From Hair To Eternity

 

Yesterday, out of a clear blue sky, my old pal, Mike (Jagger) Hatcherson decided he would enter the funhouse known as Facebook, posting a large photo of his current self (no, not the one above).  Jagger, is that YOU?  What happened to that jolly mop of hair you sported, that pageboy do which had weak women swooning and clever ones running their fingers through it.  Say it isn’t so, Jagger!

When we were kids, we never thought much about hair depletion.  If anything, we had too much hair, necessitating constant trips to the barber shop where we had to sit around reading Field & Stream magazines while we waited for Gino the Barber to finish discussing antipasto choices with the guy in the chair.  If we were lucky, the customer wasn’t also getting a shave, which involved immense amounts of hot towels, lather and a very scary razor, which Gino deftly maneuvered up and down soft, vulnerable necks without so much as a tiny abrasion.  When I finally got up into the big padded chair, Gino always asked me the same question:  “Wanna try something different this time, Billy?”  Like what, I used to wonder.  “No, Gino—same old thing.”  You had to be careful with those barbers.  You could end up looking like a Parris Island Marine if you weren’t careful.

The only bald guy we knew about was Elmer Fudd.  Oh, there were our fathers, of course, but for some reason we never made the association that we might be looking at our futures.  My own father had little hair by the time he was 29 but my maternal grandfather, whom I resembled, had a full head of hair well into his fifties and so did I.  After that, it began a slow, methodical abandonment of the ship, which didn’t bother me too much until all my photographs started to show up compromised by the reflection of sunbeams off the front of my head.  I resorted to hats, the safety nets of the hair-challenged, but I missed my hair.  I am not one to incorporate hair plugs or wear toupees or utilize the largely ineffective Rogaines of the world but I definitely expected some help from the scientific community by now.  Come on, guys.  You can land a man on Pluto but you can’t grow a little hair?  Can we please get our priorities in order here?

There may be hope on the horizon, though, as we all know, that horizon has a way of falling back further and further as we approach it.  Anyway, there appears to finally be a better understanding of hair biology, including new knowledge of how cells communicate with the hair follicle.  A study led by George Cotsarelis, M.D., chair of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and published last year in the Journal of Clinical Investigation found that a bald scalp and one with hair both have the same number of stem cells, but in the bald scalp the stems are just laying out, cool by the pool, instead of going to work repairing and replenishing hair follicles and fibers.  You’ve seen these guys before—always hanging out at the water cooler shooting the breeze while their more responsible colleagues plug away; apparently, it’s the same in the stem cell world.  Cotsarelis tells us if we can get the lazy bastards working again, the hair comes back.

What to do?  How do you bribe a stem cell?  You can’t offer him a spiffy raise, a better parking space or a paid vacation in Tristan da Cunha.  It’s a dilemma.  Specifically, it’s Dr. George Cotsarelis’ dilemma and he wants everybody to know he’s working on it day and night, sacrificing weekends at the dog track, neglecting his wife and children, drinking heavily.  In the process, he has found out this: mice with skin wounds regrew hair at the injured site in a process that mimicked embryonic development.  This means that activated stem cells can grow new hair follicles.  A company named Follica is using this technology to develop a new balding treatment formula, likely including a drug compound and some sort of wounding of the skin akin to what the mice went through.  Another outfit, San Diego-based Histogen, headed by Gail Naughton, Ph.D., an expert in tissue engineering, views Cotsarelis’ work, along with studies at Rockefeller University by Elaine Fuchs and the University of Southern California by Cheng-Ming Chuong as the foundation of current biotech progress in hair restoration.

“Our approach is to take cells that are normally found in the scalp and grow them under embryonic conditions of very low oxygen and suspension culture to trick the cells into thinking they’re back in the embryonic environment,” says that clever Naughton.  “Within a couple of days, they start acting like multipotent stem cells and secreting the growth factors that are necessary to stimulate stem cells in the body, including stem cells of the human hair follicle.  We’ve basically learned how to manufacture a complex physiological group of growth factors that are normally responsible for stimulating stem cells to create new hairs.  We simply mimic nature by figuring out how to create what the body makes to grow a new hair.”  Those growth factors, chemical signals produced by cells that induce more cell growth and maturation or differentiation, are what go into Histogen’s Hair Stimulating Complex (HSC), an injectable liquid formula currently in trial in Manila, Philippines, which I, for one, am flying to tomorrow, subscribing to the old belief that the early bird gets the hair.  If it works, I’ll call you from the airport.

Seriously, folks, Histogen aims to have a product on the market in Asia sometime this year and in the U.S. by 2016.  The final procedure involves a one or two time set of injections in the scalp with a very fine 32-gauge needle, taking only several minutes rather than the hours required for a nasty hair transplant.  After that, you’ll be back in action, hitting those bars, hustling supermodels.  In the interests of multiculturalism, I’m thinking of developing a fine afro, something on the order of Angela Davis’ historic creation.  The possibilities are endless.  After we get this one figured out, we’ll start working on Dr. Bill’s Loose Skin Elixir or maybe The Flying Pie Abdomen Depressor.  Before long, everybody will be nineteen again.  Where do we find a pot dealer around here?  

 

Alternate Possibilities

Just in case Cotsarelis and Naughton let us down, we’ve been researching other hair restoration possibilities.  One can’t have too much information.  In a remote publication called The Ebers Papyrus, we discovered a baldness cure which requires a mixture of fats from a hippopotamus, crocodile, tomcat, snake and ibex, mixed with porcupine hair boiled in water.  Apply to the scalp for four days and—voila—hair.  If all the hippos around your place are a little touchy about donating fat or you can’t find an ibex, your alternative would be to rustle up the leg of a female greyhound and saute it in oil with the hoof of a donkey.  Sounds a little macabre but it’s a historical fact that those old Egyptians knew from hair.

The ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, often referred to as the Father of Western Medicine, personally grappled with male pattern baldness.  He tried a topical concoction of opium, horseradish, pigeon droppings, beetroot and spices.  It didn’t work.  Worse yet, when he passed by people would hold their noses and move to the other side of the street.  But Hippocrates didn’t give up easily.  Eventually, he found a successful cure after noticing that eunuchs never went thin on top.  Customers, alas, were few.  Candidates of the day decided there were things worse than baldness.

Moving on to the 20th Century, manufacturers scrambled to develop high-tech solutions to this thorny issue.  One of them, the Allied Merke Institute, came up with the Thermocap.  Customers with thinning locks and busy schedules merely had to sit under this bonnetlike apparatus for 15 minutes a day; the gadget’s heat and blue light would spring into action stimulating dormant hair bulbs.  A Popular Mechanics headline screamed out the question: “HAS A REMEDY FOR BALDNESS BEEN DISCOVERED AT LAST?”  Short answer: Nope.

In 1936, The Crosley Corporation, a radio and automotive manufacturer, ventured into the “personal care” market with the introduction of the Xervac, a machine which purportedly used suction to spur hair growth.  Advertisements for the system, which could be rented for home use or found in barbershops, encouraged businessmen to “Kick back, relax with a cigarette and a newspaper” as the helmet-encased vacuum pump worked its magic.  Did it work?  See above: Thermocap. 

 

When The Comet Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie….

Okay, here we go again.  The internet is filled with dire predictions of a comet 2.5 miles wide heading straight for Puerto Rico.  Or Brazil.  Or Venezuela, take your pick.  Supposed to impact sometime between September 15th and the 28th.  We know this not because any prominent astronomers have advised the public, only because a bumblebrain named Lyn Leahz was alerted by God.  See, Lynn travels in rarefied circles and she kept hearing of threats from the sky so one day she decided to get to the bottom of all this and, during prayer, asked her friend God wassup.  God is not one to gossip about these things so he merely put the notion in Lyn’s fevered brain to call a particular old friend, who promptly confirmed the impending catastrophe.  Lyn then marched out and made a video to inform the world, much of which was thrilled to discover this was happening.  “Show them a light and they’ll follow it anywhere.”

Leahz says the government has purchased and delivered to Puerto Rico an “extraordinary number of body bags,” the better to neaten up after the comet arrives.  She is pretty sure the thing will break up when it enters Earth’s atmosphere but still thinks the remaining pieces will be “pretty big.”  Tsunamis everywhere.  Massive death counts.  Not as big a deal as The Rapture, but better than Hurricane Katrina.  Oh, and just in case you don’t believe her, Leahz wants you to know the Foreign Minister of France publicly announced at a White House press conference a 500-day countdown to what he called “climate chaos,” ending on September 24.  He didn’t mention any comets, of course, not wanting to panic the public.  Nudge me if we’ve heard all this before.

On June 8th, a NASA spokesman addressed rumors about the approach of the mystery comet and stated definitively that no such astronomical event had been charted.  Just for fun, though, we contacted The Flying Pie’s own Master of the Universe, Stuart Ellison, to find out what would happen if a comet of this magnitude did show up and plow into Earth intact.  Says he:

“A 2.5 mile diameter comet is about 4 km in diameter.  The dinosaur extinction was caused by a 10 km diameter object.  It took 30 million years for Earth to recover.  A 5-10 meter object (1/1000 the diameter of the dino-killing object) has about the same destructive power as the Hiroshima bomb “Little Boy,” or 15 kilotons of TNT, 15,000 tons of TNT.  Those tend to blow up in the atmosphere.  An object of 50 meters diameter will hit the ground and cause an effect like the Tanguska impact of 1908.

Although that comet—or meteor—burst in the air rather than hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an “impact.”  Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons of TNT to as high as 30, with 10-15 megatons of TNT being the most likely.  This is roughly equal to the U.S.’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb tested on March 1, 1954, about 1000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and about one-third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.  The explosion from that one knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 2.150 square kilometers (830 sq. mi.).  It’s estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.”

Don’t worry, though.  Lyn’s comet ain’t coming.  Really.

 

FLYING PIE Logo Forgery Unearthed in Italy

Well, it’s vacation time again.  Some of our pals are off to St. Augustine, other showoffs to Rome, and a good thing, too.  Just last month, Bruce and Barbara Reissfelder tootled over there for a few weeks of sightseeing and pasta, not necessarily in that order.  Fortunately for us, Bruce is an avid photographer, and while at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel happened to look up….and what to his wondering eyes should appear on the ceiling above but a blatant knockoff of our Flying Pie logo, presented here for evidence.  Those Italians have some nerve.  While the Vatican work has obvious shortcomings when compared to the original, it is close enough to make us grouchy.  We may sue.

 

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

See Bernie Run

 

Almost everybody likes Bernie Sanders.  The Independent Senator from Vermont, a mere 73 years old (but who’s counting?) is articulate, intelligent and unusually honest, begging the question of how he ever got elected to office in the first place.  Oh—that’s right—he’s from Vermont.  Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist who favors the creation of employee-owned cooperative enterprises and is a fan of Scandinavian-style social democracy.  He caucuses with the Democratic Party and is considered a Democrat for purposes of committee assignments.  Since January 2015, Bernie has been the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Budget Committee.  And now he’s running for President.  Well, isn’t everybody, you might wonder?  It seems like it.  We’ve got at least a baker’s dozen of Bozo Republicans and that doesn’t count the Clown-In-Chief, Donald Trump.  Then, of course, we’ve got Hillary.  And now, despite his age and his prospects, we’ve got Bernie.  But Bernie is a lot different than the other guys.

