Where East Is Least and West Becomes Best

Time was in this country--and not too long ago--when everything west of New York, Boston and Philadelphia was considered not worth bothering about. Civilization stopped at the Hudson or, at the farthest, Altoona. George M. Cohan put the right, contemptuous note on it when he said, “Everything outside of Broadway is Bridgeport.”

“Society” was 400 people in New York. Culture was Carnegie Hall.

Sports were no different. There were the Yankees and the Giants--and the seven dwarfs in each league. The big leagues stopped at the Mississippi, too. Football was Yale and Harvard. They grudgingly made way for Notre Dame. So long as the Irish played their big games at Yankee Stadium.

In prizefighting, the state of New York had its own “world” champion and the other organization titles, such as the World Boxing Assn. were considered inferior. Hockey was the Rangers, tennis was Forest Hills, basketball was the Knicks and the hell with America.

Dan Reeves broke this parochial monopoly in 1946 when he moved the Cleveland Rams west to Los Angeles. Los Angeles, at that time, was widely considered to be Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand with a little Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford thrown in.

New York did not really believe the streets were paved out here till Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers--and the Giants--west in 1958. He might have saved baseball as we know it, but they never forgave him in the East.

Franchises began to arrive in California on every incoming bus, but the East took a perverse pride in noting that the West Coast still lagged in some important areas. The Westerners regularly lost the Rose Bowl game to the Big Ten, for instance.

But the best revenge was horse racing. The West was the land of the pony express and the Seventh Cavalry but, try as it might, it could not seem to get the hang of producing, or even conditioning, race horses that could stay up with the ones owned by the old rich from Long Island and the Main Line. Racing still belonged to the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts. Horses had to run where the tracks are deep and the competition deeper.

The Kentucky Derby is America’s race, the symbol of superiority in the sport of kings, and the West lusted to prove itself in it.

The results were uniformly embarrassing. Movie moguls, disc jockeys, tap dancers went east with thoroughbreds cloaked in vermilion silks and sequined blinkers. They looked like circus jackasses in the post parades and plow horses in the race.

Louis B. Mayer breds, On Trust and Stepfather, were in the 1947 race, Grandpere in 1948, Duplicator in 1949, Your Host in 1950 and Royal Orbit in 1959. None of them even finished in the money. Mostly, they finished ninth and Mayer gave up.

It went on like that. Eastern writers gave the western bred the horse laugh, so to speak. Joe Palmer once wrote that a horse had run the fastest time of the year “unless you count time taken in California.” The consensus was, California tracks all ran downhill and were constructed of pasteboard.

Occasionally, a Swaps or Determine would come along to reverse the typical order of things, but when Swaps got beat in a mid-summer match race by Nashua, the horse he had beaten in the Kentucky Derby, the sneers from under the top hats at Belmont became unbearable.

But lots of things have changed since George M. Cohan. Los Angeles is a citadel of sports second to none now. It not only wins the Rose Bowl, it wins the Super Bowl. It gets the Olympic Games.

And, now, it wins Kentucky Derbies. With galling regularity.

When Sunday Silence won at Churchill Downs Saturday, it marked the fourth consecutive year that a horse campaigned in California had won the Derby. It was the second consecutive year that the winner of the Santa Anita Derby had won the Kentucky Derby.

The supposition had always been that, given the conditions of California tracks--hard and fast, built for speed--it behooved California trainers to produce sprinters. Or settle for fifth.

Charlie Whittingham never even contested the Kentucky Derby. He didn’t need it. His stable made all the money it could spend. From 1960 to 1986, he passed on the race.

In 1986, he had a big old headstrong horse who had a lot of ability, some desire, and Charlie decided to see for himself what was so tough about the Kentucky Derby. He put the oldest jockey, Bill Shoemaker, on Ferdinand, and the Shoe and Charlie became the oldest pair--trainer and rider--ever to win the Kentucky Derby.

Charlie didn’t think they wrote the race he couldn’t get a horse ready for, but he was never one of those guys who wanted to put a horse in the Kentucky Derby just to say he did it.

This year, the East had one of those horses that brought out all the constipated accents from the Hamptons to the paddocks again. The East felt good about itself again. Easy Goer was so good that he wasn’t compared to his contemporaries but to legends. The question was not whether he could beat Charlie Whittingham’s Sunday Silence but whether he could beat Secretariat.

It may be that Easy Goer just doesn’t care for Churchill’s track. That wouldn’t make him unique, but it is the second time he has finished second there on an off track. Those were the only races he lost--except for the first one he ever ran, which he lost by a nose.

But it’s supposed to be the Hollywood horses that don’t care for the tracks there. What is significant this year is, this was the ninth Santa Anita Derby winner to win at Kentucky. Some other Kentucky Derby winners--Gato Del Sol in 1982, Ferdinand in 1986--were in but not good enough to win the Santa Anita Derby.

Californians hate to crow. But maybe it’s time for some sound stage song-and-dance man to say, “When you get east of the Tehachapis, everything is Waterbury.”

The only trouble is, Californians don’t know where Waterbury is to begin with.