One Hell Of a Hind End

Over 8500 people turned out at Philadelphia Park to watch Smarty Jones have a bit of a gallop on Saturday. Almost nine grand at The Pha! That's waaaaaaaaay more than they usually get on an average day with a full card. First-hand accounts report a lot of little kids in tow, complete with parents admonishing, "Now remember this, so that you can tell your grandchildren that you saw this horse with your own eyes." Oh man, does that ever turn on the waterworks here in the swamp. Got to love it when destiny and The Show come to your local piece of shit track. Please God, let this ride and ride.

If Smarty pulls this off on June 5, it will shatter onto the history books just a handful hours before my nephew is baptized, and a few months before my sister's best friend, another horse freak, produces Baby Number 2. Julie hopes it happens so that the babies can boast of a Triple Crown winner in the year they were born. As a child who shares a born-on date with Seattle Slew and Star Wars, then grew up simultaneously adoring ponies and launch propulsion, I think there's a lot to be said for birth year karma. However, if we as a society can't do better than this before December, those babies are in for worlds and worlds of crap.

We racing folk, of course, are absolutely wetting ourselves over this. On one fan forum, one poster who was in attendance at the public gallop extolled for paragraphs the virtues of Smarty's "hell of a hind end."

Yes, well... Triple Crown or no, he ain't got a rack like the one I got.

(I just read back through this, and you know, it totally sounds like I know what I am talking about. This is an illusion. Here is a person who, while watching the Flyers-Lightning hockey game this weekend, watched a puck sail through a goalie's legs and shouted, "Ohhhhhhhhhhh, right through the thigh hole!" and Flipper had to lean over and go, "Um. FIVE hole." Whatever. Thigh Hole makes for a better potential name for a horrible disease, and, as we all know, that is the important thing.)

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