|
Monster Horses: Part 1
Over the years, there have been a few writers who have tried to bring greater accuracy to
the calculations we apply to figure handicapping thoroughbreds. Not many, but a few. I don't know why they do it and I wish they would cut it out.
I am perfectly happy--as a matter of fact, I'm tickled to
death--that the vast majority of race goers don't make their own numbers--and those who do, for openers, are convinced that a length is equal to a fifth of a second, and that the same length is ten-feet long. The
fastest horse I ever rode wasn't ten feet long, and he didn't have a registered name that anybody remembered, he was just "Charlie." (I don't name horses after myself; he came that way.) This horse had an
extra gear somewhere, direct-wired to a switch that kicked his brain into neutral, and when he hit that gear, he had no sense for his own safety, or yours. I would twist his head back and lay his lower lip on my
knee to discuss the matter of slowing down, while the rest of his body with mine atop was doing fifty miles-an-hour over irrigation ditches or whatever happened to be in a straight line from where he wigged out.
Charlie was a retired quarter horse, and he was a little like a punch-drunk fighter. If he heard a bell, he came out swinging.
Aside from that little idiosyncracy, he was the best horse I've ever owned. He
taught me to rope, we worked cattle, I did archeological surveys on him; we out ran everything on four legs. Charlie had one other little idiosyncracy that came from his racing days: he would not, under any
circumstances let another horse put its nose in front of his. It didn't matter if it was a race, or just walking to the pasture to gather cattle. Charlie had an attitude. Someday maybe we'll talk about
"class," but to me, there's not much more to be said than that. Put breeding and physiology together with that attitude and you not only have a race horse, but a rare kind.
I've owned and ridden
better-bred horses since, both thoroughbreds and quarter horses, but none with more heart--and none faster. When Charlie hit that gear--and I know now what it was: the three-hundred-yard breaking of the inertia
barrier--and, if there was clear sailing ahead, so that you could think of something other than survival and enjoy the trip, there was a certain feeling, a certain sound, a certain whistling in your ears, that I
have never felt or heard on another horse.
Charlie spent his retirement years with my sister and had to be put down last winter at twenty-something. Charlie was buried in a hole six feet deep by seven feet
long. The fastest horse I ever rode was seven feet long. I didn't find this out by measuring his eye with an engineer's scale and extrapolating, or by comparing his length in a photo with paraphernalia in the
background that I later measured. Rather, I ran a Stanley Powerlock 16' Model 33-423 tape measure from his nose to his rump, trying to make sure he didn't cow-kick me in the process. He didn't. He was 83 inches. Six
feet, eleven inches--give or take a half. He was a quarter horse, so for thoroughbred calculations, you would multiply that by four. [...joke...]
Charlie was a short horse in more ways than one. I've ridden
and measured a lot of fancier horses since then, and they were much bigger. At least six to twelve inches. You know those black-and-white WWII Navy movies with the ship's horn that rattles the bulkheads and makes
whales cringe? Picture that horn. Okay, NOW HEAR THIS: the average length of both thoroughbreds and quarter horses is eight feet.
I don't know where the new ten foot standard snuck in, but I am tickled to
death it did. You don't get many breaks anymore, and with morning line odds being set more and more by young Sartinists with computers, having "ten feet" burned into their chips is about the only thing
between me and even-money. Actually, I do know where it came from, and like most of the other novel ideas in horse race handicapping, you can trace it to one of three sources: Tom Ainslie, Andy Beyer, or Huey Mahl.
Huey Mahl? I know Ainslie and Beyer exist, I've seen them; but I'm not so sure about Huey. I've seen his by-line in WIN magazine, but I'm not so sure he's not one of those "urban legends" you hear about,
like exploding housewives.
Every time I come up with an idea that I think is pretty hot, I've learned to try it out on a few guys I know to see if they're going to say, "Huey did that," or,
"Oh, yeah, just like Huey." If they don't, it's probably original. But, if they do, you can bet it's a pretty damn good idea, it's just that this guy--this Huey person--has got ownership on half the good
ideas in horse racing. [Regrettably, Huey is no longer a legend in his own time; he passed away a few years ago in Las Vegas.]