Politicians, by their very nature, are distorters of The Truth.  Many of them don’t start out that way but in the process of trying to be all things to all people they begin to tell each little segment of the electorate what it wants to hear, apparently assuming none of the other segments are listening.  It’s all well and good, they might counsel themselves, to be honest and idealistic but how can you put your honesty and idealism to work if you don’t get elected?  And so the first domino falls.  From there, it’s a short trip to the big city of Oblivion, where Pragmatism reigns and Honesty cowers in the closet.  Old saws are trotted out and sharpened, Patriotism is invoked, the scary spectre of Threat from the Other Guys is roused.  Gee, we’d sure like to stop polluting the Earth but, you know, there are so many jobs involved.  Some of our best friends are Mexicans but the little buggers are swiping all the elite broccoli-picking positions from right under the noses of red-blooded Americans.  When you think about it, it makes perfectly good sense to allow guns into religious services—hell, could be one of them A-rab terrorists lingering about.

Bernie is a breath of fresh air.  He gets up there to the microphone and elucidates what he really thinks, what measures he intends to utilize concerning a particular problem.  He will tell a different audience the same thing tonight and repeat it tomorrow.  Sanders’ directness and enthusiasm is striking a responsive chord with many voters, particularly young ones who can smell a phony a mile away.  In Iowa, he is drawing larger crowds than Hillary Clinton and is now only twelve points behind her in the New Hampshire polls, despite having little money and a small, unsophisticated campaign organization.  More than 3,000 attended a Sanders speech in Minneapolis in May and the same number are expected for a rally in Denver Saturday.  The campaign is scrambling to find larger venues to accommodate unexpectedly huge crowds who relish his attacks on the “cocky billionaire class.”  Bernie can’t win, of course, everybody knows that….except, apparently, Bernie, who professes he is not merely hanging around in order to hold Hillary’s feet to the fire.  If there was ever a true grassroots candidate, Bernie is it.  Can he shock the nation with a New Hampshire victory?  It’s possible.  The Granite State doesn’t like to be taken for granite.  Surprising underdogs have triumphed before.  A win there would bring viability to Sanders’ campaign, stoke the coffers and bring in a raft of fresh, fuzzy-faced volunteers.  To the voting public, there is nothing so attractive as an honest man.

We’re not imbeciles, however.  We understand the immensity of Hillary’s advantage, the impossibility of Sanders’  herculean task.  The ultimate result is, for all intents and purposes, unalterable.  That silly old Harry Truman could never beat Dewey.

 

We decided to let Sheikh Mohammed have this one.

 

We’re Off To The Coxville Zoo….

Otherwise known as the Ocala Breeders’ June Sale of Two-Year-Olds in Training.  We’re looking for a rookie to race in Florida since trainer Eddie Plesa up and took Cosmic Saint to Monmouth Park in New Jersey, leaving us bereft of local runners.  These horse sales always remind me of little kid days at Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire with my Uncle Arthur.  First thing we’d always do is visit the Fish Pond over by the big roller coaster.  This was a very large round pool, maybe four feet high with all manner and make of plastic fish at the bottom.  You couldn’t see the fish because the water was intentionally unclear.  Uncle Arthur paid the concessionaire and he gave us two fishing poles.  The poles had a short acrylic line with a big hook at the end.  The objective was to swish your hook around the pond for awhile until it latched onto one of the fish, which you would then pull out, look at the number on the bottom and turn in for a wonderful prize worth in the neighborhood of three cents if you were unusually lucky.  I loved the Fish Pond.  When the brightly-colored plastic fish rose to the top of the water, it was the high point of my day.  You could keep your Ferris Wheel and your Tilt-A-Whirl, the Fish Pond was my favorite.

When you visit a two-year-old sale, of course, you’ve got more information than we fisherman had.  You’ve got a big catalogue detailing the genealogy of each fish, you’ve got videos of their workout performances and you get to look at them up close and personal in their barns.  They have no numbers stamped on their bottoms and it’s just as well because some of them would be minus 20,000, as in the dollars it will cost you to find out your fish isn’t very good.  But it offers features the Fish Pond didn’t have because it’s up to you to weigh the information and make your thoughtful selection instead of taking pot luck.

The first step in the selection process is to carefully inspect the pedigrees in your catalogue, immediately dispensing with any horses deemed too costly for your budget.  This is a tricky science because what might be an otherwise expensive animal may be compromised by it’s size, significant injuries or work time, among other things, making it buyable for a purchaser willing to sacrifice physical perfection for elite ancestry.  Some people are looking for a horse to van to the racetrack the next day, others are willing to wait.  We try to find an animal by a proven but not exceptional sire out of a mare who has produced a good percentage of successful runners.  If she has produced stakes horses, the price will be higher and justifiably so.  At our level, you have to be forgiving in some area.  Siobhan is a good appraiser of horses and will tolerate shortcomings which appear serious to others but only superficial to her.  We are not interested in paying the enormous amount it usually takes to buy a horse which works in, say, 9.4 seconds as opposed to one which does the job in 10.2.  If I have S25,000 invested in a race horse and it fails, I’m disappointed.  If I have $250,000 tied up in a critter and it bombs, I’m suicidal.

Despite one’s best opinions, when the bidding starts you seldom know what will happen.  If two people are determined to buy the same horse, the bidding can get reckless and stratospheric.  Egos get involved.  And like Dirty Harry often advised, “A man has to know his limitations.”  When one of our choices passes a given figure, we’re out and on to the next candidate.  Often enough, a bidder is contending only with the consignor.  If the latter buys back his own horse, that animal may be for sale later for a lesser amount than he brought in the ring. 

The bidding is a story in itself.  Some contenders openly bid, others are very circumspect.  Consignors often use deputies to do their bidding.  Many horses have a monetary reserve placed on them and the auctioneers will carry the bidding to the desired figure, hoping someone is left when that time arrives.  Frequently, your final offer is not enough and someone else wins the prize.  Fortunately, there are eleven hundred candidates in this Fish Pond.  You keep putting your hook in the water, swishing it around.  Sooner or later, that brightly-colored fish rises to the top of the water and it is the highlight of your day.  You look around for your Uncle Arthur to celebrate and you remember vividly what he always said: “Great job, Billy—I think you got a really good one.  Now, let’s go and cash it in.”

