Silver Charm Can’t Pull Weight

HALLANDALE, Fla. —  Life isn’t fair. Sports shouldn’t be either.

Michael Jordan didn’t have to play with ankle weights, did he? Terrell Davis doesn’t have to carry 10 extra pounds under his shoulder pads. Tiger Woods doesn’t have to play left-handed.

But look what they did to Silver Charm in the Donn Handicap on Saturday at Gulfstream Park.

With Skip Away in retirement, Silver Charm entered 1999 as the No. 1 contender for horse of the year. His reward? He had to carry 126 pounds, six more than the second and third favorites, Sir Bear and Puerto Madero, nine more than Frisk Me Now and at least 12 more than every other horse in the field of 12.

No wonder it was all Silver Charm could do to finish third, a neck in front of 129-1 shot Hanarsaan in the 1 1/8-mile race. Silver Charm finished more than five lengths behind the winner, Puerto Madero, who won by 2 3/4 lengths over Behrens.

This race was too fair. If it wasn’t bad enough that Silver Charm had to carry what amounted to an extra saddle, he also had to start from the extreme outside. In the five most recent Gulfstream meets, only six horses had won from the 12 post in 114 races of 1 1/16th miles or longer.

But no one assigned the post positions. That was determined by a blind draw. Silver Charm’s trainer, Bob Baffert, accepted that as bad racing luck and didn’t complain. When his 5-year-old gray was ordered to carry 126 pounds, that was different. Baffert complained.

Referring to today’s Super Bowl at nearby Pro Player Stadium, Baffert said, “[John] Elway is not going to be throwing a football with water in it.”

Handicapping horses is hardly a new concept. In one of the most famous races in Gulfstream’s 60-year history, Swaps carried 130 pounds in the 1956 Broward Stakes. Cigar carried 128 pounds in the Donn Handicap three years ago, Skip Away 126 last year.

One argument is that great horses will find a way to win no matter how great the obstacles. The three horses mentioned above all won. In that ’56 race, Swaps set a world record. “If he’s that good, he should overcome it,” Sir Bear’s trainer, Ralph Ziadie, said of Silver Charm before Saturday’s race.

Another argument is that trainers and owners won’t enter their horses if they don’t feel they have a chance to win. Other sports don’t have that problem. It’s not as if the Atlanta Falcons can simply refuse to play in the Super Bowl because they’re underdogs. Even with Skip Away carrying 132 pounds in last year’s Massachusetts Handicap, only five other horses dared challenge him.

Baffert said last week that if he’d known his horse would be doubly handicapped by having to start outside all the others he never would have flown him east from Santa Anita.

Nothing he saw in the race changed his mind. By the time jockey Gary Stevens maneuvered Silver Charm into a comfortable position alongside the rail, he still had eight horses ahead of him.

Baffert, sharing a box with Puerto’s Madero’s owners, R.D. Hubbard and Dwight Sutherland, and trainer, Richard Mandella, knew from the start that Silver Charm was running to show.

“He was very, very quiet,” Sutherland said of Baffert.

“It’s the only time I’ve ever heard him quiet,” Mandella said.

That’s not taking anything away from their horse, the Chilean-bred 5-year-old who finished second to Skip Away in two races last year, including the Hollywood Gold Cup. Puerto Madero won his recent race, the Native Diver Handicap last month at Hollywood Park.

“He was acting just like a cat,” his jockey, Kent Desormeaux, said of Puerto Madero on Saturday. “His feet weren’t touching the ground.”

But Desormeaux admitted that he looked over his shoulder at least once to see if Silver Charm was going to give him company.

If he hadn’t been handicapped, he might have. Who knows?

Even the winning trainer felt cheated by not having an answer to that question.

“If you’re going to run a Grade I race, there shouldn’t be any favors,” Mandella said.

Asked for his opinion, Silver Charm’s owner, Bob Lewis of Newport Beach, said, “I feel as emphatically about that as Bob [Baffert] does.

“I don’t think there should be a handicap. As long as I’m involved in the NTRA [National Thoroughbred Racing Assn.], I’m going to make an effort to change that. This is a day of change in the thoroughbred industry.”

As part of that change, the NTRA has established an 11-race, nationally-televised series for horses 4 years old and up, which Jim Murray used to call horse racing’s heavyweight division.

Lewis probably would have retired Silver Charm to stud after last year if he hadn’t felt obligated to support the NTRA’s efforts to revive the sport, and, because the Donn Handicap was the series’ debut, Lewis knew that Silver Charm had to be in it. What would the premiere of “Titanic” be without Leonardo DiCaprio?

But this was no way to treat a star.

Before the next race in the series, the Santa Anita Handicap on March 6, Silver Charm should call his agent. Demand to renegotiate. It’s bad enough that he doesn’t even get the girl until he retires.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com