The Quinella Project: Hopping Into Racing’s Way-Bac Machine…

I have this obsession with New York racing from the past.

Yeah, I know, my recent coverage of my own race from this past weekend speaks to that. (Congrats to Ventrillaquist and trainer pelle for the exciting win this weekend in my Hometown Turf Stakes, in 1:15 flat and a speed figure of 110, one helluva race from y’all.) I went into some varying detail as to my experience with it way back when. But the memories keep getting spurred along by my research.

It was several months ago. First things first: when I surf the web, I don’t usually have a set destination in mind, but a lot of it tends to be for nostalgia’s sake. I was searching for something else, and going through the past with the help of Google. Google might be the end of Western civilization as we know it, but their archive searches they have that allow you to go through old magazines and various newspapers of the past as they were printed all those years ago make for interesting prompts for the memory to go wandering. One night, I was looking for something, and I found the Ocala Star-Banner from, I guess, 1986. I was looking for something racing-related, and I found that the newspaper had picked up and printed not just racing results and entries from (relatively) nearby Calder, but Belmont as well. Now, remember if you might, 1986 was when I first started getting interested by the Sport of Kings, so it was a great trigger for the memory of all the cheap horses, and the stars, of yesteryear that I remember.

And so, I started making a list, looking across those old Belmont entries and recalling the names of various old-timers. In over 5 years in the Sim, I had already used a few names from my memory banks. Many names were from the claiming ranks, like Rue Reality, Iambic Pentameter, Truth Be Told, names that I figured no one would miss, because no one knew them from Adam in the good old days.

Some of them brought back specific memories, for both good and bad. Example: I named two of my horses Drums In The Night and Mr. Walter K., two solid horses back then that were involved in an awful racing accident at Belmont in the fall of 1988 that claimed the life of jockey Mike Venezia. I didn’t do that to be ghoulish, but to remember the capable New York-bred horses and also the horsemen involved, not just Mr. Venezia, but Robbie Davis, who felt terrible guilt over an accident that wasn’t his fault; I did so in their memories, for my own fond recall of all involved.

Some names I regret using now, if only because they did succeed on the track and even as I did like honoring them, I want now to remember those as they were, like King’s Swan and If I Had A Hammer. There were a ton of good names that never made it big, never made it out of the ranks. And good names in the Sim for racehorses sometimes get hard to find.

I went through as much of the Ocala archives as I could find that had entries for Belmont or Aqueduct or Saratoga, inasmuch as the newspaper could actually print them. Over a five-year period, a flood of memories came back, usually about hearing the names or remembering the horse itself at whatever level it existed. And over time, I realized that maybe, just having the list of names might not be enough. I have the names and the Internet at my disposal, and websites that could help me, so, if I could find names that worked and discovered that the horses never hit it big, why not try and duplicate them, in their own way? In some respects I was up against it, because there wasn’t a Storm Cat or an A.P. Indy sire line to use, the bigger names of the era were just hitting their strides at stud, like a Mr. Prospector and a Seattle Slew, and in all cases, the sires weren’t available, period.

So I used general sire lines. I used some Sim tools to find sires that were in the ballpark, and used PedigreeQuery.com to get the general sire line I needed for what they call a “reasonable facsimile” of the real thing. And I now have a number of reality-inspired horses raring to go, all two-year-olds. They’re all bargains, because it’s more difficult than it is expensive to, say, find sons or grandsons of Hold Your Peace or Tom Rolfe at stud anymore. I had to dig very deep, and breed with sires from Peru and France and West Virginia instead of the bluebloods of Kentucky. But I wound up with more than ten horses to reminisce with in the Sim.

Sometimes, you just have to find new ways to play the game, for fun. And I did this for the idea of a new project, like some of the other experiments I’ve tried before and written about. I literally dusted off a stable I hadn’t used in more than two years, quinella, and transferred the 9 colts and 1 filly I would up with into the new barn. (I bred them all the same week, and strangely, everything I had came out male. Go figure.) They debut this week, and all have pedigrees modern enough for almost 25 years later, and names that recall the journeymen horses of yesterday. Meet the team:

Take The Offer(CAN) [Candid Cameron x Bayou Hebert x Advocator]

Unanswered(GER) [Milesius x Royal Roberto x L’Enjoleur]

Flickering(WV) [Meadow Monster x Private Terms x Mr. Redoy]

Wine Merchant(AUS) [Greenwood Lake x Dr. Dan Eyes x It’s Freezing]

Cooling Point(CAN) [Milwaukee Brew x Fighting Fit x Honey Jay]

Vicarious Thrill(PER) [Mt. Pleasant x Maudlin x Judger]

Belle Anglais(MD) [Dance With Ravens x Lemhi Gold x Gold And Myrrh]

Moonhaven(CA) [Tizbud x Roo Art x My Gallant]

Twenty North(FL) [Teuflesberg x Screen King x Duck Dance]

Life Of Strength(FR) [Sunday Break x Success Express x Upper Case]

Stars of tomorrow? Hardly. Stars of yesterday? As if. But I’ve always thought that there can be a million ways to play the Sim, and a million squared ways to breed, and combine those things with my love of nostalgia, and my inevitable lifelong attempt to do things the hard way, and here we go.

And if any get claimed or are absolutely pitiful creatures? Well, the list is long. And after finding the Schenectady newspaper’s archives recently through Google, the resources have become something of a bottomless pit, only in a good way, for my research. So, watch the list grow. Call this, The Quinella Project. Or don’t, but there it is anyway.