 

Danny with American Pharoah.  Danny has the smaller ears.

 

Danny’s Newest Friend

When I married the illustrious Harolyn Locklair in 1970, it was a package deal.  I got her 5-year-old son, Danny Ogus, along with her and he might have been—no disrespect intended—the best part of the deal.  Growing up, he was a regular part of the horse operation, lugging around feed buckets that weighed as much as he did, helping to maintain the tractor, picking up stones in the paddocks, pulling up crotalaria.  As he got older and established friendships with kids who wanted to go out and “see the horses,” Danny developed a regular weekend work crew to haul to the farm and help him with his chores.  Once in high school, he was old enough to hold the mares when we bred one to the farm stallion, Source Of Joy, even though he and the mare always ended up many feet away from where the breeding started by dint of the stallion’s enthusiasm.

Danny was always a good-natured boy, loved sports, had an endless passel of friends.  To my amazement and his chagrin, girls began calling him up in high school but he was more interested in the Gainesville High School wrestling team, of which he was a member.  Danny wasn’t flashy but he was determined.  Always slightly behind on points entering the final period, he usually outlasted his opponent with sheer stamina and came home smiling.

Danny had no illusions about college, he wanted to be in the horse business.  Although Harolyn and I split up in 1980, he stayed with me through high-school graduation, then moved in with his mother in Ocala to get started with his calling.  He learned the training business, eventually moving to Philadelphia to work for Joe Orsino there and at the Jersey tracks.  Later, he got a job managing Indian Hill Farm for Ocala horseman Hilmer Schmidt, getting married to a woman with a thoroughbred background and living in an apartment above the barn at Indian Hill.  He later trained a string of horses for Hilmer in Texas for a couple of years before returning to Ocala to work for one of the leading two-year-old consignors,  Eddie Woods.

Danny wasn’t much at delegating authority, however.  Despite having a significant work crew at this disposal, he preferred to do the bulk of the work himself, up to and including checking 250 feed buckets after each meal and looking at 1000 legs a day.  After a few years of this, for which he was well-paid, he called me one day and said he was taking a long-distance driver’s job with Brookledge Horse Transportation.  I was astonished, not to mention appalled.

“Are you kidding?  You’ll eat terrible and get fat.  You’ll get hemorrhoids.  You’ll be on the road all the time and your wife will leave you.”  It was incomprehensible until he said those magic words:  “Bill, I get up every morning and I can’t stand the thought of going to work.”  Got it.  “When do you start?” I asked him.

Two years later, Danny’s still driving for Brookledge.  He did get fat but his wife is still around.  I didn’t ask about the hemorrhoids.  He loves his job, though.  Gets to travel, see the country.  $60,000 salary and all the horse-racing he can eat.  Oh, and the other day, Brookledge got a call from trainer Bob Baffert.  Somebody needed to make an airport run to pick up Triple Crown winner, American Pharoah.  Guess who got the job?  Sometimes, these career changes produce unexpected benefits.

 

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

Finally!!

 

If nobody at the track will ever forget the 147th Belmont Stakes, neither will anyone there forget the sound, that din which arose from 90,000 throats as the horses left the starting gate, increased for the two-and-a-half minutes of the race, rising to a crescendo as American Pharoah pulled away down the stretch, and continued unabated as Jockey Victor Espinoza took the horse back to the head of the stretch and paraded him before the fans to the winner’s circle.  It was an uncommon roar, an all-encompassing blast of sound equal to the occasion.  People couldn’t be heard by their closest neighbors in the grandstand, drivers on nearby highways wondered what disaster had befallen.  If it was not a seminal moment for racing, it was a spectacular one and maybe even a necessary one as pressure mounted annually to change the Triple Crown requirements.

Last year, Steve Coburn, one of the owners of Belmont also-ran California Chrome, famously remarked on the impossibility of any modern horse winning the Triple Crown, “I’ll be dead and in my grave before another horse does it!”  Saturday, one of the television commentators advised that someone might want to check on Steve because, one year later, the deed had been done.  We have been called the Impatient Generation, the Instant Gratification Mob, surly and demanding, ready to change the rules when they don’t suit our selfish requirements.  Fortunately, cooler—and wiser—heads have prevailed.  When Secretariat finally won the Triple Crown in 1973 after twenty-three years of fan waiting, another long dry spell was expected to follow.  Curiously, Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in 1978 quickly annexed two more.  Don’t be astonished if the same thing happens again.  And don’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

 

The Race

Before the running of the Belmont, both the trainer (Todd Pletcher) and rider (John Velazquez) of Florida Derby winner Materiality made a point of announcing that their horse would go for the lead right out of the gate.  Seemed like a good idea to us.  Materiality seems more comfortable on the lead and American Pharoah was unlikely to engage in an early head-to-head battle in a race so long.  Apparently, this was all some sort of ploy because when the gates opened Materiality was perfectly content to sit just off the favorite and apply only a modicum of pressure, allowing the leader to post pokey fractions of 24.06, 48.83 and 1:13.41 in the early going and pretty much guaranteeing nobody was going to catch him at the end.  To call this plan lousy tactics would be a kind understatement—Materiality could never catch up.  He collapsed and finished last.  Frosted made a noble effort, closing to within two lengths at the head of the stretch before Pharoah opened up and won by 5 1/2; the runnerup picked up $280,000 for his trouble.  If anyone else was in the race, we didn’t notice.  The overtrained Mubtaahij managed to be fourth.

