KNOCK 'EM DEAD

Galen May liked to gamble and it may have cost him his life. A key man in trainer Jerry Hollendorfer's organization, Galen was entrusted with Kentucky Oaks winner Blind Luck at Churchill Downs.

Galen was semi-retired after a life on the racetrack but Jerry would call on him whenever he needed a seasoned hand to prepare a horse for a big race until he could arrive on the scene. I got to know him from his frequent trips to Kentucky on behalf of Hollendorfer. He was a quiet and friendly man.

After Blind Luck's epic victory in the Oaks Galen returned to his California home.

Police arrested a neighbor of May's and charged him with murder. The motive was said to be robbery. Galen was a regular patron of a casino near Sacramento and the killer may have known his routine.

There is a sense of danger that pervades a gambling site, one of the few remaining businesses dealing in "cold cash".

I can recall several other big scores that resulted in homicide.

Fair Grounds had begun to offer the exacta as part of its wagering menu in 1969. There was an exacta only on the last race each day.

One day there was a lot of hooplah coming from the clubhouse bar. A regular had hit for big money in the last race exacta. A boisterous impromptu party broke out among a group of clubhouse regulars.

I drove home to my apartment on Esplanade in the French Quarter and thought nothing of it until I read the morning paper account of a murder victim who had been robbed of his winnings on the Fair Grounds exacta. He was shot in the carport of his apartment about a half-mile from where I lived on Esplanade.

I was at Hollywood Park one day when another steady high roller hit a Pick-Six for $40,000 and crowed about it enough to alert everybody in the park.

An assailant followed him down Century Boulevard towards the airport. The victim turned into the portico of a luxury hotel where he was shot dead. A gust of wind began to blow the money away and the thief could grab only a small amount. The scene sounded like the finale of "Treasure of Sierra Madre" when Humphrey Bogart watched his gold dust disappear in a sand storm.

The unlucky horse player drove a Jaguar with a vanity license that read YRU POOR.

Moral of the Story: If you hit a big lick it's best to keep it to yourself.

RESTITUTION NOT RETRIBUTION

Jockey Patrick Valenzuela has been blessed over the years with a certain bonhomie that, no matter how many times he has burned the racing population, there's a tendency to consider his misdeeds as "victimless".

I don't think so.

Patrick burned me and my Santa Barbara Stable partners but good by failing to keep his engagement aboard our horse Sunny Blossom in the Frank DeFrancis Memorial. The DeFrancis was the richest sprint in the country, other than the Breeders' Cup ,with a $300,000 purse.

Sunny Blossom was capable of six furlongs in 1.07.1, a Santa Anita record which still stands. It made sense to take him to Baltimore in hopes of upsetting champion Housebuster.

A number of our partners made the trip to Maryland, excited to take on the best eastern sprinters. The Kesslers from Seattle; the Caligiuris from New York and Santa Barbara; the Koenigs from Los Angeles; Nick Ben-Meir from Beverly Hills; Bob Estrin from Hollywood and various extended family boosters were all on hand.

Patrick was due to take the "red-eye" from Los Angeles which would give him plenty of time to prepare for the race. Despite calls to the hotel there was no word from our jockey. An hour before the race he finally called the stewards and claimed to be sick.

We had to scramble for the best jock we could find, namely Edgar Prado who was tops in Maryland but a far cry from the household word he was to become. His English skills were limited.

In the confusion in the paddock our trainer failed to give the word to Prado that Sunny Blossom did not like to be whipped, nor did he want to change leads so there was no point in trying to make him change.

Housebuster went to the front and never looked back. In deep stretch it was apparent that Sunny Blossom could not win. To my horror I watched as the substitute jockey whacked our horse a number of times as if he was trying to get him to change leads. You could see him swerve to try and escape the left handed stick.

Sunny Blossom exited the race dead lame in the stifle and did not run again for many months.

The partners on hand had spent tens of thousands of dollars in order to attend one of the nation's top races and came away with nothing but a sour taste and an injured horse.

Pat Valenzuela? Not a peep out of him.

I am not interested in retribution after all these years. But there is something called restitution and I challenge Pat to make good on his many indiscretions and donate a significant sum to the Winner's Foundation.

You're making money now. Ten grand ought to do it.

