‘97 Breeders’ Cup Will Lack Top Stars

Breeders’ Cup officials got lucky their first year, in 1984, when the owners of Wild Again supplemented him into the $3-million Classic and he won the race.

The Breeders’ Cup lucked out again in 1985, when the owners of Pebbles and Tasso supplemented their horses into races and they came up winners.

The luck continued in later years: The late Frank Whitham and his wife, Janis, didn’t blink when it took $200,000 each year to make their Bayakoa eligible and she won the Distaff in 1989-90; Sid and Jenny Craig paid $200,000 so Paseana could win the 1992 Distaff, and in 1994 the owner of Cherokee Run won the Sprint after a supplementary payment of $120,000.

But now the Breeders’ Cup’s luck has run out. Gentlemen, Siphon and Sandpit, the first three finishers in Sunday’s Hollywood Gold Cup, would make for a hearty rematch if they were to run in the $4-million Breeders’ Cup Classic at Hollywood Park on Nov. 8. But the problem is that they’re not eligible because they weren’t nominated--for what would have been a nominal fee--before they became yearlings.

And those three horses are only the tip of the iceberg. Other Breeders’ Cup horses not eligible include Silver Charm, Free House, Skip Away and Smoke Glacken, probably the country’s best sprinter. This time, there are no owners like the Whithams or the Craigs standing around with greenbacks sticking out of their pockets. If the Classic were run today, Formal Gold, by default, would go off the favorite at about 3-1. This is the Formal Gold who’s won two of five starts and finished 9 1/2 lengths behind Siphon, the winner of the Santa Anita Handicap.

The Breeders’ Cup survived last year without Skip Away, the eventual champion 3-year-old, because it had Cigar. It survived in 1994 without Holy Bull, the horse of the year in waiting, but the Classic was a watered-down race that proved little except that a trainer (Concern’s Richard Small) could van a horse into town at the last minute and still win. This year’s Classic, without Gentlemen, Siphon, Sandpit, Silver Charm, Free House and Skip Away, will be more than diluted, it will be a sham. Horse-of-the-year voters won’t even have to take out their pencils.

D.G. Van Clief, president of the Breeders’ Cup, was in from Kentucky to watch the Hollywood Gold Cup. Van Clief has a sunny disposition much of the time, but last Sunday it may have been a facade. Van Clief is philosophical about the state of this year’s Breeders’ Cup, but inside he must be wishing that it had already come and gone.

Van Clief’s best possible ally, Hollywood Park chairman R.D. Hubbard, said all the wrong things after the Gold Cup as far as the Breeders’ Cup is concerned. Hubbard would like the 14th Breeders’ Cup, the first at Hollywood Park under his watch, to be the most spectacular in the series, but when it comes to spending $800,000 to win just a little more than $2 million, a man has to draw a line in the sand. As the 40% owner of the Argentine-bred Gentlemen, Hubbard has a controlling interest in the horse, but he will not risk all that to win only that in November.

“There is no way I can justify paying that,” said Hubbard, who earlier this year backed off on a possible lawsuit after a Breeders’ Cup plan fell through to make horses from South America eligible via a grandfather clause.

In the next breath, Hubbard said Sunday that Hollywood Park is continuing to move ahead with plans for a race on Nov. 30, three weeks after the Breeders’ Cup, that would appeal to the owners of the Breeders’ Cup outcasts. If it comes off, that’s the race that will rouse the Eclipse Awards electorate.

In this year of their great distress, some of the original Breeders’ Cup directors are holding their ground. When Bob Lewis said that it was “absurd” for him to pay a $480,000 penalty so his Kentucky Derby-Preakness winner, Silver Charm, could run in the Breeders’ Cup, John Nerud said: “The nominating fee was $500 for a foal in the beginning, and it’s still $500. I think that a horse like Silver Charm is the best advertisement the Breeders’ Cup can have for keeping its rules. When people buy a horse like this, they are well aware of what the horse’s Breeders’ Cup situation is.”

Bob and Beverly Lewis bought Silver Charm last year as a 2-year-old, about 1 1/2 years after the Breeders’ Cup deadline had passed for nominating the colt for the $500 Nerud is talking about. If a horse isn’t nominated, he can be supplemented into a Breeders’ Cup race for 12% or 20% of the purse, the higher percentage becoming the assessment if the horse’s sire also hasn’t been enrolled in the Breeders’ Cup program. The cost for the stallion, per year, is his advertised stud fee, which covers all of his offspring from that crop.

The Lewises might reconsider their position on Silver Charm if the rules were changed: Familiar proposals are (1) adding all of the supplementary money to the purses, and (2) making horses lifetime-eligible for the Breeders’ Cup after their owners supplement them one time. The Lewises, for example, have plans to run Silver Charm as a 4-year-old, and possibly even beyond, but as it is now they would have to pay $480,000 every time he runs in a Classic.

Bob Levy, one of the owners of Smoke Glacken, is also a Breeders’ Cup board member, and maybe he could lead a movement to change the rules. Van Clief said that the board has talked casually about the lifetime supplementary, but has never seriously discussed pumping up the purses with the supplementary fees. The fees now are simply added to the Breeders’ Cup general fund.

“What we have to be concerned about,” Van Clief said, “is maintaining the integrity of the program for the guys who have been paying all of these $500 over the years. They’re the foundation of everything we have.”

Will Richard Mandella, who trains Gentlemen, Siphon and Sandpit, put in his two cents where hundreds of thousands are concerned?

“They’ll have to do it on their own,” Mandella said. “They’ll get no help from me. I could never ask anybody to spend that kind of money.”

DOWN THE STRETCH

Touch Gold is having hoof problems again, and the Belmont Stakes winner’s training program has been compromised. It could be a rush to have him ready for either the Swaps Stakes at Hollywood Park on July 20 or the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park on Aug. 3. . . . El Angelo, winner of the Inglewood Handicap before running sixth in the trouble-filled Shoemaker Mile, is the 118-pound high weight for the $150,000 American Handicap, which highlights the 1 p.m. holiday card at Hollywood on Friday. . . . Sharp Cat and Star Of Goshen are poised for the $200,000 Hollywood Oaks on Sunday. . . . For the record: Contrary to an article about the Hollywood Gold Cup on Monday, one of trainer Richard Mandella’s Breeders’ Cup winners was Phone Chatter, not Phone Trick.