So, was all this a great boon for racing?  Temporarily, sure.  Will it have great enduring benefits?  Probably not.  Unlike other sports, horseracing heroes often don’t hang around for long.  Most sports fans root for the home team or for particular players.  In racing, there is no home team and the Most Valuable Players go to stud unless they are mares or geldings.  Zenyatta was great for racing because she remained undefeated over an extended career, but Zenyattas are hard to come by.  Imagine Babe Ruth whacking 60 home runs and then waving bye-bye to the multitudes.  “Gotta grab a little beach time,” the Babe might say, waving his brown beer bottle as he fades off into the sunset.  Or Jack Nicklaus, after winning his first Masters, helicoptering off to design golf courses for the rest of his life.

American Pharaoh is now probably worth in excess of thirty million dollars as a stallion, thus making him almost uninsurable as a racehorse.  The price would be too high.  If you think thirty million is a lot (and the final figure could be greater), consider that he would probably be bred to a minimum of 100 mares at a fee of $100,000 per mare for a cool ten million a year.  That’s not soggy gingerbread.  And the insurance figure for a stallion is immensely less than that of a racehorse.  A lot of people feel that owner Ahmed Zayat should do the racing industry a big favor and race American Pharoah through his four-year-old season.  A lot of people are not getting a thirty million dollar check waved under their noses.

The Triple Crown winner will probably run three more times, at most.  Possibly in the Haskell Stakes at Monmouth Park in July, almost surely in the prestigious Travers at Saratoga in August and, finally, in the Breeders’ Cup Classic in November.  The finale would pit Pharoah against older horses for the first time and would be no picnic, but three-year-olds have won before.  He’s almost gone, so enjoy him while you can.   Champions like American Pharoah don’t come along too often.  Like, maybe, once every thirty-seven years.

 

Merritt Dives For Glory

 

The Girls Of Springtime

“HEY, BROOKSIE—YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL!”

When we were kids, this was about as unkind a cut as one could deliver to a fellow male ballplayer.  Girls were physically uncoordinated, terrible at sports (although occasionally amazing at impossibilities like jump rope). When they reached back to throw a ball, the result was laughable—the arm would follow through at a clumsy arc and the ball would drop to earth about five feet from where it started.  Occasionally, some female like Joycie Lavery, who grew up in a household of brothers, might come along and dispute the rule but it didn’t happen often.  Girls were just hopeless.  And if you thought they couldn’t throw, you should have seen them bat.  As soon as the pitcher released the ball, they ran for cover, certain they would be struck down by the speeding missile.  Girls were relegated to sitting on the sidelines, watching the boys play and chasing errant pitches.

Fast forward to 2015.  The University of Florida fast-pitch softball team (girls) is making hash of opponents, rolling up a 60-7 record.  They lose about as often as The King and His Court used to do in the early days of fast-pitch men’s ball.  Shortstop Jackie Medina looks like Phil Rizzuto out there, scarfing up anything in her general vicinity, moving forward or back to perfectly anticipate the hop of the ball, delivering ropes to first base, never making an error.  Center fielder Kirsti Merritt knows no bounds, covering two-thirds of the outfield, racing in like a panther to back up infielders on short flies, throwing runner after runner out at the plate.  Catcher Aubree Monroe, a stick of a girl, is up on bunts like Siobhan on chocolate, throwing speedy slappers out at first, blocking the plate like Jabba the Hutt and chopping down would-be base thieves at second and third.

And what can you say about pitcher/designated player Lauren Hager, voted the best player in the country for 2015 and the Most Valuable Player in the College World Series?  When she’s not shutting down powerful offenses with a few scattered hits, she’s blasting spheroids over the fences, the only player (well, there was Babe Ruth) ever to win seventy games pitching and hit the same number of home runs. After throwing 160 pitches to beat Auburn in the semifinals, she skipped a day, then allowed Michigan one run (losing 1-0) in the second game of the finals and another in the title game, won by the Gators, 4-1.

This week, the University of Florida baseball team (boys) goes to their own College World Series in Omaha.  We think they have a pretty good chance to win it.  As long as they play like girls.

 

Summer Is Icumen In

It’s getting busy around here.  Places to go, people to see.  Next Tuesday starts the Ocala Breeders June Two-Year-Old sale, where Bill and Siobhan will amble around searching for talent.  It’s in there somewhere, all a person has to do is wade through 1100 candidates.  Maybe we’ll do better than we did when we picked Bull Ensign out of a yearling sale a couple years back and watched him finish fourth a million times in a row.  That horse was eventually claimed in New Jersey last month for $30,000, giving us the opportunity to try again.

Meanwhile, homebred Cosmic Saint is up at Monmouth working toward her first start.  After several middling efforts, she finally posted an encouraging 36.4 out of the gate Sunday and should run next month.  Our two layabout yearlings, Ava and Micki, have been advised the day nears for their own trip to boarding school.  Only four more months of frolicking on the lea before they pick up their beanies and Crayolas and march off to class.

It’s almost vacation time for B&S, as well.  Come July 23rd, we’ll be off to Maine by way of New York City and Boston, with a side trip to the old homestead in South Lawrence thrown in.  We wrote to the current homeowners of 51-53 Garfield Street the other day and we can’t wait to hear back.  I can see it now—our letter arrives, they look at it suspiciously, the husband shakes his head:  “I don’t know, Brunhilda—might be a sneaky way to case the joint.  Better tell them we’ll be in the French Alps that week.”

Siobhan is looking around for a dress and a wedding ring, even though there are twelve months to the nuptials.  This takes a lot of work, just any old thing won’t do.  Last I heard, she’s leaning to an outside ceremony with red rock backgrounds, thus requiring something in the vast range of white to eggshell.  Knee length or shorter.  This isn’t the Renaissance, after all.  People keep asking if they can come.  This is what happens when you get hitched in Las Vegas.  Maybe we should have tried Boise.

Pathogenes is rolling in dough so now we have to visit people like investment counselors and worry about the stock market.  Maybe we’ll start a foundation.  Tiger Woods has one, perhaps we can talk to him and get some advice.  It’s not like he’s doing anything else right now.

