Ave Atque Vale; Kenny Fleming

Try as we might, even had we wanted, it's not possible to carry with us throughout the rest of our days all that which has passed.  This necessarily includes some things that were, or still are, important.  There are only so many minutes in day.  That we retain any lasting, vital connections with but a few cherished friends may in itself be miraculous.

Time rushes onward at a dizzying pace.  Places change.  Memories fade.  Friendships unwind.

I lost track of Kenny almost immediately upon his high school graduation.  I saw him briefly in the summer of 1990 and again, briefly, at an uptown bar some lost summer evening a few years afterward.  Each time no longer than a minute.  And we never spoke.  There is nothing unique about kids growing up and seizing the opportunity to leave their hometowns, set sights on distant horizons without looking back. 

I didn't know the man that Kenny became, and so I cannot speak to his adult life.  As such, I can only share what I knew of Kenny from his, and our, vigorous teenage experiences.  I won't go on at length.   For if I do, the 17-year old Kenny would roll his eyes, tell me to lighten up and he'd let out with that joyous, infectious laugh of his.  Kenny was always right.

I inferred from the obituary that he was known, in recent years, by his close friends by another nickname.  That's perfectly acceptable, maybe preferable.  We age, we mature.  We become better versions of our younger selves.  The same, in certain respects, and different in so many others.  Kenny was the kid I knew, Kenny is who I remember and Kenny is who I write about here today.

Our paths may have crossed at some now-distant, forgotten point in childhood.  On a Little League baseball field?  At a birthday for a mutual playmate?  No matter, that's inconsequential.  I really came to know Kenny through his brother Pete, with whom I became good friends in 8th Grade.  It was in the first year of high school, hanging out during afternoons at the Flemings (often watching as youngest brother Jones excelled at mastering all manner of Nintendo video games), that Kenny developed into a good friend.  In short order, Kenny was to become both a trusted confidant and a very influential force in my teenage life in so many of the ways that oft are described, these days, as "youthful indiscretions."  Those are not reminiscences to be published here, now.  Most of you reading this will already know of them via your own, direct indiscretionary participation.  Catch up with me some time and, over a beer, I'll gladly share with you some of the dozens upon dozens of nearly unbelievable adventures.

I have only a handful of pictures of, or with Kenny.  Here's one:

This photo was taken in 1989 as someone's photography class assignment.  You talk about people, places and times that are lost to the ages; the photo was taken in the East Park (redeveloped now), under the water tower (long since demolished) and with a commercial building at far right that no longer exists.  This is of a time and place that are, now, virtually unrecognizable.  Yet the thing that is readily familiar in this photo is the vibrancy that was such an integral element of Kenny Fleming. 

The other four photos were from - some of you already will have guessed - the photo session which yielded our truly infamous 1989 high school yearbook submission.  Those pictures really did capture the indomitable spirit of our gang.  Here, below, is the first photo taken in that rapid-fire series of four and it serves as a conduit that visually illustrates how important Kenny was to us:

If one can resist the distraction created on the hood of Coach's Skootchwagon by your humble correspondent (flexing for the benefit, I'm sure, of Skootchette), what one sees in this photo is Kenny, front and center.  As we progressed though three more photos, all of us switched positions each time - in front of the car, on top of the car, left side, right side - except for one person.  In all four photographs, Kenny is always front and center.  Coach put the band together, to borrow a phrase, but Kenny was the heart and soul of our rogue operation.  And whereas Coach unmistakably was the directional force, Kenny was the driving force. 

At Kenny's feet, in the photo above, lies a homecoming parade banner (just one of those myriad youthful indiscretions) that proudly identified our muse; The Cult.  Kenny introduced me to The Cult, which the 15-year old me thought was cool, as well as its earlier iteration as the Southern Death Cult, which the 15-year old me thought was even cooler.  Kenny's influence covered a broad spectrum and was significant.

