probably impossible.
But here was the last Preakness of the decade, and it was a doozie. Everybody east of Los Angeles was in the Easy Goer camp. All that Phipps and Pat Day and Shug McGaughey 3d nonsense. Maybe only the slick Californians were rooting for Sunday Silence. Even though Sunday Silence had beaten him two weeks earlier in the Derby, the mopes in Baltimore considered it a fluke, and they favored Easy Goer, same as they had at Louisville. He was simply the better, more-talented horsey, and there was no muddy track to disadvantage the Easy Goer at Baltimore. The Easy Goer. Even his name was condescending.
We were legal to bet, free, yellow and 21 by 1988, but that never stopped us before. Risen Star in that year was a moral victory, the forces of righteousness and good, the hometown New Orleans heroes of Lamarque, Roussel 3d and Eddie Delahoussaye shoving it down the brilliant throat of Winning Colors, put on the track by the Evil Empire of Klein, Lukas and G. Stevens.
Didn’t make that one in person, 1988. Would have loved to, but as long as the New Orleans boys were beating Klein & La-La Land, it would have to suffice. Then when they rammed it home at Belmont three weeks later, Eddie D. hand-riding Risen Star with the whip out on the horse’s shoulder, just waving it ahead of his right-eye, rhythmically in a majestic procession down the lane, Eugene Klein ready to have a sweaty, sloppy heart attack in the Belmont clubhouse, that was the best. Lukas hiding in retreat behind the sunglasses. By damn, Risen Star, if he does not draw the rail in the Derby, is a Triple Crown winner, no doubt.
And again in 1989 the regional battle lines were drawn. No New Orleans this time, but this time the La-La Land was the right side to root for. Exam week was still going on in New Orleans on the first Saturday in May, so we had to watch the Derby from a bar on Maple. It was a damp track going in Louisville, and we all wanted Sunday Silence, given that he was not the favorite and that Easy Goer was so overhyped. We were OK with it.
School was out by the third Saturday in May, and we drove down I-95 to suburban Olney/Derwood, had dinner at the Copeland’s on Rockville Pike, fried crawfish tails and blackened redfish, bread pudding for desert, Dixies and Hurricanes and daiquiris all the while. Flying. Old friends, still remembered fondly if lost to time and space, always present in memory.
Lord, there must have been 12 or 13 of us that day, several cars, the locals sacrificing their rowhouse driveways and scarce frontyards to fleece the racegoers, ten or twenty bucks a car for the privilege to park. Then carrying the precious cold beverages in heavy Coleman and Igloo coolers, so weighed down with beer and ice that it felt like there must have been dead human bodies inside sloshing around. We stopped every 100 yards or so to ‘switch leads’ and let the arm that had been carrying the load take a rest.
Then waiting along the backstretch, crossing the main track and over the turf course, planks put down to keep the sod from wearing out too much, and into the infield.
It was all about the drinking and the socializing, of course, scamming on coeds, but when the minutes leading up to 5:40 p.m. EDT came around, the two of us, this writer and his best friend back then — where have you gone, Will? — and we dashed about the grounds to find some vantage from which to watch the whole spectacle.
We tried for the front apron, but there was no clear sight-line to the track. With maybe three minutes to go, we descended into some bowels of the plant, maybe below the infield, maybe below the grandstand, it was hard to tell, already drunk and spinning and sweating.
The scene was surreal, hardly about horseracing. If you’ve ever seen how they depict in the movies how the London Underground was used as a bomb shelter during the Battle of Britain, that’s what it was like. Just a bunch of citizens, hot, impatient, breathing too hard for too little air, waiting. Somehow we were able to push our way toward an overhead TV, probably a vintage Quasar with a dent in the speaker and two big dials, one for VHF tuning, the other for UHF, and we were watching the race.
It was impossible to hear on-track announcer Trevor Denman (you could look it up!) make the call. It was just the fans screaming like they were at a prizefight or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Absolute tumult.
The race was just a picture, you had to create the commentary in your head. It looked like Easy Goer was merely toying with Sunday Silence in deep stretch, ready to pull away on the rail whenever he wanted.
But Sunday Silence was Sunday Silence. What he lacked in blue blood and old money, he made up for in upstart opportunism. The horses’s heads were up-and-down, back-and-forth, inch-for-inch all the way down the final furlong, 12 or 13 seconds of alternating for the lead, stride-for-stride.
Sunday Silence hit his nose on the wire with pinpoint precision, a few centimeters in front of Easy Goer’s. On the totebard, 2-1 had beaten 3-5. The underdog prevailed.
For a split-second as the horses hit the wire and for a split-second after, the noise went out of the Pimlico Underground. A great collective exhalation followed, and then the noise started up again almost as quickly as it stopped. The fans could not believe it. Though it was close, they knew it was Sunday Silence. Though they had been beaten, as a group, when the favorite lost, they still were buzzing with excitement. They knew they had seen One for The Ages. Their horse had given everything he had, and was not at all disappointing save for the space of the very last inch of 75,240 of them; in time, the span of a couple hundredths of a second.