With the College World Series wrapping up next week and pro hockey and basketball playoffs about finished, we’re out of sports for awhile.  Oh, there’s the Red Sox, but they’re setting a new standard for Dismal.  How can you pay millions of dollars to professional hitters and get shut out all the time?  They’ve already fired the pitching coach, the batting mentor will be the next to go, then the manager, the GM and the guy who plays the electric organ.  The team is currently owned by an odd little fellow named John Henry, who is definitely not a steel-drivin’ man.  I don’t think John Henry knows much about baseball and he needs better advice.  I keep waiting for his call but the phone never rings.

I’m expecting to see my sisters, Alice and Kathy, when I get to Maine.  But only in the evening.  Alice and Kathy don’t hike.  Alice and Kathy drink wine and spend a lot of time on Facebook.  Kathy mainly gabs with her friends and proselytizes for her kid’s rock ‘n’ roll band.  Alice bashes Democrats.  They have a lot of time on their hands.  Alice was thinking about volunteering at the L.A Mexican Soup kitchen but she found out they don’t feed the volunteers free tequila.  There’s nothing like family.

It’s June here in soggy Fairfield, so it rains every day.  We go from dry as a bone in May to paddock ponding in June.  With satellite TV, that means you lose your television all the time.  I have discovered, though, that this mainly applies to the hi-def channels and you can often keep the non-HD stations with a deft twist of the knob.  This ranks right up there with the discovery of cheese and several of the lesser planets, but it keeps me happy.

I went to visit my old friend B.J. at her hair salon the other day.  It’s a twenty-five mile drive just for a haircut but things were not working out at the Ocala drive-by haircutteries.  With so little hair to contend with, you’d think they’d do a better job.  Anyway, I’ve missed B.J.  When I go there, we always discuss politics and other important issues of the day.  This time, it was the privatization of Florida prisons, about which B.J. has mixed feelings.  Her son is in one of them so she has first-hand experience.  “The phone calls are outrageous,” she complains.  “It’s fifty cents for three minutes.  On the other hand, they let the inmates dress like it’s Casual Fridays on the outside.” 

We almost had a nice picture in here with my stepson, Danny, and American Pharoah.  Danny drives vans for Brookledge Horse Transportation, haulers of AP, and he snookered himself into a good shot with his wealthy friend.  His mother, Harolyn, sent it to Irana and she to me.  Trouble is, the photo is a tiny little thing, unforwardable from my ancient phone.  Irana is technologically challenged and doesn’t know how to email it and I am progressively challenged and still have one of those flip-top phones from the Troglodyte Era.  Siobhan says I have to get with the program because I am the only one left on Earth with one of these dinosaurs, but I know that is not true because one or her employees, Debbie Stuart has a flip-top and so does Internet Heroine Of The Year, Deb Peterson.  Siobhan says that pretty soon my little phone won’t work any more because I’ll be bypassed by the latest technology which spits on flip-tops.  I don’t believe her.  My phone worked on a mountaintop in Alaska, why should it quit now?  Siobhan points out that her brand new phone can scratch her nose or book an aisle seat to Duluth, but I don’t need any of that stuff.  Shockingly, I just use it to make phone calls.  Go ahead—lock me up.  Hey, let me tell you something.  I can close my phone off to the worries of the world; if it falls into a tub of marmalade, no problem.  If it’s run over by a John Deere tractor, it comes up smiling.  You can even put it in your back pocket and sit through a movie.  Try that with your fancy-schmancy new phones—they come back looking like horseshoes.  You have to turn them over and jump up and down on them to straighten them out.  You keep your communication instrument and I’ll keep mine.  Hello?  Is anybody there?

 

Friend Of Internet Hero Eats

Harry Edwards was not always the Counterculture Archbishop of Austin.  Once, long, long ago, he was just a simple little boy with a socially-conscious father, who taught him to always consider the fortunes of others.  “Everybody doesn’t have a new shiny Schwinn like you have, Harry.  Make sure you give your friends rides.”  Harry did not give his friends rides, but he felt guilty about it, and years later when he joined the seminary he promised God he would do what he could to help the less fortunate.  And over the years, he has kept his promise, dutifully picketing the child-labor mills, boosting gritty socialist causes and religiously dumping boiling oil on greedy capitalist pigs.

Now, he has been installed and he uses the might of his Bishopric for the betterment of man, often sacrificing his own interests for the sake of his neighbor.  Recently, in fact, he donated his Flying Pie Internet Hero Of The Year dinner to a young, struggling neighbor couple, just one year married.  Charles and Hannah Packard have been separated for much of that year by the nature of his job as a recruiter for ITT, never a happy circumstance for young marrieds, nor are they rolling in Uncle Scrooge’s money bin; Hannah is an event coordinator for the Austin Humane Society.

So, thanks to Archbishop Edwards, here they are at La V, one of Austin’s finest restaurants.  “Some of the best food we’ve ever eaten,” says the grateful couple.  Oh, and by the way, The Flying Pie being a progressive outfit, our clergymen are allowed to marry.  It’s so much easier on the little altar boys.  And Harry is married to the lovely Diane, who we have a sneaking suspicion is in charge of research and development.

 

 

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

The Snake Pit

 

There’s a story, and many people believe it, that Alydar, failing to best Affirmed for the third consecutive classic race, while galloping back to be unsaddled looked to the skies and placed a merciless curse on racing’s Triple Crown.  “Never again!” demanded Alydar, and the Cosmos, sympathizing with the brave warrior’s unfortunate plight, echoed “Never again!”  And since that day, 37 long years past, there has never been a thoroughbred to win the Triple Crown.  Most of the failures came in the Belmont Stakes, the third and longest gem in the Triple Crown and for seemingly logical reasons, which might belie Alydar’s curse.  But the weight of the failures, the unlikely circumstances time after time lend credence.