We, all of us, were brothers bonded together in common cause; maximizing the volume of fun.  You must get the most out of life that you can, and in those high school years we lived a lifetime.  This was due in no small part to Kenny Fleming.

Those kids are all gone.  In their place are different people.  Better versions, we like to think, but more distant versions.  Kenny is now irretrievably most distant of all.

Time and distance may divide.  I think, certainly, that they do.  This never prevented me from thinking of Kenny (and of so many others for which contact has been lost) and it has never diminished how I feel about Kenny.  Kenny was a good friend.  Kenny was a great friend.  And on those occasions since high school when I might have thought about him long enough, I would miss his company.  I always will.

Kenny would have wanted me to shut up about 8 paragraphs earlier.  Kenny was always right.

Hail and farewell.

12th Triple Crown

Morning of the 147th Belmont Stakes this past Saturday found me at venerable old Turfway Park, not too different from so many Belmont Stakes days over the past few decades.

What made this Belmont Stakes morning different was the absence of two-thirds of The B Team Syndicate.  The Old Master of the Turf was disillusioned at some Belmont-week field defections and minimal potential payouts and Lou [codenamed B2] was otherwise preoccupied.  Therefore, it was up to me - B3 - to represent the Syndicate.  Arriving shortly before betting windows and terminals began taking bets, I revisited some of my old racetrack haunts:

Haunts being the operative term as the grandstand possessed (pun intended) an unmistakable ghost town eeriness.  Where'd everybody go?!  To be fair, it was early and Turfway Park was not hosting live racing that day.  Note the sign, in the photo above at left; Section B.  Natch.  I took a seat and quietly considered both my bets and all the history that might be made later in the afternoon.

From a youthful age, before beginning school, I sat in these seats on countless nights at what was in those days called Latonia Raceway.  The Old Master was then a one-third partner in a racing stable and so he'd pack up the family into the Dodge Coronet Crestwood station wagon and we'd have an outing to the track, often (but not always) to watch his horses race from the very seats you see in the photo above.  The Old Master would bring along a Radio Shack cassette recorder and record his observations.  I retain some small number of those cassette tapes, somewhere, in my vast archive.  Dad would grab hold of my shoulders and steer me through the bustling crowds (they had bustling crowds at the racetrack back in those days), through the smoke-filled concourse (you've never truly experienced smoke-filled unless/until you've spent time at a racetrack in the 1970s) and guide me to the betting window where I'd learn how to make bets by listening to him call out his own wagers.  Those kids in First Grade might have known how to tell time; I knew how to place a bet on a $2 Quinella.  I don't recall these tabletops being painted in a shade of teal, I'm moderately certain they were battleship gray back in the 1970s/1980s.

You might be asking why I made the drive to Turfway when Miami Valley, and indeed Belterra Park, are less-epic journeys from The Ranch.  Here I will remind you of my Belmont experience last year at Miami Valley.

Bets made, I returned to Ox City and put in a few hours of honest work. 

But only a few hours, as The PaleoRider had that weekend descended from his mountaintop retreat in the western Carolinas for a visit to pastoral Reily Township and we'd made arrangements to get together that evening for a meal.  In the hour between the end of my abbreviated workday and heading uptown with the mid-Atlantic's foremost paleontologist, I tuned in the live broadcast coverage from Belmont Park and checked my tickets for any winners (to that point) via Equibase.  I was happy to find myself already in the black:

Race 6 was the $400,000 (Grade 2) Brooklyn Invitational Stakes for four-year old and older horses, contested at one an one-half miles on the dirt; the same distance as the Belmont Stakes.  The 1 & 1a coupling of Coach Inge and Micromanage went off the 3-1 favorite and won (one of only two times all day that a race would be won by the favorite).  My $10 WIN wager paid $39.50.  Breaking from the gate at odds of 4-1, V.E. Day finished second.  That $2 Exacta Box paid $39.00.  On the strength of these two winning scores, no matter the outcome of any/all of that day's following races I would come out ahead on Belmont Day.  Lucky for me, too, because these were to be the only cashable tickets I had on Saturday.  More self-congratulatory detail regarding my wagering follows later, below.  I know you'll be riveted.