Actually, the monster horse has been around a long time, but it became
wide-spread with Ainslie, and was brought to high-art by Mahl. Tom Ainslie used the distance of ten feet in his books, but I don't recall that he had much to say about it; I suspect that it was the rule-of-thumb,
just like the fifth-of-a-second for time-per-length (which we'll get to next time). I was heavily influenced by Beyer, so I used eight feet without thinking much about it--until it occurred to me just how
significant that two-foot difference is.
When we make handicapping figures, we're not just talking about two feet between the nose and rump of one horse in a photo-finish picture. We're talking about hundreds
of lengths over the course of a race, and each one of those times two feet--which puts a ten-foot horse in Pennsylvania before an eight-foot horse leaves The Big Apple. Whoa.
I had all these hay converters
hanging around out back, and a Stanley model 33-423, so I started measuring them. Charlie was a scant seven feet. A big, dapple grey, thoroughbred/percheron-cross "heavy hunter" was about
eight-feet-plus-four-inches. A friend's thoroughbred, fresh off the track was eight feet on the money. But, I didn't settle for that. You know, horses extend when they run. Their necks are long and they stick up at
about a forty-five degree angle (except the quarter horse "pleasure" class, but that's another story), and some have pretty long heads that stick down at another angle, so, if you straightened them out
like they sometimes do in a race, wouldn't they be sort of like a jackknife and get a heck of a lot longer?
For this you need an assistant (or a piece of duct tape) to hold the tape at the horse's butt while
you plant both feet in its chest and stretch it's nose out like an accordion. If you choose to do this with anything less than a gentle horse, you can send word from the hospital that this procedure, amazingly, only
gains six to eight inches. It had to be wrong. This is where I first heard about the mythical Huey Mahl. Six inches for all that neck didn't seem right. There had to be something different about a horse in full
extension, running. So I got out an engineer's scale and began scaling full-side photographs of running thoroughbreds. I mentioned to a friend what I was doing and that it wasn't easy, and he said, "Oh, yeah,
Huey Mahl did that. Used the eye as a constant and got ten feet."
The only trouble with scaling the length of a running horse is that there are no constants. I thought I had one right off the bat with
the saddle girth. My saddle girths were four inches. I used that and got good numbers (for my original bias), right around eight feet. Then I was at the tack shop on the backside one day and noticed there were some
stinking metric girths! And they were about three inches. Caaarr-rud! Do you know how many more three-inch girths you can scale into a horse picture than you can using four-inches? Right--approximately two-feet
worth, and the horses come out ten feet long again.
If you own an engineer's scale, get it out and look at it. (These are those triangular plastic rulers that don't have inches and centimeters, just different
spacings on each of the six edges, and are always the only thing you can find when you actually want a ruler.) Take a look at, say, the "50" scale, with the lines only a fraction of a millimeter apart.
Suppose you have a running horse photo that is 20 big units on the "50" scale. That means it is 200 little tic-marks long. So how big is its eye? Is it 1.5 tic-marks? Two tic-marks? If it's two, that means
this horse's overall running length is 100 times the length of its eye.
Of course, if you're wrong and it is actually closer to 1.75 units, then it's 114.2 times, and you'd be 14.2 times the width-of-an-eye
off. We're not talking eyelashes here, but eyes. If an eye is 2.5 inches, that's an eyelash under three feet! How long's an eye in real life, anyway? Probably right around 2.5 inches. But, 2.25" is right around
2.5", and so is 2.75", and 3" when your looking at it all miniaturized in a photograph. If the horse photo you scale this time is actually 2.25" and the one you scale next time is 2.75" and
the constant you use is 2.5", then the first horse is going to appear to be two feet longer than the second! Horses gather and extend as they run--they get longer and shorter. There is an average, but an
engineer's scale isn't going to get it.
Copyright(C) 2003 Charles Carroll - DesertSea.Com
This text can not be reproduced without the written permission of
Charles Carroll
|
|
