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Who’s ready for April? Well, like it or not it’s here and we’re getting settled in. Time to get that yard cleaned up, do some planting, file those taxes and soak up some sunshine in between showers and snow. If the latter got to you this week fear not, it won’t last long, and you’ll be back outside in no time.
Ask a silly question . . . You don’t need to be Carnac The Magnificent (look it up, kids) to guess Arthur Hancock’s Horse Who Changed Everything. The Kentucky horseman foaled, raised, owned and raced Hall of Famer Sunday Silence, whose 14-start racing career included nine wins and five seconds (with four of those runner-up efforts coming by less than a length). Sunday Silence changed the lives of plenty of people – some who knew him and some who only saw him.
The days are getting longer, March Madness is winding down, Cheltenham is a distant speck in the rearview mirror and the final Kentucky Derby preps are right around the corner.
Spring has sprung, even though the so-called experts say it’s too early to call it and even though Christmas lights can be found without looking too hard in spots. So it might be a bit early, and it doesn’t quite feel the same as the last few winters that packed a serious wallop, the warm weather is still very welcome.
Two months down, ten to go. It’s hard to believe – or is it? – that spring is on the way and with it warmer weather, better racing and a lot more time outside.
Sure signs of late winter and spring popped up this week with the start of the 2-year-olds in training sales season.
Wendy Kingsley ransacked her vocabulary in a frantic search for enough superlatives to describe daughter Taylor’s horse, A.J. Awesome. Stopping just this side of supercalifragilisticexpialidocius, she finally conceded that the bay gelding’s name says it all.
Trainer Chuck Lawrence went to the Breeders’ Cup with a horse last year. He’s won 359 races as a trainer. He rode 1994 steeplechase champion Warm Spell, and won two National Steeplechase Association jockey championships as part of a 122-win career. But his Horse Who Changed Everything wasn’t even a horse.
The days are ticking away on the shortest month of the year and it’s starting to feel like spring in some places. Not quite spring fever, but close, and especially so after some bizarre weather up and down the eastern part of the country that made it feel more like summer than late February earlier this week.
Another three-day holiday weekend (for some) has come and gone, this time a doubled up version with Valentine’s Day and President’s Day falling back-to-back. It’s been fairly busy at ST Publishing’s Eastern outposts and we’ll roll out a new feature or two later this week. In the meantime we’ve dug through notes and emptied voice recorders for the weekly mishmash from the world of racing.
As David Allen Coe’s friend Steve Goodman wrote, the perfect country and western song says something about mama, trains, trucks, prison and gettin’ drunk. Well, David (and Steve) never met Cowboy Dan.
