Alysheba Was Tough in a Race

I always thought Citation was the best race horse I ever saw. Then, I saw Swaps and I wasn’t so sure.

Then, I saw Affirmed and fell in love all over again. Affirmed did everything you’d ask of a horse and, besides, Laz Barrera, his trainer, loved him, too. Laz had trained horses all over the hemisphere but, so far as Laz was concerned, Affirmed could do everything but talk.

But right now, I’m beginning to wonder if the recently retired Alysheba isn’t as good as any of them. He may be the hardest-knocking, most honest runner I ever saw on a track. The one who did the most with what he had, the Pete Rose of turfdom, if you will.

I mean, there were other horses faster. There were other horses that could go farther. Someone once said of Man o’ War that he was “the nearest thing to a living flame” you would ever see on a race track. Native Dancer lost only 1 race in his life, the Kentucky Derby. Few horses were as superior to their company as Secretariat.

But Alysheba was a horse who seemed to rise to the occasion. He wouldn’t stay beat. Like Dempsey, he got off the floor to win.

He never really ran a bad race. He never packed it in. The bigger the race, the better he ran.

He won his Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Super Derby, Santa Anita Handicap. The richest race in the world, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, he lost by a nose last year, then won in the dark and the mud at Louisville this year. You just loaded Alysheba in the gate and pointed him at the finish line.

He was a pro. He won on the East Coast, he won on the West Coast. He won in between. He ran in the mud, he ran in the rain. He ran in the heat and he ran in the cold. He won on medication and he won without medication. He won on tracks of pure gumbo and he won on tracks so hard and fast you could light matches off them.

He might get outrun. He never got out-gutted. In the ’87 Kentucky Derby, he almost got knocked to his knees in the stretch but still won going away. He was in the money 21 of the 26 races he ran. He didn’t care what the times were, just where the horses were. He won the Breeders’ Cup last month in the slow-boat time of 2:04 4/5 over a track that was tiring faster than a waiter with corns. He won his Kentucky Derby in 2:03 2/5, which is a long way from Secretariat’s Derby record of 1:59 2/5.

Still, Alysheba did what Secretariat did--run a half a length faster than anything else in the race.

If everyone else wanted to run fast, so could Alysheba. He won the Santa Anita Handicap in 1:59 4/5. He won the Meadowlands Cup in 1:58 4/5 and the Woodward at Belmont in 1:59 2/5. Whatever it took. Alysheba could slug or box, play long ball or hit-and-run, out-putt you or out-drive you. You got the choice of weapons.

In his early career, he was winning races when he could hardly get his breath. Once the vets diagnosed a constrictive throat ailment and cleaned out his thorax, Alysheba never had a sick day in his life. You might say he was as healthy as a horse.

He’d never stay beaten. Bet Twice beat him in the Belmont in probably the dullest race Alysheba ever threw and beat him again, narrowly, in New Jersey a couple of weeks later and still later at Pimlico. But the lifetime standings between them is now Alysheba 4, Bet Twice 3.

You couldn’t get rid of Alysheba. He relished a good scrap. Ferdinand nosed him out in the ’87 Breeders’ Cup Classic, but Alysheba won the next 2 times they met, one of them in the Santa Anita Handicap.

He seemed to know when the stakes were high. He was a money horse and now has won more than any race horse in history. Cutlass Reality startled him in the Hollywood Park Gold Cup this year but Alysheba went past him like a fast freight passing a telephone pole in the Breeders’ Cup last month. Cutlass Reality was a staggering seventh when Alysheba crossed the finish line.

Horses who do their early running in California are very suspect around the white picket fence farms of Kentucky and Maryland. They are usually regarded around those barns about the same as ballplayers who hit a lot of home runs in mile-high minor league cities but can’t seem to get the ball in the air against big-league pitching.

Alysheba, though, was no bush league Babe Ruth. He could handle the going anywhere. He was not some movie horse or “nice little California sprinter” as the hardboots used to say. He was the real article.

Jack Van Berg has saddled more winners than any other trainer on the track but Jack will tell you he never had any horse try any harder for him than Alysheba. Jack knew he could take that horse anywhere.

And, maybe, in any time. Citation would go get you. Affirmed wouldn’t let you get by. Swaps, you had to catch. Alysheba just figures out what it takes. And goes out and does it.

He’s wasn’t as fast as Swaps, as brilliant as Citation, as pretty as Affirmed. But he might be in the photo with any of them. His daddy, Alydar, was in a lot of them with Affirmed.

And he should easily get the horse-of-the-year honor at the Eclipse Awards in February. Horse of the decade is not out of the question.

You can say one thing for Alysheba. You had to beat him. As Casey Stengel used to say of his type of athlete, “You gotta beat him--he won’t help you none.”

Citation might have caught him. He might not have caught Swaps or gotten by Affirmed. But they’d have known they were in a race.