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“Hi, I’m calling to order my calendars. I order them every year from you. You should know who I am and have all of my information.”
“I only need one this year. The person I bought the second one for passed away.”
“My mama drank tequila when she was pregnant with me, so I don’t hear so well. Can you speak up?”
“My friends owned some horses in California. I was their official jockey hugger. Now that was a good job.”
They weren’t missing this one, not this year. And maybe not ever.
Brent and Carol Johnson turned up in Saratoga Monday to present the trophy for the Better Talk Now Stakes two months after the race’s namesake – and the best horse they ever owned – died of colic at age 18. Retired in 2009 after 51 starts and 14 wins including the 2004 Sword Dancer Invitational at Saratoga Race Course, Better Talk Now was part of the Johnson family. And they miss him.
Months ago, Mimi Voss asked me to make an introductory speech about Tom Voss for his Hall of Fame induction. I told her I’d be honored – then started sweating. It went off without a hitch (or many hitches) Friday, but I pretty much stuck to the abridged version. Here’s all of it, or most of it, from a Word doc on my computer labled simply, “Voss.”
As my journalism professors told me it would, a pencil saved me as I scribbled down some observations. I’m sure I still have the notebook (because I hardly ever throw those things away), but I’m not sure where it is. The notes would have been difficult to read, and would have gone something like this:
“Every year I say I’m running in that thing. One of these years, I’m going to do it.”
Jake Chalfin heard my excuse for not taking part in the annual Chasin for Chalfin trail run, looked me in the eye and said something to the effect of “Well, if you don’t wimp out this year we’d love to have you.” Only he didn’t put it that nicely.
So I signed up.
Fasig-Tipton Midlantic sales buyers and sellers will tell you Paget Bennett is “one in a million” and now they’ve got proof. The regional director of sales, based in the company’s Fair Hill, Md. office is recovering from surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm late last month.
I know Graham Motion well enough to know when he doesn’t want to answer a question, or when he can’t really conjure a 566th answer to a question he’s been asked 565 times. But I usually ask anyway.
Last Tuesday, I asked. “So why was that last race so bad?”
Mostly, I had time to kill. What I got was a great morning and a reminder of a few things. One, horses are cool creatures. Two, horse people work hard. And three, I need to get out of the office more often.
Hockey and horse racing. Start a conversation about one or the other and you’re liable to get somewhere. I called Steve Wigmore about both two weeks ago. He owns a horse named after a hockey player I follow (the horse, Gostisbehere, is with Charlie LoPresti; the player, defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere, is in his second season with the Philadelphia Flyers) and we published a story last week about them that shed some light on both.
If Jim Stevenson read this, he’d probably say I overwrote it. Something like that, anyway. But, here goes.
