Sean Clancy

I can see it now.

Mike Smith’s feet dangling, long and low, like a kid riding his pony to the river. Body swaying, gently, he could be fishing from a surfboard. Looking at the horizon, squinting, distant, like he’s trying to will away his and his horse’s nerves. Hands on the reins but not clutching them, coddling them like they might bite.

Richard Valentine walked toward the side gate of the paddock, paused, turned and gazed across the top of sport coats and sun dresses like he was looking for someone. Then he wiped his hand down his face and exhaled. 

“I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.”

Nearing the end of the Capital OTB show Wednesday morning, Seth Merrow offered a question and a statement all rolled together, letting it hang in the air.

“You write the Cup of Coffee, on or near the back page, every day…?”

“Every day,” I said, knocking on wood, “I haven’t missed one yet.”

I just knocked on wood again, eight hours later, as the clock ticks and I sit behind an empty screen.

I saw the saddle first. The letters LUZ poking behind a pink saddle towel and a girth, wedged between a valet’s elbow and wrist as it was carried across the paddock to a saddling stall for the fifth race.

Whew. The saddle meant Mike Luzzi was OK after hurling into the slop in the fourth when Domestic Warrior broke down in a $16,000 claimer on an overcast Monday at Saratoga.

Part underground newspaper, part town crier, The Saratoga Special serves as our public front. As a reader said to me, “You don’t understand, we know all of you like you’re family, we’ve watched the kids grow up, we know your good days, your bad days, we know everything about you.”

Well, not everything. Here’s what you might not know.

It was 2004. We lived and worked at 48 Union Avenue, in a partially renovated – OK, partially demolished – carriage house. The masthead listed 19 names, the only ones who still remain are Dave Harmon, Tod Marks, Joe and me.

Survivors or suckers? Sometimes we wonder.

“You’ve been coming here since 1973? You’re out here every day, you know the owners, you talk to the trainers, you’re friends with the jockeys, you see the horses, you write it all down, you follow it year round, you’ve been doing it your whole life. You must know what’s going to happen. Nothing could surprise you around here.”

Pat Kelly parked his bike, a spray-painted, no-brand beater with a fading Free John Veitch bumper stick, a trash bag on the seat, a brass chain around the handle bars and a metal chain around the seat. The 68-year-old trainer stepped off and began transferring cans and bottles from the wire mesh basket into an oat bag nailed to the wooden wall of the bunkhouse deep in the shaded corner on the backside of the main track.

The text came at 9:49 Saturday morning.

“You see that?”

I hadn’t, but I knew what it meant.

Fair Eva had won.