I want to like Palace Malice. I really do. I’ve wanted to for a while, going back to before the Belmont. He’s owned by likeable connections. He’s got a good racing story, that whole blinkers-in-the-Derby debacle and all, then coming back to win the Belmont. He won the Jim Dandy. But I have a hard…
Last week, the Breeders’ Cup announced that for the first time since 2007, its headline race for fillies and mares will once again be called the Distaff, rightly consigning to the rubbish bin the Ladies’ Classic. It’s unfortunate that there will be five winners of the race who will forever be saddled with that name…
Arising early last Saturday morning, I thought about August 3, 1863. I thought about what might have been going through John Morrissey’s mind on that summer morning 150 years ago, about how the guests in the downtown hotels might have prepared for the races, about the horse and carriage traffic jam that might have taken…
In the late 1980’s, I worked for several years in the sales office during the Saratoga sales. In those days before computers were widely used, I painstakingly recorded the details of each sale in a ledger: hip number, consigner, buyer, sales price. I lived in fear of making a mistake. That anxiety aside, it was…
On Saturday, May 27, in his 14th year as a jockey, Joseph Rocco Jr. got his first Grade I win when Tiz Miz Sue won the Ogden Phipps Handicap at Belmont Park. Exactly two months later, at Saratoga Race Course, he got his second. Riding longshot Lighthouse Bay in last Saturday’s Prioress, Rocco rode the…
A year ago this month, multiple stakes winner Stud Muffin was on a farm just outside Saratoga, resting up for a fall racing campaign. Then eight years old, he hadn’t hit the winner’s circle in 2012. He raced twice more last year, non-competitively, and it was clear that his best racing days were behind him.…
Last Saturday at Saratoga, trainer Tom Morley watched his 3-year-old filly Scribbling Sarah load into the gate for the fourth race. A bit of a temperamental filly, he had worked hard with her in the mornings to get her comfortable in the starting gate, and the efforts were, he thought, finally paying off. “I thought…
By the time the gates fly open for the first race today at 1 p.m., tens of thousands of words will have been written about this summer’s Saratoga meeting. They will have appeared in turf publications, in newspapers, and in magazines. Races will have been handicapped, predictions will have been made, visitors’ guides will have…
Brooklyn Backstretch 