Just one year after Affirmed’s Triple Crown conquest of Alydar, Spectacular Bid was rolling through opponents like General Sherman danced through Georgia, equaling a track record in his second start at two years old, winning the prestigious Champagne Stakes in New York, then the Laurel Futurity, in which he set another track record, unheard of for a two-year-old in a route race.  The Bid won an Eclipse Award that year, the first of three he would claim in his career.  Spectacular Bid was trained by Grover “Bud” Delp, an obnoxious sort who plied his trade primarily in the Maryland area.  He was ridden by a teenager named Ronnie Franklin who would never be mistaken for a whiz kid.

As a three-year-old, Spectacular Bid was gangbusters, reeling off five in a row, including the Hutcheson Stakes, the Fountain of Youth and the Florida Derby, all at Gulfstream Park, the Flamingo at Hialeah and the Blue Grass at Keeneland Race Course, becoming a 3-5 favorite for the Kentucky Derby.  Trainer Delp famously advised the public to “Go bet!  Go bet now!”  Anyone who followed his advice was a happy camper as the horse prevailed by 2 3/4 over General Assembly.

Bumped early in the Preakness Stakes, Spectacular Bid stayed wide, easily taking command by the time he hit the stretch, winning by 5 1/2 over Golden Act.  When asked bout Bid’s Triple Crown chances, jockey Franklin piped up, “He’s a cinch!”  All racing people shudder at such remarks.  It’s the racing equivalent of baseball’s refusal to discuss an ongoing no-hitter in the dugout, the gods will obviously be offended.  Perhaps it was the fun-loving Loki who decided to place an open safety pin in Bid’s stall.  The horse somehow stepped on it and the pin became embedded in his hoof, leading to an infection which was drilled to cure the problem.  Spectacular Bid was never lame, however, and the pin’s relevance to his performance in the Belmont is questionable. 

In the Belmont, Franklin rode The Bid with unusual aggression early in the race, taking the lead halfway through.  He still had a clear lead entering the stretch but then began to struggle and was eventually overtaken by winner Coastal and second-place Golden Act.  Some commentators speculated that Delp and Franklin had been intent on emulating Secretariat’s performance in the 1973 Belmont and their tactics were intended to maximize the margin of victory.  If so, they quickly discovered there was only one Secretariat.  Delp, who had denigrated Coastal’s chances before the race, thought Bid might simply “not be a mile-and-a-half horse.”  Nonetheless, he abruptly fired Franklin and brought the legendary Bill Shoemaker in to ride Bid in subsequent races.  Franklin admitted he had run a poorly-judged race and had very little experience race-riding over long distances.  So, not a curse, right?  Not so far.

In 1981, Wall Street financier Thomas Mellon Evans brought Pleasant Colony to the fore.  The latter had won two of five starts as a Freshman, one being New York’s Remsen Stakes (by the disqualification of first-under-the-wire Akureyri), but couldn’t beat that horse as a three-year-old, losing three times.  After Pleasant Colony’s fifth-place finish in the Florida Derby, Evans ditched his trainer and hired New Yorker Johnny Campo, never accused of being a nice man and occasionally investigated by racing authorities for untoward shenanigans. Ridden by Canadian Jeffrey Fell, Pleasant Colony then won April’s Wood Memorial Stakes by three lengths.

In the Kentucky Derby, Jorge Velasquez held off a powerful stretch drive by Woodchopper to win by three-quarters of a length, then came from behind to win the Preakness by a length over Arkansas Derby winner, Bold Ego.  Pleasant Colony never gave the appearance of being a great horse, however, and few were shocked when he ran third in the Belmont to Summing and Highland Blade.  Certainly no suspicion of a curse here.

But then came the good horse, Alysheba, in 1987, time for irony to raise its tousled head.  For Alysheba, you see, was sired by none other than Alydar.  Surely, the curse, be there one, would relent at the behest of its perpetrator.  Or would it?  Some curses have a mind of their own.  As a two-year-old, Alysheba had only a maiden win to his credit and, when he underperformed at three, he was scoped and discovered to have an entrapped epiglottis.  Surgery was successful and he was entered in the Kentucky Derby despite having only the one victory, something which could not happen today due to the earnings requirements.  Alysheba won a slow Derby (2:03 4/5), then knocked off the Preakness, both races which permitted the use of Lasix, which was not legal in New York State, where the Belmont would be run.  He finished a poor fourth, Bet Big killing the field by 14 lengths.  No curse involved, obviously it was the Lasix situation.

This is where things really get suspect.  In 1989, Bob Baffert’s Sunday Silence surprised Easy Goer in the Derby and the Preakness but was second to that colt in the Belmont.   In 1997, Silver Charm, a very nice Baffert colt, won the first two legs of the Triple Crown before Touch Gold caught him at the wire in the Belmont.  Then, in 1998, Real Quiet dominated the first two races before losing by an eyelash to Victory Gallop’s impossible stretch run.  Three seconds in a row to foil a Triple Crown, the third requiring a detailed photo investigation to determine the winner.  Nobody was dismissing the curse now.  Later disappointments followed with Charismatic (1999), War Emblem (2002), Funny Cide (2003)  and the very popular Smarty Jones in 2004.  In the 2008 race, Big Brown was injured and did not finish (a bad advertisement for his namesake, UPS).  Worse yet, in 2012, I’ll Have Another suffered a pre-race injury and didn’t even start.  Last year, everybody’s favorite, California Chrome finished an undistinguished fourth, and maybe that was because the curse sought to punish an undeserving owner.  There’s too much evidence here to ignore.  The hex is on.  What do we do about it?

