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Dutrow fights back at LaurelThe feature at Laurel Park on Nov. 21 was the Lite the Fuse, three quarters of a mile for 3-year-olds and older, $75,000 guaranteed. It was the second running of the stake, commemorating the colt Diek Dutrow bred and trained to torch a field of the nation’s best sprinters in the $300,000 DeFrancis Dash in 1995, then do it again the next year, shading 1:09 both times.Dutrow, a horseman for 45 of his 61 years, smiled when it was suggested that as designated trophy-presenter he might be handing the Waterford Crystal to himself. He was the trainer of two stakes winners in the eight-horse Seld.ii was the morning before the stake and Dutrow was leaning on the rail near the quarter pole, watching his horses train. It was his fourth morning at the track in a row, after an extended absence. Dutrow has had cancer surgery and will have more, when his body is ready. He has regained half the 30 pounds he lost, he said.I’d be presenting the trophy to one of my owners,” he amended. Greensprlng Willy is the property of Post 'lime 96, nom de course of Alvin Akman, Dutrow’s friend and client since before Guy, the durable gelding wbo ran on and on from 1976 through 1986 and won 45 times. Jove Stone is Dutrow’s $10,500 yearling purchase for the Marathon Farms of Peter Angelos, who owns the Orioles and covets the Redskins.- Akman was- owner- the.. 90-horse Maryland stable withHORSE RACINGBy JACK MANNwhich Dutrow won 352 races in JS35l-.*JML ,W^.jnore_than. .any., trainer in the world had ever won. In 1984 Dutrow graduated himself to New York, where the standard-bearer of his eminent success was a 5-year-old gelding he claimed for Akman for $80,000- King's Swan won stakes long and short and earned $1,924,845.In 1988 alone, the 8-year-old King’s Swan (by the. swift King's Bishop from a Sea Bird mare) won five New York stakes, three of them graded, from six furlongs to a mile and an eighth, and earned $539,681. Then came the '90s and Dutrows doldrums: a long business slump, leading to deep personal depression.So saturnine was Dutrow’s char gin at Saratoga four summers ago that Dick told Andy Beyer his only ambition for 3-year-old Lite the 'Fue ,was to “break-his maiden -and sell him, before something goeswrong.” The eolt, by Buckaroo from Dutrow s pet mare, Annie’s Dream, was the culmination of 21 years of breeding, Dick said, and probably had world-class speed. But Dutrow hd lost his confidence.Lite the Fuse brought it back. Three dazzling sprint victories sent the bids up to $600,000 and then, on a day the people might have gone to $1 million, Lite the Fuse put in a dull one, finishing five lengths behind Meritocrat in the Grade-2 Boojum at Belmont.“Meritocrat” was on the roll called by Dickie Dutrow in the Laurel winner’s circle the next July. He had kept his cool as 4-year-Carter and the Grade 2 Tom Fool in the spring. And be had blamed himself, not his stars, for his decline, acknowledging his error in taking on purple-bred 2-year-olds for elite stables like Harbor View and Loblolly, rather than staying with the hardly cia inters that had made him a leader.But the tension broke dramatically, almost hysterically, all over the Laurel winner's circle after Lite the Fuse scored as a 3-to-5 shot ought to in the '95 DeFrancis.Surrounded by old clients, assistants and friends, Dickie leaped and chirped around like an elf on a high, slapping his palm in cadence to his exultant litany:“Meritocrat. ..Rizzi... You And L.Birdonthewire: I want to see 'em alL“Tbey^^finished in front of Lite the Fuse. Iwant them all together, to kick theira--!”Dutrow wasn’t in the winner’s circle after the Lite the Fuse, nor were bis horses. Couldn’t make it” Dick said Monday morning. “Can’t get up at 4 any more, but who needs it? My boys (Tony and Chip) are running the bam all right.”He and Tony were wondering how the Laurel bettors let Angelos’ Jove Stone go off at 20.60 to I, while making Greenspring Willy 8-1 “What were they thinking of?” Dick asked. “He’s had one bad race.”“Doesn't figure.” Tony agreed, “in the paddock Bob Camae (trainer of the 6-5 favorite Wire Me Collect) -was axnazed»-teq-l’- ___________________Richard Eugene Dutrow, who has saddled almost 4,000 winners since a milk-wagon horse caught his attention in Hagerstown 50 years ago, was mildly surprised that Camac's favorite scorched to the lead and the inscrutable Purple Passion, the winner, did not. But that did not confute Dutrow’s intuition.“We’re in tough, Dick said the day before the race. “But the race sets up for us.” At the eighth pole Jove Stone was last, four lengths out of it. He finished second.Dickie Dutrow is in tough, too, in the toughest contest of his life. But it sets up for him. Four years ago he pronounced himself “an antique,” washed-up, reduced to a dozen mediocre horses. “Nobody wants me any more, Dick said. TTiey do now, again- Like Jove Stone,- -he.: comes from out of it.
Newspaper Details
Capital Gazette
Annapolis, Maryland, US
Sun, Nov 29, 1998
Page 84
Full Page
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Anonymous
MD, USA 29 Apr 2024
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