The PaleoRider ambled over to The Ranch around 5:15 and we moseyed on up to Skippers Pub for some sammichs and cheese fries (what else?).  The only thing missing was the entirety of Gn'R Lies blaring from the juke box.  We grabbed a table that allowed us to watch, on two different high-definition flat screen monitors, both the Reds game and the Belmont undercard.  With our meals having been consumed, and the Reds staggering towards another crippling defeat, me and my sidekick removed to seats at the bar for a closer view of the 147th running of the Belmont Stakes:

The photo above may or may not depict an obscene gesture being directed at the Chicago Cubs.  Interpretation will be left to your fertile imagination.

As per last week's post in Heavy Artillery, I sat at the bar genteelly sipping my Coca-Cola with a (by then) non-cashable Pick 3 ticket that included American Pharoah on the back end.  Eagle-eyed railbirds will observe a couple of formatting errors on the ticket below:

Tonalist won the Belmont Stakes last year.  Going into the $1.25 million Race 9 (Grade 1) Metropolitan Handicap contested at one mile on the dirt for three-year olds and older, Tonalist had a perfect 4-for-4 record at Belmont Park.  He also had benefit of the country's top jockey in John R "JR" Valezquez and went off the 2-1 favorite.  How could Tonalist lose?  I also placed a WIN wager on last year's Belmont winner:

Tonalist finished second, sinking my Pick 3 right from the start.  Using favorites (Tonalist & American Pharoah) as bookends for the Pick 3 wager, I sought a longshot to slot into the middle and Jack Milton, off at odds of 13-1 and the only longshot in the field for which I had any familiarity, fit the bill.  Or so I hoped.  Jack Milton finished 9th.

In addition to having made an exotic wager that included the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner, I also placed a modest WIN bet on Frosted:

As stated here last week, with the Belmont favorite going of at odds of 3-5, American Pharoah only presented a true money-making proposition as a single bet for the Robber Barron set from the Hamptons, found further out on Long Island.  Due also to the immense sums of money pouring into the PLACE pools for all the other contenders, a WIN bet on any horse other than the Pharoah was the only logical singular, non-exotic bet to be made.  Ergo, my $20 on the only horse that may have been capable of outrunning American Pharoah that day.

By the time you read this, most North Americans know of the historic triumph which unfolded that sunny, breezy Saturday in New York.

I snapped a few photos of the race replay for blog posterity:

[Oh, hey!  Look!  There's me, reflected in the mirror, wearing my Smarty Jones t-shirt under a Greg Norman golf shirt.]

Turning for home, and already beyond the distance of the Kentucky Derby, the photo above spotlights American Pharoah and Frosted running one-two and captures the brief moment when I thought there may have existed the possibility for Frosted to take the lead.  Mere strides later, as the field hit the top of the homestretch, it was evident American Pharoah would not be vanquished.....

 

..... And that this magnificent horse would cross the finish line racing directly into Triple Crown immortality (captured below).

 

 

 

A Triple Crown secured and with the Reds smoldering in defeat, Mr Heavy Artillery and The PaleoRider exited Skippers for a celebratory adult beverage at the Miami Western [sic]:

Bottled selections were minimal, I settled for an Ultra.

Three hours later, a different type of celebration spontaneously erupted across the street in front of Al and Larry's [sic]:

One hundred or so sparklers honoring newlyweds departing their post-reception soiree.  Oh, the irony.  At far left, a limo and driver waits patiently to whisk bride and groom away on their honeymoon.

