Maddy’s Passing Leaves Void That California Will Never Fill

They ran the Ken Maddy Sprint Handicap last Saturday at Bay Meadows, only hours after the race’s namesake had died, and darned if a California-bred gelding named Champ’s Star didn’t win the race. In the last year of his life, Ken Maddy, who had been a star for almost three decades in Sacramento, was still championing his favorite sport.

“They’ve added more days to the racing calendar,” an annoyed Maddy said during a conversation last summer at Del Mar. “[The California Horse Racing Board] ought to be doing the opposite. The tracks owe the public good-sized fields to bet on, and with a horse shortage, increasing the number of racing days is the opposite way to go.”

A grim prognosis, after the doctors had found lung cancer, should have hung heavy over the personable Maddy then, but he wasn’t for missing Del Mar, where a couple of his horses were running. For a former state senator, they couldn’t have been better named, and Got The Votes and Strings Attached not only ran but won.

“Got The Votes hurt her knee,” said Maddy, more swept up in a filly’s future than two unsuccessful rounds of chemotherapy. “She’ll be out for a while.”

In Inglewood, a young Ken Maddy grew up on football and horse racing, and at one time, before joining the Air Force, he thought about becoming a veterinarian. Instead, his military hitch over, he practiced law before embracing politics. Indirectly, he still helped horses, more than most $2 bettors knew, by frequently coalescing an industry that thrives on bickering.

For all the respect he commanded, there were still many times when Maddy couldn’t get racing’s right hand to meet the left.

“Because I knew the game, I became the [Sacramento] expert in racing matters,” he said. “But that led to a lot of frustration. I spent a lot of time trying to get the industry to fight for things as a whole. There were always segments that were mostly interested in taking care of themselves. The game could be a lot better off if everybody wasn’t looking out for No. 1.”

Maddy, foreseeing the abuses that have accompanied open-ended equine medication, once naively thought he could successfully manage a drug-free bill through the Legislature. It was a longshot that finished up the track.

“It would have been hay, water and oats and nothing else,” Maddy said. “You couldn’t have believed it. It was like the whole world came down on me.”

Maddy’s death, at 65, reverberated around Santa Anita, hitting the brothers Stute--Warren and Mel--particularly hard. Not lost on trainer Mel Stute is the cruel irony that Maddy, a nonsmoker, had a malignancy on his lung. For years, Mel Stute, 72, has smoked more than two packs a day.

It was the Stutes, in the 1950s, who introduced Maddy to the realities of backstretch life at Hollywood Park. Maddy had become the groom for Abe’s Birthday, one of the horses in Warren Stute’s barn.

“Even then, as a young boy, Kenny had this hair thing,” Mel Stute said. “He had a nice head of hair and he was always very proud of it. Abe’s Birthday had a ringworm problem, and one day, just to have some fun, Warren told Kenny to be careful, because that ringworm could get in his own hair. He told him that if he wasn’t careful his hair might fall out. He had Kenny believing it.”

Maddy reasoned that the more he washed his hair, the more Abe’s Birthday’s ringworm would stay away.

“He must have been taking showers by the dozen,” Mel Stute said. “When he got out of sight, we’d laugh and laugh. He had to be the cleanest kid in Inglewood.”

Mel Stute’s signature horse, of course, is Snow Chief, the colt who won the Santa Anita Derby and the Preakness in 1986. Snow Chief finished with $3.3 million in purses, second only to Best Pal among California-breds. It was one of Maddy’s bills in Sacramento that dramatically increased the money that state-breds now run for.

Mel Stute said, “Years ago, you could go to these Cal-bred sales and pick up maybe five or six horses for about $10,000. Now their prices are so high that I can’t even get in a bid most of the time.”

The stylish Ken Maddy reached his end with unreal courage. Last fall, on the day that the Oak Tree Racing Assn. ran a race in his name at Santa Anita, he circulated in the Turf Club and presented the trophy, belying his fatigue.

“None of the treatments are working,” he said in one of his last interviews. “It’s not very encouraging. But I’ve got a positive attitude and I’m going to keep trying.”

Mel Stute said that Maddy’s determination came from his mother, who is in her mid-90s. Anna Maddy Thomas is also at home at the racetrack.

“All I have to do is call her,” Ken Maddy was still saying late last year. “Then we’ll go out to Cal Expo and make a day of it.”

Notes

Joe Bravo, who has ridden more than 2,800 winners, will leave New York and begin riding at Santa Anita on March 8. Bravo, 28, finished 16th nationally last year with a purse total of almost $8 million. . . . Chris Antley, who hasn’t ridden in almost four months, underwent arthroscopic knee surgery Feb. 2 and plans to resume riding next week. Antley won last year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness with Charismatic and ranked just behind Bravo on the money list.

Saint’s Honor, who may run in the $6-million Dubai World Cup in the United Arab Emirates March 25, was a neck short of Hook Call at the wire in Friday’s feature.