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….