By midnight noisy, sloppy drunk revelers invaded our space and interrupted our conversation about The Butcher of Cincinnati aka Doc Hollywood.  Ducking back inside the Miami Western [sic], I was surprised to see it inhabited by Emo-types of every uniformly black-clad variety.  The dance floor featured but two girls and three guys, the gents incongruously engaged in some poor imitation of Boo doing The Humpty Dance.  Thoroughly dissociative from the so-called Pop Punk scene, we retired to the Baskin-Robbins Rathskeller [sic].  There we remained as the only customers until 2am when it was time to ride off into the sunset moonrise.

As for the most critical element of Belmont Day 2015; my wagering.  I did not handicap any of the races on Saturday.  I did not study the Daily Racing Form, nor look at a program.  Rather, I merely read over the official list of entries (horse names, post positions, jockeys, trainers, owners, breeders and Morning Line odds) looking for horses with which I might have some degree of familiarity and favorable sentiment.  I found one horse in the third race, one in the fifth race, two in the sixth race and one in the ninth race (not including the eleventh race Belmont Stakes).  All of the horses upon which I was inclined to wager in undercard races had short Morning Line odds.  Therefore I planned a course of attack that relied significantly on a series of Pick 3s.  Below is the cheat sheet I prepared on Friday night for use at a Turfway Park betting terminal:

Cipher key for the image above:  Just as with my handicapping, a circle denotes a positive (in this case, a winner) and a square indicates a negative (or losers in this example).  The circled numbers in the far-right column indicate individual wager outlays.

There were no horses that interested me in Races 1 or 2.

For Race 3, the $500,000 (Grade 2) Woody Stephens Stakes for three-year olds at seven furlongs on the dirt, I bet a $1 Pick 3 that began with a horse named Competitive Edge.  I last saw Competitive Edge in a stakes race on the Derby Day undercard.  On that First Saturday in May, Competitive Edge was ridden by JR Velazquez for trainer Todd Pletcher and looked like a world beater.  I rhetorically speculated with The Old Master of the Turf as to why, quizzically, Competitive Edge wasn't a Derby horse.  He had the connections, he was undefeated, possessed high Beyer Speed Figures.  It may have been that his connections didn't see him as more than a sprinter or miler.  I loaded up on Competitive Edge on Derby Day and he paid me a handsome return.  He went off in the Woody Stephens as the 2-5 favorite, a lead-pipe cinch to kick off a successful Pick 3..... and ran last.  A 10-1 longshot won the race.

I didn't recognize any horses in the fourth race, a $300,000 Grade 3 stakes race for older horses, so for the second leg of my (now dead) Pick 3 and for a new Pick 3 that began with this race I hit the "All" button and hoped for a longshot to win.  Indeed a longshot won at odds of 10-1.  My fresh, and very much alive, Pick 3 soon ran aground when.....

In the Race 5, $1 million (Grade 1) Ogden Phipps Stakes for older fillies and mares, I tapped for Pick 3 inclusion the JR Valezquez-Todd Pletcher (have you detected a pattern yet?) entry, Untapable.  Untapable, a four-year old filly, won last year the Kentucky Oaks (G1) and Breeders' Cup Distaff (G1) and was named the Champion Three-Year Old Filly for 2014.  She had a win already this year and went off in the Ogden Phipps Stakes as the 4-5 favorite..... and finished second.  This killed my second Pick 3 ticket and drove a final ignominious nail into my first Pick 3 - that was particularly painful; a Pick 3 that began with a 2-5 favorite, concluded with a 4-5 favorite and had an "All" in the middle looked like an automatic windfall.  That's horse race wagering.  Further compounding my Pick 3 calamities, I'd initiated my third Pick 3 with Untapable and so that ticket, too, was torpedoed.  This fact proved most unfortunate because.....

