Prologue
They ran the Fountain of Youth the other day at Gulfstream, so that means the Florida Derby is about five weeks away and the Kentucky Derby, always held the first Saturday in May, only two months off. So we’ll be talking more about horses the next few weeks, starting today with Precisionist, who didn’t win the Derby but did win about everything else.
Our own training horses, Juno, Elf and Wilson are galloping a mile and a half now (Juno isn’t sure she likes the gate yet—sorta hops through it)—and will soon be moving from their current training facility on Rte. 200 to another track on Rte. 225 closer to home. Although not closer to a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, which we invariably visit on training days. Desperate measures will have to be taken.
Nobody died (that we know of) this week and nobody had life-threatening medical procedures. The temperatures have reached the seventies daily and we’re hoping to avoid the dreaded Final Frost of March so that everybody’s optimistically early plantings aren’t ravaged. Cosmic Song is rested and is ready to resume her career at Gulfstream, which just raised purses 10%. So it’s with a spry step and a positive outlook that we approach another Spring. We’re not even going to think about those horrid and corrupt Republicans who are busily at work seeking to destroy all life on Earth as we know it. We’ll save that for a darker time.
Bill’s Rant Of The Week
But I do have one gripe. What’s with this home-schooling baloney? When we were kids, if you didn’t go to school, the truant officer went out and found you and hauled your butt in. And if your parents didn’t make you go to school, they got arrested. Now, moron parents can teach their children at home. Hey, Mom—what’s the capitol of South Dakota? Yeah, I thought so.
The other day, police in Miami arrested a couple of sickos who had been torturing their kids for a couple of weeks before they perished. If these kids had been going to school, maybe someone would have noticed they hadn’t shown up for oh, say two weeks, and perhaps made a point of checking on them.
Shouldn’t home-schooling parents have to procure some kind of license to teach their kids? I mean the other teachers need a degree. The politicos allow this foolishness to go on because the Religious Right screams about the horrors of exposing their beloved spawn to the worldly dangers of public education. But, gee, last time I looked there was a Christian Academy on every corner, why not send them there? Oh, maybe they’re being bullied (and, if I recall correctly, we had bullies in our generation, too, and nobody went and killed themselves over it) and their tender psyches can’t handle it. No problem. In Republican America, there are seventeen guns in every home—just pick one of them up, march on down to where the offender lurks and stick it in his ear, dispensing advice regarding the many dangers of picking on the children of armed parents. No wonder the sneaky Chinese are getting ahead of us. Home schooling….the curse of a nation. Well. One of them.
Your Health Report: Red Yeast Rice Is Nice
Many people with high cholesterol take red yeast rice supplements as a “natural” alternative to statin drugs. My cholesterol was not particularly high, slightly over 200 but edging upwards, several years ago when my doctor suggested trying red yeast rice. It is not a statin but behaves like one in keeping cholesterol in check. Why not just take a statin? Well, some people don’t tolerate them well. We had a neighbor, Carol, who took statins and had terrible muscle pain and extreme moodiness. She switched to red yeast rice and these problems disappeared. I have heard of many other people who can’t handle statins for whom red yeast might be the answer. I’ve been taking the stuff for 15 years, with no ill effects. It is important, if you take it, to also take CoQ10, as red yeast rice draws it out of your system. It is also important to purchase red yeast rice from the right manufacturer since supplements are not regulated and, if not careful, you could get hosed.
The Berkeley Wellness Letter, a good source of health information (if a little too conservative for my liking) complains in a recent issue that supplement labels rarely list the levels of active ingredients in their products, the problem being that products that do disclose some of these levels would be considered unapproved—and thus illegal—drugs. Long story short, if you are interested in supplements, find a progressive doctor who will steer you to the safe manufacturers. The stuff I get, by the way, comes from a company called HPF in Morrisville. Pa. and is called Cholestene. They also manufacture CoQ10.
