“What happened to The Saratoga Special?”
Vince Bonanni’s text blasted across my phone Saturday afternoon, somewhere and sometime between picking up Miles at Governor’s School in Western Virginia and the Virginia Bolts playing ball at James Madison High School in Northern Virginia. I wasn’t exactly watching Saratoga or worrying about what happened to The Saratoga Special as Miles fought back tears after a three-week stint of summer school and pitched three scoreless innings of the doubleheader.
Trying not to react to the cold, hard, contextless, toneless, one-way, abruptness of a text, I paused, composed, drove a thousand more miles, settled into a chair behind a dusty dugout and eventually replied with two words.
“Starts Thursday.”
Immediately, three blinking dots…“Thank you.”
In those two simple words, the context, the tone, the mood changed. From my point of view, anyway. A racing lifer, a longing reader, a concerned friend, looking for the first edition of the paper, that’s better. Way better.
And now it’s Thursday. After five days of the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival and seven days July 3-12, the meet starts for the third time today. At least for The Special. Today is Opening Day. Soft launch, launch, hard launch. Something like that.
And if you were wondering or worrying what happened to The Special this year, nothing happened. Balancing business decisions, an ever-changing/increasing racing schedule and the logistics of life, we opted to wait until the closest thing to a traditional start of the meet. As has been the schedule since Covid, we’ll publish 20 editions. Thursday. Saturday. Thursday. Saturday. Wednesday. Saturday. Wednesday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Saturday. Wednesday. Saturday. Wednesday. Saturday. Wednesday. Saturday. Got it?
And here’s to the opening of Belmont Park this fall to right the ship and return everything to normal by next summer. The new normal, anyway.
Now, let’s roll. Our 26th season starts today.
The meet, the day, the paper starts with the Jonathan Kiser Memorial. As I was driving up I-81 Tuesday on my third trip to Saratoga this summer, Maryland-based trainer Todd Wyatt called, and we talked about the once Maryland-based jockey. As we have done for the past 26 years. There will be weeks, months when we forget, but we always remember when Saratoga and his race roll around.
“We’ve been honoring that kid for 26 years,” Wyatt said. “That’s hard to believe.”
Kiser, a rocket of a jump jockey, died in 2000. The Special, anything but a rocket, started in 2001. Yeah, it’s hard to believe he’s been gone that long, and The Special has been going that long. Kiser would have liked The Special.
“A lot has happened in 26 years,” Wyatt said.
If the text touched a nerve, the call grabbed it and wrenched it in a knot.
The Special started in an out-of-business exercise studio on Broadway. Racing six days a week, publishing six days a week. Creative writers from Skidmore, ads arriving on discs and dial-up Internet bumping and grinding like a rugby scrum. Nobody thought we would make it. Neither did we. We switched to five days a week halfway through, long after the creative writers had flitted off.
We celebrated when we got Roadrunner. The Paper Lady. Quint Kessenich. Dave Harmon. Tod Marks. Susie Alexander. Bounced to the Arcade Building, the Chamber of Commerce commune and construction projects from Broadway to Union Avenue. About halfway through, Tom Law hopped in the camper van, guaranteeing we would make it – despite Distributiongate – and changing it forever.
A water cooler. A golf cart, then two. Full color. A growing list of interns making it big, our proudest achievement. “Hey, there’s Quint doing college football on ESPN…Travis got the job at Churchill…Gabby’s going to California…Ryan graduated law school…Panagot got hired as an agent…”
Somewhere along the line we moved to the feed store at Fasig-Tipton. A stakeout over the sales grounds, the training track, the degenerates and the drunks. The Park Avenue of Thoroughbred racing.
And our kids. Joey’s boys, the original paper boys, grew up in our pages. Miles, too. A reader once said to me, “You don’t know our kids. You don’t know us. But we know your kids. We know you.” It was the first time I looked at it that way and I’ve measured my words, ever so slightly, ever since.
Point Given won our first Travers. Frankel and Flute. Walking up the stretch after The Chief’s final Grade 1 and walking home with Wise Dan after another one of his. Johnny has been here for all of them, and then some, 26 years and still going strong. Rachel raised the rafters. Maple Leaf Mel dropped us to our knees. And we’ll never forget Garrett Gomez. Carmen Barrera. Christophe, too.
Joe and Sam have a grandson now. Three generations. One newspaper.
And so, yeah, that’s what happened to The Special. And here we go again. Wildfires in the air, the World Cup on mute, the Kiser to open, 39 racing days to go and another season around the sun.
Keep reading…
Click the cover to access the online edition of the full paper, presented by Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners.