In Race 6, addressed above, I cashed both a WIN ticket and an Exacta Box.  The entry wearing saddle cloth 1a was Micromanage, a hard-luck horse knocked off the Derby Trail back in 2013 for which I have an affinity.  Injury derailed what might have been a bright future for Micromanage.  He was coupled with the entry wearing saddle cloth 1, a horse named Coach Inge.  Coach Inge was sired by Big Brown, winner of the 2008 Florida and Kentucky Derbies and Preakness Stakes, and is out of a mare sired by - altogether now - Holy Bull.  Coach Inge is trained by Todd Pletcher and was ridden Saturday by..... wait for it.... JR Valezquez.  The coupled entry went off as the 3-1 favorite and Coach Inge won with Micromanage running 12th of 13.

I had no singular betting interest in the seventh race, a $750,000 Grade 1 stakes race for three-year old fillies.  For the final leg of my (long dead) third Pick 3 I again hit the "All" button and would have been rewarded, had Untapable run like a 4-5 favorite back in Race 5, when a 7-1 horse came home to victory.  That 7-1 winner was yet another Todd Pletcher-trained, JR Valezquez-ridden horse.

As you can see in the image above, by this point in the race day two of my three Pick 3s were two-thirds correct and both were blown up by the same 4-5 beaten favorite.  Ouch, babe.

I recounted, earlier (above), my agony in Race 9 when the "How could he lose?" Tonalist was my third beaten favorite on the afternoon.  That denied me collecting a WIN wager and flatlined my fourth and final Pick 3.

All told for Saturday, I wagered $77 dollars and won $78.50.  Factor in my gas money and, well..... let's not factor in my gas money.  Had either the 4-5 Untapable or the 2-1 Tonalist won, I'd have been comfortably ahead.  But remember (here is where I salve my ego), all this was without the aid of handicapping.  This effort was based solely on looking at the entries and making educated guesses drawing upon my deep well of thoroughbred horse racing knowledge.  This now concludes the self-congratulatory portion of today's blog post.

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Here are a few 147th Belmont Stakes statistics you might find interesting:

95% of all $2 WIN tickets on American Pharoah have gone uncashed.  That adds up to something over $300,000 in unclaimed winnings.

American Pharoah's winning time was the sixth-fastest all-time (at the mile-and-one-half distance; earlier Belmonts were contested at differing lengths).  It was the second-fastest winning time among all 12 Triple Crown winners (but still more than 2 seconds slower than Secretariat's record-setting time.  In horse racing one length is often considered to be the equivalent of one-fifth a second; Secretariat would have finished more than 10 lengths in front of American Pharaoh).

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If your interest in horse racing has risen incrementally, consider this:  the owners of American Pharoah have indicated they are going to race him again this year before he retires to stud in 2016.  If so, there exists the distinct possibility that American Pharoah will be the first Triple Crown winner to race in the Breeders' Cup Classic (American Pharoah being the first Triple Crown winner in the Breeders' Cup era).  And this year being the first time ever that the World Thoroughbred Championships are to be held at scenic Keeneland, it promises to be - potentially - a very special Breeders' Cup.

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Across the pond on Saturday, Frankie Dettori rode Epsom Derby favorite Golden Horn to a rousing victory.  Frankie Dettori is the greatest!  This now concludes the self-congratulatory portion of international racing for today's blog post.

Roll the credits!

The Test Of A Champion; 2015 Edition

This Saturday at Belmont Park, rooting and wagering interests converge - to a degree - when Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner American Pharoah bids to win the Triple Crown. 

As you might imagine, there has been this week some excellent turf writing regarding this subject.  I highly recommend that you read "Memo to Victor: Don't Let Belmont Park Beat You" and "Pharoah Fits Profile of Triple Crown Winner" and "To Move or Not to Move," all by Steve Haskin, all illuminative and all published at The Blood-Horse.  Bill Finley at ESPN gives readers a look back at the "unlucky 13" who tried and failed to win the Triple Crown since Affirmed last did so in 1978 (useful data to impress the guests at your Triple Crown party.  You are hosting a Triple crown party, aren't you?).

