Sally Rohrbach stands by a fence behind her sprawling house in Harwood, Maryland, a short ride from Annapolis. Glimpses of the South River are visible down the hill from the front yard. She whistles, looking across several paddocks, over the heads of the three miniature horses that live closest to the barn, a handful of…
Earlier this week, perhaps in anticipation of this afternoon’s Spooky Mulder Stakes at Aqueduct, Barbara Livingston posted a photo of Spooky himself, dueling with fellow game gelding Callmetony at Saratoga in 2006. Tony was a spritely five-year-old back then, Spooky an older, wiser eight-year-old. The race was Spooky’s 66th; Tony had raced in exactly half…
In today’s second race at Saratoga, the youngest horse is four years old; the oldest is seven. Among them, they’ve made 124 starts. The race is called the Spooky Mulder, and I suspect that its namesake would approve. During his racing career, Spooky ran in 85 races, winning 34 of them. He finished second 17…
My father is the very antithesis of a hunch bettor: he has little use for the betting proclivities of his daughter (in fact, he frequently refers to me as “the worst bettor of all time”), and I can’t remember a single time when he bet a horse for any other reason than that he thought…
Ah, holiday weekends! Not sure what the justification is behind making Columbus Day a major holiday, but given the chance at a three-day weekend…I’ll take it. As usual, I spent Saturday at Belmont, where there were three Grade 1 races on tap: the Jamaica, the Frizette, and the Champagne. On Sunday I headed for points…
The Jacobson barn last week, on Spooky Mulder: “He doesn’t know he’s ten years old; he acts like a two-year-old.” On Sunday, Spooky beat four other horses in a $16,000 claimer at Monmouth, in his first and only start for trainer David Jacobson. Spooky had been in Scott Lake’s barn since February of 07, and…
Good news for fans of New Yorkers Spooky Mulder and Naughty New Yorker. Though bred in Kentucky, Spooky Mulder’s spent a good deal of his racing life in New York. After being claimed by Scott Lake in February of 2007, Spooky moved to the Mid-Atlantic circuit, but David Jacobson claimed him in his last start,…
A few weekends ago, I made my third visit to Delaware Park; I’d intended to post this then, but then the Derby happened…and then the Derby aftermath happened. My previous visits were on closing day in November of 2006 and on a Saturday in April of 2007. Each time, I was impressed with various elements…
Slowing down as we age is distastefully inevitable–I wish that running fast and far was as easy today as it was ten years ago–and even if we do a pretty good job of denying it in ourselves, we find ourselves reminded of its truth when we are lucky enough to watch some of our favorites…
Or as the former (California) school of a current colleague says, Happy Indigenous People’s Day. A collection of random thoughts on the weekend’s racing: After multiple attempts, I was finally able to catch Spooky Mulder’s race on Calracing; it was a four-horse field, but a typical Spooky race: he hung about four lengths off the…
Brooklyn Backstretch 