JM, Fernando at Taix, 10.27.07
We spent a lot of the morning together. I had a sazerac at the empty bar. I plunked my DRF down and Fernando stuck with his Daily News consensus charts.
War Pass looked great in the BC Juvenile. Midway through the final turn, Fernando and I looked at each other and said, simultaneously: "Wire to wire."
I went away, and came back a few hours later, when Taix was officially open. And it turned out in the afternoon that in the BC Classic Fernando and I both had a feeling about Tiago.
That feeling turned out to mean nothing; it's not unusual for both of us to be wrong, but it's something to try to understand.
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I don't have memories of many big horse races over the past fifteen years that don't take place at Taix. The triple crown races and the Breeder's Cup are the biggest days of the racing year, and throughout them my unwitting companion has been Fernando, Taix's venerable Argentinian Saturday bartender.
Fernando has been at Taix since the sixties, when the restaurant would close between lunch and dinner and some of the workers there would slip off to Hollywood Park in between. He's a good fan of the horses and also of World Cup soccer; in a couple of weeks he'll wrap his vacation around a soccer match, Argentina v. Colombia---and yes, that match is in Bogotá, a fact that is merely incidental to Fernando.What could it possibly mean that we were looking for some kind of outside hope, and both ultimately landed on the same longshot? Fernando also backed away from Street Sense, while I did not; his radar must have been up, and that's a clue: he's not quite as much of a sentimental fool as I am. Nonetheless, he and I both can hope against hope; and by this point, in retrospect, Curlin looks like an absolute villian of a horse, first nipping Street Sense in the Preakness five months ago, and then getting stronger all the time, even while Street Sense faltered on occasion. And so, there it was: the hope for an outsider, founded.
Yesterday, on television, Curlin's shoulders looked even more developed than ever. In the mud, a horse that gets the lead down the stretch, when everyone is digging, usually holds it; only the jockeys get goggles. But Curlin it was obvious would have won if the race had been any length or on any condition at all.
Depressing. I told Fernando I'd see him before his vacation, and slipped out.
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The broader question is: Why should there not be heartbreaking horse races this year? There has been heartbreaking everything else.
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