GOODWOOD GOOD WILL

Recently we posted a piece on how to address European dignitaries often encountered in the course of our equine wanderings. Most such meetings are usually cursory and formal at best..



And then there's Charlie, the Duke of Richmond and master of Glorious Goodwood, in the family for seven centuries or so.



Charlie, you say? A bit cheeky, that.



Hardly.



Our Four Stars Sales team sent over a draft of yearlings in 2003 to try our luck in the Tattersalls lucrative Newmarket vendue. We were advised to put on a splashy show to make the toffs aware of our imminent arrival in the UK, sort of a Paul Revere ride in reverse.



Goodwood was chosen as the site for this soiree and we complied with champion jockey Steve Cauthen in tow as media bait. Our entourage was whisked to the Duke's private quarters for champagne after the running of the Duke of Richmond Stakes.

I asked the Duke what he liked to be called , not having quaffed bubbly with a real duke before.

"You might call me Duke, or even Your Grace or just plain Charlie. Just don't call me anything bad," he said with a chuckle. We had a high old time sipping on the Duke's good champagne while he regaled his visitors with tales of Goodwood.

Goodwood had been a sponsor along with Oak Tree at Santa Anita with a home-and-home stakes offering which is now in jeopardy with the Santa Anita turmoil.

I hope I can find my way back to Goodwood one day and look up my buddy Charlie.

MINDING THE STORE

Sharp Secretary continues to shine among Woodbine's 3-year-old fillies. She smartly scampered away from a good field to annex the $150,000 Duchess stakes on August 7.

Several television commentators have noted that she was bought for only $1,100.

True enough. But we paid out $25,000 last spring to acquire her as a 2-year-old.

She has made everybody look good.

Highly regarded juvenile Western Mood regressed in the Best Pal stakes at Del Mar, finishing third.

JUDDMONTE HONORS FRANKEL

Prince Khalid of Juddmonte Farm evidently picked out a good one to honor his longtime trainer, Bobby Frankel. The Galileo colt he named Frankel won decisively on the weekend at Newmarket.

Please excuse us if we throw out a couple more Frankel tales.

One concerns a horse named Mehmet, one of Bobby's first good stakes-winners to go to stud. When it came time to dole out a breeding right or a syndicate share as promised, Bobby hit the roof. He said that would never happen to him again and he included a clause in future training agreements granting him such perquisites.

One of those future stakes-winners was Missionary Ridge who won the inaugural Pacific Classic at Del Mar after being purchased from Robert Sangster by Canadian Peter Wall.

When Wall first signed on with Bobby he was told how he could expect to know when they would be running.

"You have lots of money," he said. "Buy a racing form".

A DEL MAR TALE

This is a Del Mar story. Actually, it is a Bobby Frankel story that happens to take place at Del Mar.

In the summer of 1983 the first horse I ever bred was ready to race at Hollywood Park.

My trainer of choice was Bobby Frankel. I was a little daunted by his gruff demeanor but I was looking for a trainer who was a consistent winner with any kind of horse. I wasn't even sure he'd want to take on a British Columbia-bred maiden claimer named Bold Runaway .

I had only one request of Frankel: Let me know if we can win a bet.

"Maybe, maybe not," he told me when we met in the paddock at Hollywood Park. I took that as a "no" and made only a modest wager of support rather than conviction.

We ran second.

Three weeks later we were at Del Mar where terse instructions told me "bet your money".

My life at that time was embroiled in an unpleasant and costly divorce. My two children joined me for the trek from Santa Barbara. I was so sure that Bold Runaway would win that I plunked down a four-figure win bet. Not very clever, I realize, to drive a horse's odds down to 6-t0-5 on the nose. But I had blind faith in Frankel at that time and I needed a winner to boost my morale as well as that of Shannon and Josh.

Bold Runaway walked her beat under Martin Pedroza and,

after cashing my tickets, we went back to the barn to bid her adieu before the long ride home. To my dismay what I saw was my filly walking lame.

On the way out of the barn I bumped into Bobby. "Did you see your filly?

" he said, smiling.

"I think she's gone lame," I said. "Please have the vet look her over."

He muttered something to himself that sounded like "everybody's a trainer these days" and strode away.

