It is so appropriate that Saratoga starts its season every
year on a Thursday. It really is horse racing’s Thanksgiving.
Opening day not only feels like a holiday on its own merit,
it signals the most wonderful time of the year. It is like Hallmark Channel’s
Christmas in July except without the bad writing and acting. The only thing
missing is someone telling us that it is politically incorrect to wish someone
a happy Labor Day at the end.
The very setting in a village not far from the Adirondacks
is perfect, right down to the absence of that pesky snow this time of year.
Each day at the races is framed perfectly between breakfasts over PPs and
dinners at any rotation of restaurants and friends of friends’ rental homes.
This far into a column, a reader might be wondering about
where the pivot will be. There must be a but coming, right? Well, maybe not.
Not long into adulthood, I was preached a lesson about news.
I was just getting into that game at a little TV station in northern
California. It was not long after Watergate, back when journalists were at once
inquisitive investigators and nabobs of negativity. That was when I was taught
an enduring lesson.
Asked by an intern why there never was anything but bad news
being broadcast, a fair-haired reporter with a ton of promise and 10 times as
much attitude said, “It’s not news when the Queen Mary makes it across the
ocean.”
Long gone from my circle, that guy developed a reputation
for sensationalism that eventually led him out of news and into a career in
politics and then charity. Yet those 12 words are like an earworm.
“It’s not news when the Queen Mary makes it across the
ocean.”
For years that was my rationale for emphasizing bad news,
but in truth there was a more nuanced message. Don’t accentuate the negative.
Emphasize the exceptional, which also can be very, very good.
It happens in our own game. The most handsome chestnut
completing a Triple Crown with a 31-length runway. The horse of a lifetime
winning 16 consecutive races. An 80-1 long shot doing the unthinkable in winning
the Kentucky Derby.
Just this year we witnessed one of the most skillful, daring
rides when Brian Hernandez Jr. squeezed Mystik Dan through the eye of a needle
to win the Derby. We got to see 88-year-old D. Wayne Lukas dip into the
fountain of youth for his 15th win in a Triple Crown race. And we shared the
experience of Jayson Werth, who made a name for himself in one mainstream sport
before sipping from a goblet of victory in this thing called horse racing.
Hey, what do you know? That last one happened at Saratoga. I
will not let go of the watered-down status of a 1 1/4-mile Belmont Stakes*, but
there is no denying that a hard-working trainer like Danny Gargan and a rising
star of a jockey like Luis Sáez were feel-good stories. Exceptions. Especially
with a 17-1 payoff.
By all measures, the move of the Belmont Stakes racing
festival to Saratoga was wildly successful. Again, it was the exception that
validates the rule. It is not as if the Spa should be a year-round home for
racing. That would be too much of a good thing. Like eating a bowlful of
frosting without any cake.
I look at last month’s four days of racing at Saratoga like
it was the last out-of-town shakedown of a play before it goes to Broadway. Maybe
even previews. Thursday was akin to opening night of opera season every fall in
Manhattan, where the reward really lives up to the anticipation.
Saratoga delivered Thursday. When The Queens M G took her
44-1 odds to one of the most unlikely victories ever seen in a Spa stakes, it
had to be the perfect ice-breaker that evening at the saloons and bistros
around the upstate town.
For the next eight weeks Saratoga is set up to be our happy
place. A Travers with any combination of Mystik Dan and Seize the Grey and
Dornoch and Fierceness and Sierra Leone will be a championship-making race. The
temptation for Kenny McPeek to enter Thorpedo Anna in the Travers will be like dangling mistletoe.
National Treasure and Idiomatic will be must-see attractions. And more
2-year-olds like The Queens M G cannot help but be shiny, eye-catching gems.
I am fully aware storylines like these were supposed to live
in our frontal lobes last year, too. But then 14 horses died and 65 races were
rained off the turf and stakes fields were small and stewards’ decisions were
perplexing and last-second changes screwed horseplayers.
Those, too, were exceptions. The Queen Mary failing in its
mission.
The troubles that Saratoga experienced last summer were
day-to-day exceptions. A year later it does not feel like those cringe-worthy,
head-shaking moments of that aestas horribilis have stayed the throngs of
racing lovers from the swift completion of their return to the Spa.
In its own way, the lure that is Saratoga for eight weeks this
summer preceded by four bonus days in the late spring is an exception on a much
broader scale. Name any other meet during the year that is more eagerly
awaited. Make it the world, and only Royal Ascot and the Melbourne Spring
Carnival measure up through the prism of anticipation.
Forgive me, then, for celebrating Saratoga. I might even
hang stockings and start caroling.
Ron
Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below
are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron
Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.
