They'll Burn From The Start

The superlative filly goes against the merely superior colt at Belmont Park in New York this Sunday afternoon, the terrible speed of Ruffian against the persistent courage of Foolish Pleasure. It will be a $350,000 match race—$225,000 to the winner, $125,000 to the loser—between the best 3-year-olds of each sex over the Derby distance of a mile and a quarter.

Match races between top thoroughbred horses are rare. Chris Evert trounced Miss Musket a year ago in a well-publicized $350,000 duel of fillies, but the last one to excite interest equal to the Ruffian-Foolish Pleasure showdown was Nashua-Swaps in 1955, which Nashua won by 6� lengths. The filly vs. colt conflict in this one adds undeniable spice. Racetrack tradition holds that females generally are unable to compete on even terms with males, and when a filly or a mare challenges that tradition, interest heightens. And even discounting the battle-of-the-sexes aspect, the match-up is fascinating. Ruffian is undefeated—unchallenged, really—in 10 races. Foolish Pleasure has won 11 of his 14, including the Kentucky Derby, and in two of his defeats—when he ended up second in both the Preakness and the Belmont—he finished with such a hard-closing drive that he missed winning the Triple Crown by little more than the length of his body.

Both are grandchildren of Bold Ruler, Secretariat's daddy and the outstanding American sire of the last two decades. Foolish Pleasure, undefeated as a 2-year-old and up to now the favorite in every race he has run, is just about everything you would want a thoroughbred racehorse to be. Ruffian is all of that and something more, as horsemen began to suspect when she first came onto the track a year ago. She has won races easily by nine, 13, 15 lengths; her average margin of victory is 8� lengths. Eight of her 10 triumphs have been in stakes, including New York's "triple crown for fillies," and all of those stakes victories have been run in record time. She has utterly dominated her opposition. The charts of her past performances—a point-by-point analysis of her races—glitter with the number 1, which means that except for a few strides at the beginning of a couple of them, she has been in front all the way in all her races.

While that is impressive, it is not necessarily the best preparation for a showdown with a tough, courageous competitor like Foolish Pleasure. "She's never been in a fight," worries her jockey, Jacinto Vasquez, who is also Foolish Pleasure's regular rider and will be again, according to the colt's trainer, LeRoy Jolley. (Obliged to make a choice between the two for the match race, Vasquez went with Ruffian, his decision to some extent imposed on him by an ultimatum from Ruffian's trainer, Frank Whiteley. "He made it pretty plain," Vasquez said. " LeRoy just said it was O.K., that he'd ride me back on Foolish Pleasure when I was available.")

Nonetheless, Ruffian is almost certain to be the strong favorite in the betting, her supporters apt to get back only $3 for each $2 bet, if she wins. That $1 profit would be considerably larger than Ruffian's usual return; her most recent victory, for example, earned her backers a dime on each $2 bet.

Yet her admirers feel this is found money, for they believe Ruffian will break Foolish Pleasure's heart. The expression is not anthropomorphic sentimentality but backstretch idiom, and it simply implies that Ruffian will turn on her speed from the start and that Foolish Pleasure, an honest horse who always tries, will go with her until he finds he can go no farther. Sham did that with Secretariat in the Derby and the Preakness in 1973 and tried it again in the Belmont. But after a mile of that mile-and-a-half classic, Sham had nothing left. Secretariat went on to win by a hard-to-believe 31 lengths. Sham faded to last and never raced again.

If Ruffian does indeed cut his heart out—more backstretch talk—she may, like Mack the Knife, do the deed out of sight. That is, the race may be over for all practical purposes in the first quarter of a mile, before the horses come into full public view on the backstretch. The early obscurity will occur because the race will start at the extreme end of Belmont's "chute," a long straight extension of the backstretch that goes far to the right (as viewed from the grandstand) to a spot somewhere near Montauk Point. As a matter of geographical fact, the start will take place about half a mile, as the bettor stares, from the finish line. Those in upper-level boxes with hyperopic vision or high-powered binoculars will have some idea of what's going on in the first quarter of a mile, but railbirds at ground level will be lucky if they get a glimpse of the racing silks. Televiewing will be better. CBS will have cameras all over the track, every place but in one of the Goodyear blimps, all three of which have commitments elsewhere. ("You can't get one just anytime," a CBS man explained.) And a helicopter is out: too high, it could clutter nearby Kennedy Airport's traffic patterns; too low, it could spook the horses.

The race is being started from the distant reaches of the chute because of Belmont's classic (or antique) dimensions, which were retained for sentimental—the sentimentalists say traditional—reasons when the track was rebuilt a decade or so ago. It is a mile-and-a-half oval, the only one of that size in North America. On such a track there are only two places to start a mile-and-a-quarter race, both unsatisfactory. One is at the end of the chute. The other is halfway around the first, or clubhouse, turn. The turn is where Jack Dreyfus, chairman of the New York Racing Association, would like to have the match race start, where the public could see it. But starting a race on a turn is awkward, even dangerous. Horses, like most creatures, run more efficiently on the straight than around a bend, although in truth they seldom run in purely straight lines. The better ones weave, and the poorer ones stagger. On a turn, these haphazard variations are often magnified. With the start on a turn and horses bunched together, there could be disaster. But, Dreyfus reasoned, with only two horses racing, things might not be so bad. If the starting gate were placed near the outside rail at an angle, there would be at least several strides of straight going for the two horses as they sliced across the track before they had to veer left. He felt the inconvenience of such a start could be endured for the good of the public, not to mention TV, which put up most of the purse ("More than $300,000," says Bob Wussler of CBS).

Well, that's show biz, but Frank Whiteley said, flatly, no. Ruffian's super-conservative trainer pays little heed to press, public or electronic media. His filly would start on the straight or not at all. Jolley did not contest the issue, although a start on the curve might possibly detract more from Ruffian's instant acceleration than from his colt's more deliberate start.

Foolish Pleasure seems to have so many disadvantages. He is smaller than Ruffian (an enormous filly, even bigger than the outsize Secretariat), yet under the rules of racing, which say a filly must get a five-pound "sex allowance," he must carry 126 pounds to her 121. He is a come-from-behind horse, yet the experts agree that if he stays off the pace and tries to come from behind he will be out of it. He has no choice but to challenge Ruffian from the start, try to outrun her, try, in short, to break her heart. He will have to sprint with her, which is not his style.