The next morning, however, Bobby was on the phone with news that Bold Runaway had indeed suffered a slab fracture of her knee. The news was not unexpected so I paused, wondering what to do next, when Bobby asked what I planned to do with her.

"I'm not sure," I said. "Try to find her a good home."

"Would you take fifteen for her?" he said.

By that time I did not know if he meant fifteen hundred, fifteen thousand or fifteen cents. I knew enough about horse dealing to not make the first bid.

"I have a season to the top quarter horse stallion in America,"he explained. "I'll give you $15,000 for your filly and breed her."

Since I figured she was worth $1000, tops, I jumped at the offer while, at the same time, wondering which of us was loco. The sharpest guy in racing overpaying tenfold for a filly with no pedigree and a broken knee.

Bobby knew of my domestic disorder and seemed charmed by Shannon and Josh as only 5 and 10-year-olds can do. For years I wondered what his motive for that gesture represented. I didn't bring it up, perhaps in fear that he might want the money back.

Many years later I was in a group of horsemen, Frankel among them,

kibitzing at a Saratoga charity function. A couple glasses of wine loosened my tongue and I told the story for the first time outside my immediate family.

"Why, Bobby, why"? I asked.

He just smiled.

SPEIGHTS TO THE HEIGHTS

Somebody had to be second last Saturday in the Lady's Secret at Monmouth Park.

Queen Martha didn't scare Rachel Alexandra much but a tidy sum of $80,000 was more than worth the effort. The dam of Queen Martha was the good stakes producer' Cryptoqueen which I had purchased for John Franks some years back. She was a well-made yearling but a touch on the small side. I paid $22,000 for her but she was one of those fillies who did not grow much and thus had a modest racing career.Bred to the home stallion Lucky North, Cryptoqueen produced the very good stakes mare Clearly A Queen.

Our handiwork was evident in various quarters of late. Two brilliant juveniles surfaced, Wine Police and Roxy Gap, both by the surging third-year stallion Speightstown which yours truly bought as a $2million yearling. Furthermore, I purchased the dam of Roxy Gap (the stakes-placed Harts Gap) and sold the dam of Wine Police under the Four Star Sales banner.

Another Speightstown rising star is Jersey-based Spiteful Gypsy. I sold the dam, SW Leo's Gypsy Dancer for the Purse Strings Stable, a conglomerate of 17 women from Louisville. I earned my 5 % on that occasion I can assure you.

If this sounds a bit self-serving that's because it is. Remember: it's not bragging if you can do it. When you are ready to step back into the fray keep that in mind.

STRAWBERRY FIELDS

Canadians consider Strawberry Morn as one of the finest racemares ever seen in the Western province of British Columbia. The benchmark for greatness in that remote locale is to head South to take on the high class mares at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar.

I played a cameo role in arranging Strawberry Morn's transfer to the barn of Jenine Sahadi. She placed in a few starts, including a stakes at Hollywood, but she was clearly over the top by then and was sent to be bred to Awesome Again

and sold in the November Sale at Keeneland.

Strawberry Morn's run of success ran out the very night before she was due to be sold.

I received a call at 3 a.m. from a night watchman that the mare was in the process of aborting her foal. A bitter blow to be sure.

There was further melodrama in Strawberry Morn's life which we need not elaborate at this time (a partnership gone sour). Like many hard raced mares, Strawberry Morn needed a bit of time to reproduce her best foals.

The mare wended her way to Europe and gained international notice when her daughter Strawberrydaiquiri won a Group race at Royal Ascot for trainer Sir Michael Stoute.

"I SAW THE LIGHT"

There's an undefeated 3-year-old in Northern California named Goggles McCoy who will move into California-bred stakes soon at Del Mar for trainer Steve Sherman. Another Goggles McCoy rode races in the 1930s. A journeyman rider of no great distinction, McCoy will be remembered, if at all, as the jockey who invented goggles.

I met the two-legged "Goggles" when assigned to do a story on him when I covered the races for a New Orleans daily in 1968.

"It was a matter of self-preservation," I recall him saying. "I got tired of getting whacked in the face on muddy days at Fair Grounds. You just couldn't see through the mud and neither could the other riders. It was plumb dangerous.

"The other jocks were skeptical at first but it wasn't long before they were all wearing them, too".

Sometimes it's the little things that matter.