Answering A Riddle
Many of my friends—indeed, many of the friends of most horse owners—look at all the unpredictables inherent in the business, all the risks compared to the perceived small rewards, all the hours spent and time sacrificed, all the heartbreak and disappointment, and they ask: Why the hell do you do it? And our answer is, well, someday—if the stars properly align, if you can discover the correct pixie dust to spread on your little candidate, if he has the constitution of Teddy Roosevelt and, simultaneously, the speed of Mercury and if the good Lord takes a likin’ to you, you might, just might, get to race a horse like Precisionist.
Precisionist
There would be no Precisionist if there were no Fred Hooper. Hooper won the Kentucky Derby with his first horse, Hoop Jr., in 1945. Friends told him he was in trouble after that. “Why?” Hooper wanted to know. “Because you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to do it again,” they said. And they were right. Hooper was so determined to do it again he lived to be 102. Sadly, Hoop Jr. was his first and last Derby winner.
In the annals of rags-to-riches success, it would be difficult to surpass the story of Fred Hooper. He was born on October 6, 1897, on a farm in Georgia. He quit school in the eighth grade, he raised cotton, he broke horses, he even went to barber school and cut hair for a living. He worked as a schoolteacher, a carpenter, a riveter, a prizefighter by night and a potato farmer by day. After a blight ruined his potato crop, he borrowed money to get a job building a road, and became rich.
Hooper Farm, on Rte 40 in Ocala, was the base of operation for years. There, he developed his favorite filly, Susan’s Girl, who won 29 of her 63 starts and $1.2 million in purses back when a million dollars was a lot of money. She also won the Eclipse Award as the filly champion in 1972, 1973 and 1975. See if anybody does that again. His great colt Precisionist won the 1984 Swaps Stakes, the 1985 Breeders’ Cup Sprint and the 1986 Woodward, and was voted Champion Sprinter of 1985. He earned more than $3.4 million.
When Precisionist was sent to Hooper’s farm after his retirement, Arthur Appleton of Bridlewood Farm paid $4 million for a half interest in him as a stallion, a nice piece of change that was returned later when Precisionist turned out to be infertile. It was here that Siobhan came into the picture, eventually—after several forays over to Hooper’s place—talking the old man into letting her take Precisionist to her farm to see if she could solve the problem. She brought him a little mini-mule named Mary Margaret for company and they became fast friends. (Years later, after Precisionist departed, Mary Margaret became so depressed she laid down night and day and only came out of her despondency when provided with an orphan foal to look out for.)
Precisionist had an unusual problem with his fertility due to sperm which, while plentiful, uniform and unblemished, were missing one tiny and obviously critical enzyme reaction. Siobhan believed that this was the enzyme that allowed the sperm to enter the mare’s egg. It takes 500 million sperm attacking the egg shell with an enzyme (or group of enzymes) that is held in the “hat” (acrosome) of the sperm. If there are 499,999, it’s a no-go. Each sperm cell has 1/500 millionth of the necessary chemical. Whatever unknown reaction that was necessary for the sperm to initiate the acrosome reaction and allow the lucky 500 million-and-first cell into the egg was missing. All manner of concoctions and potions imaginable were used to no avail.
At age 25, Precisionist stopped sweating, never a good thing for a Florida resident. This happens to horses on the track occasionally and the best solution is almost always to send them north, where the problem either disappears or is, at least, alleviated. There is no drug that will solve the problem, nor any other known treatment that works, although there are plenty of quack notions.
We sent Precisionist to a place in Georgetown, Kentucky called Old Friends, founded by a wonderful man named Michael Blowen. Old Friends is a retirement and rescue facility for pensioned thoroughbreds and they were very happy to get Precisionist, who, despite being among some famous contemporaries, was clearly the star of the show. Blowen told the press upon his arrival, “This is the greatest thing that could ever happen to us. Many race fans will now have the opportunity to see him.” And many fans did. The final part of our story will be provided by a writer from the Daily Racing Form in a column which won an Eclipse Award for journalism.
From Start To Finish, A Champion by Jay Hovdey
This is the kind of horse Precisionist was.
On the day of his comeback at age 7, after an absence of nearly two years from competition, he stumbled at the start of an allowance race at Hollywood Park, dumped Chris McCarron, then recovered in time to join the field and lead them to the wire.
