Opinion

“She was a runner.” 

That’s how Randy Romero signed a photo of Personal Ensign winning the 1988 Whitney. That was it, simple and oh so sweet. Just like the man. 

John Wayne Eastwood opened the office door and began to rant. “Hey, I can’t find the paper anywhere this morning.” Tom Law, ever the traffic cop, tempered the situation from the first chair in the office, strategically placed for situations like this (I hid in the back office). “We don’t do Wednesdays,” Law said to … Read more

It’s that time of year. The Travers has come and gone, the downward slide has begun. To celebrate our final print edition (the final four Specials will be digital only), I bring you the annual “I’ll miss. I won’t miss” column.

The first one I remember watching, really watching, was 1982. Joey and I finished watering off at the barn and drove the farm truck to the racing office at Delaware Park. There, we watched the Travers. It was the first time we had watched a race from another track at a track. We walked past shiny white trailers in the parking lot. Somebody said something about simulcast trucks, whatever that meant.

How did you get here?

Bill Mott stood in the road outside his barn on the Oklahoma bend Wednesday morning and directed traffic. Making sure there were no cars, golf carts or horses, Mott asked for his paddock schoolers to make the walk, hoping to slip through a break in a relentless rain.

The tack trunk sits in the corner, next to a Saratoga 2-year-old winner, under the overhang of the T-shaped barn inside Clare Court. A bag of timothy hay cubes folds and falls. Ankle paint, a soft-bristled, long-stemmed brush dropped in the plastic holder taped around the jar, you know, the quintessential groom-rigged method of efficiency. A stiff bristle brush, it looks like it was thrown from a passing car. Green gel, Epsom salt, a feed tub and a bag of laundry.

Victor Berrios went to school one day. Into the army the next.

It wasn’t his choice.

Early Thursday morning, Joe Campbell waited for a coffee and a chocolate Coolatta at the counter of Dunkin Donuts. A couple of racetrackers stood in line, two golfers planned a tea time from a table and I asked the most natural question I could ask.