HOLLYWOOD PARK : Delahoussaye Takes Five, Including Opening Feature

Since leaving the Midwest to ride in California in 1979, Eddie Delahoussaye has won only one seasonal title at Hollywood Park.

For a day at least, Delahoussaye is atop the Hollywood standings, and if he has another day today as he did Wednesday, the 41-year-old jockey will become the fifth rider to win 1,000 races at the Inglewood track.

On opening day of Hollywood’s fall meeting, Delahoussaye rode five winners--none of them a favorite--and won the $101,375 Moccasin Breeders’ Cup Stakes with a typically inventive ride aboard Blue Moonlight.

Delahoussaye’s five victories gives him 997 at Hollywood, where his only riding title came at the fall meet in 1989. The four jockeys ahead of him in overall victories at Hollywood are Hall of Famers: Laffit Pincay with 2,445, Bill Shoemaker with 2,416, Chris McCarron with 1,440 and Johnny Longden with 1,038. Pincay added to his total with a victory in Wednesday’s sixth race as Delahoussaye’s mount finished second. Delahoussaye was out of the money with his only other mount.

Delahoussaye rode Blue Moonlight for the first time, after four other jockeys had been aboard the 2-year-old filly in her first seven races. The second betting choice, Blue Moonlight broke on top, then dropped back as favored No Social Graces and Fit To Lead moved into the top two positions. Blue Moonlight was back on top with less than a sixteenth of a mile to go, and held off Fit To Lead to win by a neck. Nijivision was third, also beaten by less than a length. No Social Graces, making her first stakes start after a maiden victory at Santa Anita her first time out, finished fifth at 2-1 in the seven-horse field.

“My filly broke sharp, and I thought we’d be laying right up there,” Delahoussaye said. “She was very relaxed, so we waited until the eighth pole. She came on and ran tough at the end. The horse on the outside was flying, but we hit the wire at the right time.”

Through Sunday, Delahoussaye’s mounts had earned $11.6 million, ranking him third nationally behind Kent Desormeaux and McCarron. Desormeaux, whose total was $12.7 million, can count on much support from the voters for the Eclipse Award, something he won in 1989, but Delahoussaye, who has never won an Eclipse, has marquee mounts that include A.P. Indy, the probable horse of the year, and will be in the thick of the election.

Desormeaux will lose some momentum because of action taken by the Hollywood Park stewards on Wednesday. They handed him a five-day suspension, starting Saturday, for an incident in the last race on Monday at Santa Anita. A horse ridden by Desormeaux dropped in front of Delahoussaye’s mount on the far turn and was disqualified from first place to seventh.

Blue Moonlight’s victory enabled trainer Brian Mayberry to return to the spotlight with one of his many precocious 2-year-olds. Mayberry dominated the 2-year-old races at Hollywood’s first meeting this year, winning the Landaluce Stakes with Zealous Connection and the Hollywood Juvenile with Altazarr.

Later in the summer, not much was heard from Mayberry’s juveniles. Zealous Connection, sent to Monmouth Park, ran a fever instead of in the race, and Mayberry made no noises at Saratoga. Zoonaqua did win a stake at Del Mar, however, and in October she won the Oak Leaf Stakes before running seventh in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies at Gulfstream Park.

Zoonaqua bruised a foot and lost only a couple of days of training, but Zealous Connection, unable to shake her hard luck, has chipped a knee, undergone surgery and won’t be a factor until her 3-year-old season.

Still, Mayberry may have strength in numbers for the $250,000 Starlet at Hollywood Park, with Zoonaqua and Blue Moonlight his probables. On Wednesday, not long after the Moccasin, Mayberry and Donald Zuckerman, Blue Moonlight’s owner-breeder, were already discussing their options.

“The territory was running out (in the seven-furlong Moccasin),” Mayberry said. “This filly might be limited in how far she can go.”

The Starlet, on Dec. 19, is 1 1/16 miles, a distance that Blue Moonlight could not handle while running a badly beaten fifth in the Oak Leaf. On Nov. 28, Hollywood is running the $250,000 Miesque Stakes for 2-year-old fillies at a mile on grass, and Zuckerman is not opposed to paying a supplementary penalty of $10,000 to make Blue Moonlight eligible. Blue Moonlight’s pedigree indicates that she might like running on grass, but she has never tried the turf while winning three of eight starts. On Wednesday, she earned $57,000, was timed in 1:22 4/5 and paid $9 to win.

“Brian and his crew have done a phenomenal job,” Zuckerman said. “This is her eighth race and it looks like her second. We considered the Breeders’ Cup, but that would have been three weeks after the Oak Leaf, and we thought she’d prosper if she had a month between starts.”

The showcase race for 2-year-old colts at Hollywood is the $500,000 Futurity on Dec. 20, and Mayberry hopes to be running Altazarr and perhaps one or two others. Altazarr, whose summer was curtailed by a respiratory infection while he was training at Del Mar, preps for the Futurity on Saturday, in the Hollywood Prevue Breeders’ Cup Stakes.

Horse Racing Notes

Donald Zuckerman’s wife, Mary, is the co-owner of Blue Moonlight. The result of a mating between Mining and Blue Lass, Blue Moonlight is out of a dam who has been retired at age 24. Mining was undefeated when he ran 10th as the favorite in the 1988 Breeders’ Cup Sprint. . . . Kent Desormeaux won Wednesday’s first race for trainer Bob Hess Jr., giving them 23 victories together this year at Hollywood. . . . Eddie Delahoussaye won the third through the fifth races, and the eighth and ninth. He had never ridden any of his five winners before Wednesday. . . . Delahoussaye has the mount on Altazarr on Saturday.

Wednesday’s attendance was 12,042, a drop of about 2,500 from a year before. Betting was off about $200,000. Counting off-track betting, the overall handle was up about $150,000, with Nevada’s 17 locations not carrying the races because of no contract with Hollywood. “Talks broke off this (Wednesday) afternoon,” said Don Robbins, president of Hollywood Park. “But we’re not far apart and eventually I think we’ll have an agreement. We average about $250,000 a day with the race books that pump the money into our pools at the track, and about $250,000 with the books that don’t.”

Hollywood Park’s attempt to gain a racing license in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area is “dead,” according to R.D. Hubbard, the track’s chief operating officer. Hollywood Park and Hubbard were applicants for a license that went to a combined group from Texas and Maryland, and talk about an appeal of the Texas Racing Commission’s decision has ended.