“Helluva way to get a race into your horse, John,” said Charlie Whittingham, needling Precisionist’s trainer, John Russell.
“I just hope they don’t weight him for the next one off that performance,” the wry Russell replied.
Precisionist was a champion. He was a stakes winner 17 times over—15 of those for trainer Ross Fenstermaker—at just about any distance or condition you would want to name, from the six furlongs of the Breeder’s Cup Sprint to the 1 ¼ miles of the Swaps Stakes.
At age 2, he was a wild-eyed firebrand who won on turf and dirt. At age 3, he beat older horses in the Del Mar Handicap. When he was 4, he did something only three other horses had done before—Round Table, Spectacular Bid and Hillsdale—and none since, when he won the Strub Series of three races from seven to ten furlongs over a span of just 40 days.
When he was 5, he could have been Horse of the Year with just one more nudge from his brilliant record, even though he defeated eventual Horse of the Year Lady’s Secret in their only two encounters.
When he was 6, he fractured his cannon bone just above the ankle, which was about the only bad step he took in his mostly Bute-less, Lasix-free racing career.
He also proved to have limited fertility, which made his comeback at age 7 all the more entertaining. What else was the handsome red dude to do? Once they caught him after that first dry run, he broke a 25-year-old record for a mile at Del Mar.
Thankfully, the record is codified in the racing Hall of Fame, which Precisionist joined in 2003. His death on Tuesday, suffering from an inoperable tumor, laid a final, gentle hand on a noble life that lasted 25 years and left few regrets—unless you count the fact that Precisionist was able to sire only four horses that made it to the races.
But you know what? So what. Precisionist turned out to be more than enough horse in his own right to get the point across. Just as Cigar will never be burdened by disappointing offspring, neither was Precisionist held accountable for anything other than the job he was to perform. His imprint is as indelible as that of any prolific stallion, just as his memories have been carried on through the years by the people who were lucky enough to breathe the same air.
Precisionist’s final moments were spent at Old Friends retirement facility near Lexington, Ky., where former film critic Michael Blowen has gathered together a cast of characters that would rival any John Ford western. Apologies to Ruhlman, Sunshine Forever, Ogygian, Special Ring and the others, but Precisionist was definitely the John Wayne among them.
“I felt so honored to just be around him,” Blowen said. “And I’ve never seen such an intelligent horse. He was so smart, he could communicate with somebody as stupid about horses as I am. He’d tell me what kind of hay he wanted, where he wanted it, when he wanted to go out and when he wanted to come in.”
Last Monday, two-time Eclipse Award-winning photographer Barbara Livingston visited Old Friends to take a few pictures. One of them, the last ever taken of Precisionist, can be found on the Old Friends website, at oldfriendsequine.com. Though clearly ill, he also looks like a horse at peace. According to Blowen, Precisionist even knew when it was time to go.
“We performed a tracheotomy on him just to help his breathing, so he wouldn’t be in so much pain,” Blowen said. “We knew he didn’t have a lot of time left, but we didn’t want him to spend it in distress.
“On Monday night, I couldn’t sleep, knowing how he was,” Blowen said. “We set up a deck chair right outside his stall, so I spent most of the night there. Around four in the morning, he started eating hay out of my hand. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Okay, this is it. I’m not even interested in the hay’”.
On Tuesday morning, it was time. Dr. Holly Aldinger, the veterinarian on call with Old Friends, arranged to be there at 12:30 p.m. An Old Friends volunteer manned the backhoe and prepared Precisionist’s plot, located under a tree between the final resting places of champion turf mare Estrapade and Breeder’s Cup Turf winner Fraise.
“It was about noon when I decided to take him out of his stall,” Blowen said. “It was a perfectly sunny day. He looked around and nibbled a little grass. Then, he walked over there with his head held high, and stood there right next to the grave until the vet got there. I’m telling you, if I can go with 10 per cent of the dignity of this guy, I’ll be fine.”
That is the kind of horse Precisionist was.
That’s all, folks