According to Magic, Spells & Potions, a simple way of “drawing out” curses and hexes is to use a salt medicine pouch, worn over the heart.  This would have to be okayed by the Belmont stewards but we don’t see a problem there.  Horses are allowed to wear earmuffs, for crying out loud, how could a little salt medicine pouch hurt?   So here’s the deal; first, get a piece of wax paper.  Then, write on it carefully (ever try writing on wax paper?) what you know about the curse….who cast it, where it came from, when it started.  Then, place three spoonfuls of salt into the paper and make a little bundle you can tie with a piece of string.  After that, place it over the heart of the victim for three days and three nights, including race day.  The salt will draw out the curse and take it into itself.

Will it work?  Hey, what have you got to lose?  And if you win the race, you’ve got a great story.  I’m going to try it, myself, next time I go to the cardiologist or have an IRS audit.  I’ll let you know how it works out.  Always assuming, of course, that I’m not in jail.  That’s a curse of a different color.

 

 

Dead Horse Walking 

Our Lexington pal, Bill Mauk, forwarded a note from his son, Fletcher, containing the….um, unorthodox workout schedule of Belmont entry Mubtaahij.  You remember Mubtaahij, if not the spelling of his name: he was the colt born in Ireland, raced in England, then Dubai, flown to Chicago via Amsterdam, quarantined for the requisite period and finally vanned to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby.  Shockingly, he didn’t win.  He did finish eighth, though, beating ten others—not too bad considering the circumstances.  Anyway, we all know now that his trainer, Mike de Kock (an obvious natural for the chicken-fighting business) is not indisposed to doing things differently.  Here’s the work chart provided by Equibase: on May 17 on the inner turf track at Belmont, five furlongs in 1:01.11.  Three days later on the Belmont dirt track, a half-mile in 48.34.  Four days later on the Belmont dirt, five furlongs in 1:03.16.  Three days later, again at Belmont: 38.05.  and three days after that, five-eighths in 1:01.05.  Not burning-up-the-track times for a horse at this level but a lot tougher than a stout gallop.  Fletcher thinks if Mubtaahij wins, de Kock will have singlehandedly rewritten the training books.

All due respect to Fletcher, but we see few trainers following this regimen, good performance in the Belmont or not.  It’s too risky.  While de Kock’s horse may tolerate such a schedule—and that remains to be seen—many other horses would not.  It’s a throwback to the first half of the twentieth century, when horses were tougher and raced more often with few repercussions.  Why are today’s horses different?  Many of the runners from that earlier era were bred, raised and raced by their owners, the majority of them wealthy sportsmen with their own farms.  The races were, on average, longer then, not demanding of the early speed necessary today.  Most of today’s racehorses are raised by breeders to sell as yearlings or two-year-olds.  In the latter public sales, the young colts work either an eighth of a mile, a quarter or even three-eighths and the times are recorded and published.  Videos are also taken of each work and made accessible to potential buyers.  Speed is critical.  You won’t be getting a pretty penny for a horse with a slow work, whatever the excuse.  For breeders, therefore, speed pedigrees are all-important.  People are looking for sires which have the ability to produce precocious babies.  The circumstances being what they are, most races today are sprints, races run at less than a mile and as short as 4 1/2 furlongs.  Horses with sprint pedigrees do not lend themselves to longer races.  There are still individuals and farms, of course, which concentrate on producing classics horses, but their numbers are dwindling.  The lack of rugged distance horses today is one of the main reasons for the lack of recent Triple Crown winners and also for the annual grumbling about the tight schedule of the three races and even the distances.  A win by American Pharoah would prove a Triple Crown can still be achieved and, temporarily at least, quiet the complainers.  One more good reason to root for the favorite.

 

The Champ Arrives At Belmont

 

Who Can Beat American Pharoah?

Maybe nobody, especially if it rains.  And it’s supposed to.  Pharoah’s wet track wins in Arkansas and Maryland might have been his two best races and few of his rivals have been successful in the slop, if they experienced it at all.  There are good horses in this race, however.  Materiality is an interesting contender, having come up big in the Florida Derby after throat surgery.  He is capable of getting the lead and holding it well into the race.  A mile and a half?  Who knows?  None of the horses in the race have ever gone that distance, the opportunities being what they are.  This horse got off to a terrible start in the Kentucky Derby when he was slow out of the gate from his inside 3 post, was crushed by the mob and still finished a good sixth.  Materiality has the outside gate for this one, which seems like a good thing until you realize that only five Belmont winners have come from that post position in the history of the race.

Frosted, another off to a miserable Derby start, ran near the back of the pack early in that race, picked it up with a half-mile to go, roaring down the stretch to be fourth.  A better start here gives him an excellent shot. Madefromlucky won the Peter Pan Stakes on this same racetrack and winners of that race have historically run well in the Belmont.  Beaten twice already by Pharoah, however.  Last year’s winner, Tonalist, upset California Chrome, and that wasn’t the first surprise for Peter Pan winners.  Tale Of Verve made a big closing run to be second in the Preakness but it is unusual for horses who drop far back to sweep by the field in this race.  Bill Mauk thinks Keen Ice has a chance.  We should have asked him why.  Needs a fast pace, which doesn’t seem likely, to get much.  Frammento would be better off taking the kids to the beach, although they do pay something for fifth.

 

The Envelope, Please….

1.  Amercan Pharoah will win, barring terrible racing luck, an Act of God, or the difficulties incurred by his schedule.  He is simply the best horse, and it’s not close.

2.  Frosted probably isn’t beating the champ at any other distance but this is a unique opportunity.  Depends on how hard Pharoah has to run earlier in the race.

3.  Materiality would be wise to go to the front, slow it down and hope for the best.  If he does this, he may hold on, at least for second.

Yes, Bill the Optimist is picking a Triple Crown winner.  Sooner or later, some horse is going to win one and this is an awfully nice horse.  The length of the race can be a friend as well as an enemy.  It allows a horse an imperfect start, there’s plenty of time to recover.  There are some decent horses in here but none of them is in any danger of being mistaken for Secretariat.  American Pharoah will almost certainly win.

 

 

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com