OLDIES BUT GOODIES

I don’t know about you, but I have a soft spot in my heart for horses that run well at an advanced age. Last Sunday at Aqueduct, Cool N Collective, a 13-year-old son of Ruhlmann, finished second for a $7,500 claiming price.

Do you remember Ruhlmann? He won the 1990 Santa Anita Handicap with Gary Stevens in the irons. Rulmann was one of nine Big ’Cap winners trained by the great Charlie Whittingham. Long before Zenyatta, Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Moss owned Ruhlmann, who earned $1,819,190.

When Cool N Collective ran at the Big A the other day at such an advanced age, it brought to mind a couple of Washington-breds, Snappy Nashville and Maxwell G.

Snappy Nashville is the oldest horse I ever saw win. I was at Yakima Meadows on Feb. 17, 1979, when Snappy Nashville won a 4 1/2-furlong race under Robert Howg. Sent away as the 5-2 favorite, Snappy Nashville prevailed by a half-length.

Snappy Nashville won that race at the age of 15. No, that is not a typo. You read it right. Snappy Nashville was a 15-year-old when he won that $1,600 claiming race.

Bay Power finished second. Compared to Snappy Nashville, 10-year-old Bay Power was just a kid.

As a 6-year-old, Snappy Nashville was good enough to finish second in the $20,000 All American Handicap at Golden Gate Fields. Royal Fols won that six-furlong contest in a rapid 1:08 4/5.

Snappy Nashville’s sire, the multiple stakes-winning Nashville, took Santa Anita’s Palos Verdes Handicap in 1957. Bill Shoemaker was aboard the son of Nasrullah for that Palos Verdes victory. Whittingham trained him, too.

Cold Snap, Snappy Nashville’s dam, was a granddaughter of 1939 Kentucky Derby winner Johnstown. Cold Snap also produced Snappy King, who won the Westchester Stakes at Hollywood Park in 1961 before finishing second to Weldy that year in the Del Mar Futurity.

When Cool N Collective ran last Sunday, it was his 80th lifetime start. He has won 15 races and earned $678,296.

Snappy Nashville won 39 of 123 starts during his career. He earned $90,318.

But 39 wins and 123 starts pale in comparison to Maxwell G., a blue-collar Thoroughbred who won 47 of 234 career starts. Maxwell G. earned $181,420. He also earned the admiration of a great many racing fans, particularly those at Turf Paradise, Arlington Park, Hawthorne and Sportsman’s Park.

Maxwell G. did not make his debut until he was 4. In his second career start, he won a 5 1/2-furlong race at Yakima Meadows in 1965. I was there for that race, too. I saw Maxwell G. run a number of times at that track during the 1960s.

In fact, I still have a Yakima Meadows program that shows Maxwell G. entered for a $1,000 claiming tag in the fourth race on March 26, 1967. According to what I wrote on the program, Galspin B. won, with Maxwell G. finishing second.

Maxwell G. eventually made his way to California. He raced without much success at Bay Meadows, Golden Gate, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park.

In 1970, he was claimed for $6,250 at Pomona (now Fairplex Park). Richard Hazelton became Maxwell G.’s new trainer.

Prior to Maxwell G. joining the Hazelton barn, the 9-year-old gelding had come close to beating the Hazelton-trained Fleet Wing. That, Hazelton explained, was the main reason he claimed Maxwell G. for the first time.

“The careers of both horse and trainer would never be the same,” Gene McCormick wrote in a story about Maxwell G. in the 2004 Illinois Racing News.

Maxwell G. won a whole bunch of races for Hazelton. From time to time, someone would claim Maxwell G. away from Hazelton. But, time after time, Maxwell G. would not do all that well for his new connections. Eventually, he would end up back in Hazelton’s barn.

When he was 13, an article about Maxwell G. appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. And like Snappy Nashville, Maxwell G. still was racing and winning at the age of 15.

But Maxwell G. did not stop at 15. Early in 1977 at Turf Paradise, 16-year-old Maxwell G. won a $2,000 claiming race at one mile under Jimmy Powell, who rode the gelding in many of his races. After Maxwell G. lost a couple of time that year at Sportsman’s Park, it appeared to Hazelton that age finally seemed to have caught up with the son of Author. The trainer decided that the time had come to retire Maxwell G. from racing.

Maxwell G. made at least one start every year from age 4 through 16. According to McCormick’s story, Hazelton (whose son Scott is an HRTV colleague of mine) “made certain Max had a good retirement home. The old horse was sent to the 26,000-acre McGregor Ranch near Wichita Falls, Texas.” At that ranch, Maxwell G. spent his remaining five years of his life surrounded by other Thoroughbreds and Texas Longhorns.

WINSLOW HOMER SIDELINED

Winslow Homer, winner of Gulfstream Park’s Grade III Holy Bull Stakes on Jan. 23, “has suffered a stress fracture in his cannon bone that will keep him sidelined through the Triple Crown season,” Daily Racing Form’s Mike Welsch reported.

Trainer Tony Dutrow said he is “looking forward to Winslow Homer’s return later this year.”

Winslow Homer was No. 3 last week on my first Kentucky Derby Top 10 list of 2010. Of course, he’s off the list this week.

Piscitelli, who was one of those listed “on my radar screen” for the Kentucky Derby last week, also will miss the Triple Crown races. According to The Blood-Horse, after Piscitelli finished eighth in the Holy Bull, he emerged from the race with “trauma sustained to the right hind cannon bone.”

In the Grade I Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last year, Piscitelli finished fourth, just three-quarters of a length behind the winner, Vale of York.