That was the first, and it always will be the best. Yes, two more visits to Pimlico followed in 1990 and ’91, with the unremarkable Hansel in that latter year returning a better price and a more mutuelly satisfying overlay than Sunday Silence did in 1989.
Sunday Silence and, yea, verily, Easy Goer will live forever. We still talk about them vividly 25 years later, and if racing somehow persists for another 75 years from today, surviving its own infirmities — nevermind climate-change and the Kanyassians and the unrelenting trend toward narcissism — or even if it does not, those who are left should simply bring up the running of the 1989 Preakness and say without need for boast or conceit, ‘This was a horse race’…
Best wishes for a prosperous and half as memorable Preakness Day 2014.
Free ones: Rundown…
Belmont 9
Calder / Gulf Calder 8, Gulf 8, 10
Santa Anita 2, 5, 7, 9, 11
Pay-side: Today…
Arlington 5, 6, 7, 9
BelTerra 2, 5, 8
Churchill 5, 8, 9, 10
Delpark 3, 6
Golden Gate 3, 4, 5, 10
Louisiana 1, 6
Lone Star 3, 4, 5, 10
Monmouth 5
Suffolk 5, 7
Woodbine 8
Today’s Stakes Pageantry: Eight big events for your Preakness Day at Pimlico. Racing!
SA 9 on the free page.
CD 10, WO 8 on the pay-side
#4 Kauai Katie is one of ’em Triple Threat Horseys in Bel 10. Now what? Likewise #1 Slim Shadey in Mth 11.
Wild-open in Cby 8. #7 Blues Edge, #6 Happy Hour Honey are two 6-1 morning-line chances who are not out of it.
Avoiding the morning-line chalk in FL 6 via #1 Mom’s Law, #6 American Trilogy, #7 Clear Pasaj, #3 Miss Rubycubes.
Over to Northlands for another Triple Threat Horsey: #2 Saturday Nite Ride, aptly named.
And in Prairie 8, #5 Shock Hazard is preferred to the favored coupled-entry.
Yesterday’s Activity: As always, Welcome to The Home of The Runner-Up Finish, this time nearly led by Mondai Mondai in the opener at Golden Gate.
Mondai Mondai, 14-1 in real life from a morning line of 15-1, was top of the V6 Betting Line and OK on the LifeLiner Speed Column analysis. He just could not get by the 7-5 fave, losing by 1½ lengths in a creditable effort. The winner was also OK on LifeLiner, and the saver exacta paid $48, 7-5 over 14-1 in a six-horse rumble.
Now for some winners. BelTerra 4 went to Olympic Street, $14.80.
Over at the Belmont, back-to-back Bonkersmate jackers in Races 3 & 4, Mad Props ($21.20) in the former, Giantinthemoonlite ($9.40) in the latter, yielding your winning daily double, which returned 50¢ shy of $200-even, for $2.
Finally, last but hardly least, to the Churchill, at which two races were touted, three horseys total were touted, and two of those won. In Race 6, Barber Shop Rock came through at $22.40.
And in the nightcap, it was Metz winning at an amazing $126.60.
Metz, third-choice on your V6 Betting Line at Fair Odds of 5-1, was also third-top on the LifeLiner Speed Column analysis, barely, with an 80.
Metz, 15-1 on your morning line, somehow was shunned like a three-hoofed leper on the toteboard, 62-1.
Metz, in touch all the way around, got by the 13-10 fave in the stretch — these crazy maiden-claimers! — and won by a lunging neck at, as reported earlier, a lovely $126.60 up top.
The 13-10 fave, top of LifeLiner but perhaps a little lower than that in the Intestinal Fortitude Column analysis, completed a $376.60 exacta. The third-place runner also was OK on LifeLiner, with the trizacta returning three bucks shy of $1,500, for $2. The fourth-place runner also was LifeLiner-approved, and your super-duper returned a jackpot $5,389, again for $2.
Sorry, the fifth-place runner was not OK on LifeLiner. We missed the quintafecta. Regretsz!
Oh, yeah, one more thing. This all happened in the last race of the day, meaning that, yea, verily, this was one of ’em KING OF THE NETCAPPER BULLIESZ SPECIALSZ!
As always, hope you had ’em.
WMF Report:
Early
Arlington 6f
Churchill 1 1/16m
Chas. Town 4½f, 6½f
Emerald 5½f, 6f
Evangeline 6f
Exhibition 6½f
Indiana 5½f
Los Alamitos 4½f
Mountain 6f
Northlands 6f
PennNat 6f
Keystone 6f
Prairie 6f
Santa Anita 6f
SunRay 4½f, 6½f
Nocturnal Submission: Sifting through the wreckage…
Thank you. Best wishes. Goodbye. Next time!
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About Steven Unite
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