THE BELMONT : Big Apple Puts Bite on Another Out-of-Towner

ELMONT,N.Y. —  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. But a horse that won two legs of the Triple Crown got beat in the Belmont Saturday.

I think I’ve seen this film before. This was time No. 12 this has happened. This puts it in the majority. Eleven times, it has happened the other way: The two-time winner has made it a sweep in the Belmont.

We were supposed to get Dempsey-Firpo. Instead, we got Tyson-Bruno. Easy Goer flattened Sunday Silence in the stretch.

They ran one of the great races ever run at the Preakness. This one looked more like the Rose Parade. Sunday Silence looked more like a guy chasing a bus than a horse in a race.

You’ve heard of guys going home from a race track in a barrel? Of guys losing a bundle?

How’d you like to drop $4 million? On one race?

That’s what Sunday Silence, Charlie Whittingham and Arthur Hancock III left lying around Belmont Park Saturday.

Lots of guys have come to New York and gone home wiped out. Usually they buy the Brooklyn Bridge or a watch from a guy wearing a checkered suit.

Sunday Silence’s people didn’t buy anything that turned green on their arms. But they could have walked away with $5 million. All Sunday Silence had to do was win the Belmont. The Triple Crown. He didn’t even come close. The automobile company that puts up that prize must feel like a club that puts up a new car for anyone making a hole-in-one on a par-five.

It still might be the biggest one-day drop in the history of racing. Bet-A-Million Gates never had a worse score.

It could have been worse. The conditions of the bonus are these: Chrysler guarantees $5 million to any horse winning the Triple Crown. It puts up $1 million to the horse scoring the most points in the three races (five points for a first, three for a second and one for a third).

Two years ago, Alysheba won the first two races, then finished fourth in the Belmont. Another horse, Bet Twice, was second twice and then won the Belmont. He got the million-dollar bonus. Alysheba got the middle of the doughnut.

As unfair as it sounds, it could have happened again to Sunday Silence. A horse that wins two out of three could shoot the wad by losing one. Sunday Silence had the presence of mind to finish second. He got the million with 13 points. The Belmont winner, Easy Goer, ended up with 11.

Chrysler has not yet had to empty the vault to meet its pledge, but it’s plain the bonus conditions are geared to a save-the-Belmont philosophy.

It really wasn’t much of a race. Seven of the horses had about as much business in there as burros. The fourth horse was 20 lengths behind the winner, 12 lengths behind the third horse, and the last horse was 49 lengths behind everybody. They almost had to delay the next race.

Sunday Silence, who kicked his trainer in the head Friday, got a lick in at the bettors, too. He took about a million out of their pockets, going off as odds-on (4-5).

Oh well, nobody’s perfect. The story of the race was an immigrant from France. He did better than anyone from there since Lafayette.

Le Voyageur had not only never raced in this country before, he had never raced on dirt. He wasn’t exactly Man o’ War but he proved harder to get rid of than dandruff. Of course, he was the only horse in the race that had ever run a mile and a half before. In America, they pack a lunch for anything over seven-eighths of a mile. Le Voyageur must have thought it was a nice little sprint. He was just getting warmed up when he hit the finish. He led the race all the way to the far turn. It took the second fastest Belmont of all time just to shuffle him back to third.

All the race really proved was one of the hoariest cliches in racing. This has been heard in every backstretch in America from camptown meetings to the lordly Jockey Club. It goes--repeat after me--like this: “Horses for courses.” Stripped of the doggerel, it means that some horses don’t like some race tracks.

Great race horses can run on glass. But good race horses sometimes curl up their noses at inferior surfaces and pout.

It doesn’t make him all bad, but Easy Goer just doesn’t like Kentucky.

He came up to Churchill Downs last November hailed as the greatest thing on four legs since Pegasus. But when the Breeders’ Cup came up mud, he chased an inferior sort called Is It True (who ran on the undercard at Belmont Saturday). He lost.

Then, when he didn’t lose again until the Kentucky Derby last May under the same conditions--greasy track, intermittent rain--the race track world concluded he was an indifferent sort. I mean, a great horse doesn’t need his own deck.

But what was overlooked was that Easy Goer hooked up with 15 horses on a track and conditions he hated in the Derby--and finished second. In the Breeders’ Cup, he took on 10 horses and a surface that irritated him--and finished second.

When inferior horses hate a track, they finish last. They give up. Sulk. Pout. Refuse the bit. Lug in. Lug out.

Easy Goer had too much class for that. It was just his bad luck the most celebrated race in America took place in a part of the country he found difficulty standing up in.

This is a horse that ran a 1:32 2/5 mile this spring. Only one horse in the history of thoroughbreds has run faster.

Lots of people can’t handle Kentucky in the rain. But the burden of the proof is, Easy Goer is the best in his business when the sun is shining and the track isn’t glassy. And in Kentucky.

Oh, he finished second in the Preakness. If you consider 6 inches off the winner as second. Only sophisticated optics could determine that it wasn’t a dead heat.

When Long Island came up with the kind of weather that capsizes destroyers all week, the handicappers all but wrote Easy Goer off.

But this wasn’t Kentucky. Easy Goer just stalked Sunday Silence like that railroad dick after Butch Cassidy. He just swept by him at the far turn as soon as he got ready. He ran the fastest Belmont this side of Secretariat.

If he stays out of Louisville in the rain, no one can beat him. Of course, that’s a good game plan even if you don’t have to run.