Meanwhile, all has not been well with Lookin At Lucky, whose only loss came when he finished second in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. The colt returned to the track Tuesday “after being given the weekend off because of a slight illness,” trainer Bob Baffert said to the Racing Form’s Steve Andersen.

Baffert said Lookin At Lucky did not train over the weekend because “he had a little temperature and it scared me.”

The Hall of Fame trainer explained that he “didn’t want to take any chances,” but that the son of Smart Strike went back to the track Tuesday “and he looked good.”

Lookin At Lucky, voted an Eclipse Award as champion 2-year-old male of 2009 following three Grade I victories, has not started since winning the CashCall Futurity at Hollywood Park on Dec. 19.

Baffert has said he intends to run Lookin At Lucky in March, but no specific race has yet been announced. Santa Anita’s Grade II San Felipe Stakes on March 13 is considered one of the possibilities.

Here is this week’s Kentucky Derby Top 10 list:

1. Lookin At Lucky
2. Buddy’s Saint
3. Jackson Bend
4. Blind Luck
5. Super Saver
6. Noble’s Promise
7. Eightyfiveinafifty
8. Tiz Chrome
9. Eskendereya
10. Drosselmeyer

Blind Luck, who won the Grade I Hollywood Starlet Stakes by seven lengths, is scheduled to make her 2010 debut this Saturday in the Grade I Las Virgenes Stakes. In the Starlet, she ran 1 1/16 miles in 1:41.96. The day before, over the same surface, Lookin At Lucky won the CashCall Futurity in 1:43.30.

Eightyfiveinafifty, a 17 1/4-length winner of a six-furlong maiden race at Aqueduct on Jan. 9, is entered in this Saturday’s Whirlaway Stakes at the Big A. The 1 1/16-mile race has drawn a field of six.

Peppi Knows and Three Day Rush also are entered in the Whirlaway. Peppi Knows has not started since finishing second to Buddy’s Saint in the Grade II Remsen at Aqueduct on Nov. 28. Three Day Rush is coming off an allowance win on a sloppy track Jan. 9 at Gulfstream Park for trainer Todd Pletcher.

Drosselmeyer moves onto the Top 10 list this week following his 1 3/4-length win in a 1 1/8-mile allowance affair at Gulfstream Park last Suinday (85 Beyer Speed Figure). Trained by Hall of Famer Bill Mott, the Distorted Humor colt previously had posted a six-length maiden victory in a one-mile race at Churchill Downs last Nov. 18 in his fourth career start. Thus, Drosselmeyer already has won on the Kentucky Derby surface.

REMEMBERING LARRY BORTSTEIN

I was saddened to learn that Larry Borstein died early last Sunday morning at Arcadia Methodist Hospital near Santa Anita after sustaining a pulmonary embolism on Jan. 23. He was 67.

I first met Borstein in the 1980s while I was working for the Daily Racing Form and he was with Santa Anita’s publicity department. In time, he left that publicity job and went to work for the Orange County Register. He covered racing for that newspaper for the past 17 years.

In recent years, Bortstein also was a contributor to the California Thoroughbred magazine. In the January issue of that publication, his byline appeared on six stories. Yes, despite being sight-impaired, Larry Bortstein could churn out copy with the best of them.

Bortstein also wrote an NTRA blog in recent years. In her NTRA blog, Claire Novak wrote about Larry Bortstein the day he died.

“I received news of Larry’s passing with great sorrow,” Novak wrote. “Although we were not close friends, he had been gracious and complimentary when I met him in the press box at Hollywood Park in the spring of 2008…Today the industry lost one of its finest turf writers, for Larry truly loved and respected the sport. All of us here at NTRA.com will miss him.”

Eclipse Award-winning writer Bill Christine, who now writes for horseraceinsider.com after covering the sport for the Los Angeles Times, was good friends with Larry Bortstein.

“If Larry and I had had a greenback for every time we shared the press box at Santa Anita, or the ones at Hollywood Park and Del Mar, we could have given up this writing dodge long ago,” Christine wrote following Bortstein’s death. “When Larry went from newspapering to racetrack PR at Santa Anita in the early 1980s, it had to be the most difficult of career shifts. I don’t know if he was legally blind, but his eyesight was so poor that he couldn’t drive a car. So here was a transplanted New Yorker, where all you needed was shoe leather, the pavement under a feet, a subway token or a loud cab whistle, plunging into a sport of fine print in a land of wall-to-wall suburbs, hardly any of them connected by the same transportation system. It was impossible for Larry to read the Racing Form without getting an ink smudge on his nose. When it came time to write, he’d plant his Coke-bottle glasses on his forehead and you could see his breath on his laptop screen.

“You work very long in this business,” Christine continued, “and sooner or later you get under somebody’s skin, and Larry was no exception. He wrote something Gary Stevens didn’t like, and one night at a bowling alley the jockey knocked off Larry’s glasses, threw him to the ground and jumped on top. The roly-poly Bortstein, more than 20 years Stevens’ senior, at least doubled him in weight but was still on the bottom of a classic mismatch. It’s a credit to them both that after a handshake and an apology, they became friends again.”

At that time, I bowled on the same team as Larry Bortstein. So I was at the bowling alley the night of the Stevens vs. Bortstein bout. But while they were going at it, it was my turn to bowl. I remember that after I let the ball go, I heard a commotion and turned around. But by then the “bowling brawl” was over. All I saw was trainer Mike Puhich restraining Stevens. Still, that’s certainly a night I will never forget.

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