The Morning Line on American Pharoah is 3-5.  Just as with the Preakness Stakes three weeks ago, those odds do not provide an appeal from a singular wagering perspective unless you plan to wager John Pierpont Morgan sums of Treasury-inflated bank notes.  The way to bet on American Pharoah this Saturday is to include him on the back end of a multi-race exotic wager, such as a Pick 3 or Pick 4.  This I will do, and I will be rooting for him to win. 

I am of the school of thought that the modern Thoroughbred racehorse is neither bred nor trained for the grueling three-races-in-five-weeks regimen that is the Triple Crown. [Here is an interesting report about the science of equine recuperation between races.  No, really, it is interesting.]  As such, I will also play the Morning Line's second choice, Frosted (4th in the Derby), in a modest straight-WIN wager.  For those of you who will ask, The Old Master of the Turf liked Materiality in the Derby and still likes him in the Belmont.  American Pharoah has had just about as easy a time in the Derby and Preakness as one could imagine.  He stalked the pace in a trouble-free trip in the Kentucky Derby and wired a smaller, lesser field in the sloppy monsoon that was the 2015 Preakness.  The American Pharoah Triple Crown experience parallels, thus far, that of Smarty Jones.  Smarty Jones stalked the pace in a sloppy 130th Kentucky Derby (2004) and won a hard-charging victory.  Two weeks later Smarty Jones romped home to victory by a dozen lengths and went into the Belmont Stakes looking like the popular, lead pipe cinch for Triple Crown immortality that horse racing fandom and television broadcast networks have been craving for a generation.  In the '04 Belmont, Smarty Jones raced hard and fought to as honest a defeat as there is in The Sport of Kings.  His trainer and jockey, too, were magnanimous in their defeat which only added to the popularity and sympathy that enveloped Smarty Jones.  Last year's crybaby sore-loser connections of California Chrome should have taken a page from the experience of 2004.  This 13-minute video of the 2004 Belmont Stakes is perhaps longer than most of you are interested in watching but it takes you back to a time when wild popularity was the sentiment for Smarty Jones and, simultaneously, it serves as a model for nobility in defeat.

On Saturday, I'll reach deep into my t-shirt drawer and wear proudly Smarty's colors.  Well, wear them proudly under a collared shirt:

For the record, I only wear this t-shirt on Belmont Day when there is a Triple Crown at stake and, of course, we haven't had a Triple Crown winner since.  I'm actually not certain what that says about the motives in wearing my Smarty Jones t-shirt.  Perhaps it's akin to betting the "Don't Pass" line at the casino craps table?

For the horseplayers among you, the Belmont undercard has some great races.  The (Race 9) Metropolitan Handicap may be the best race of the day.  It pits Bayern, Honor Code, Pants on Fire, Private Zone, Tonalist, and Wicked Strong among others in a ferocious 10-horse field.  My plan for the day is to send my bankroll with The Old Master to bet for me a few Pick 3's, and maybe one or two WIN bets.

I've long thought that a Triple Crown winner, as triumphant a moment as that would certainly be, will not generate the long-term effects - namely in terms of increasing interest among the general public - as so many seem to think.  Come January, there won't be any more people interested in horse racing as there was this past January.  Five years from now we'll hear the same lamentations about going so long without having another Triple Crown winner.  In this, I hope I am wrong.

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June 6th is also Epsom Derby Day in England.  The Epsom Derby is the race upon which our own Kentucky Derby is modeled (and named for).  It, too, is the premiere race for three-year olds in England.  Last year I gave you the winner in a horse named Australia.  I haven't had an opportunity to do anything more than give a cursory look into this year's Epsom Derby except to say that I note the world's greatest jockey - Lanfranco "Frankie" Dettori - has the mount on the Morning Line favorite, a horse named Golden Horn.  Ergo, Golden Horn will have my rooting interest if not my financial backing.

Roll the credits!