This isn't the column that I expected to write early this week when I scanned the nominations for the Fantasy Stakes and did not see Will's Secret's name.
Surely, with two stakes wins at Oaklawn and an Arkansas owner (Willis Horton of Marshall), the homebred 3-year-old filly would stick around for the Fantasy Stakes, which last year produced winners of the Kentucky Oaks and Preakness.
Not to worry. Checking with the owner, I found that besides sending his stable star to Keeneland for a Grade 1 race, Horton would test the waters in the Fantasy with a last-out maiden winner. For every Rachel Alexandra that has won the race, the stage is open also to a Take Charge Lorin.
With somewhat more chagrin, I read that Keepmeinmind, considered an early contender for the Arkansas Derby, would not run in the April 10 race at Oaklawn. But, who knows? Essential Quality, who has beaten Robertino Diodoro's horse twice, might not have every screw tightened for his last Kentucky Derby prep. Although no Blue Grass winner since 1991 has gone to a closer, Strike the Gold, like Diodoro's horse, did his best running late.
Things began to clear with Gov. Asa Hutchinson's midweek declaration about removing masks in Arkansas, a harbinger that the COVID-19 pandemic might be loosening in other states.
Then came Friday and the opening day at Keeneland and all was right in the commonwealth of Kentucky.
After a year that racing was affected more in the Bluegrass than perhaps any other region, the spring meet in Lexington, Ky., 2-year-olds and all, was back in full swing.
Holding the Blue Grass Stakes in July and the Kentucky Derby in September last year seemed, well, unpatriotic. Couldn't be helped in a year that the Preakness went off in October, ending a Triple Crown series that included a shortened Belmont. Hey, the coronavirus became a campaign issue with even the sitting president affected.
Although crowds were limited because of the pandemic, and obtaining media credentials was an almost draconian process even for Kentucky outlets, Keeneland was open for business Friday. Further proof comes with today's card highlighted by the Toyota Blue Grass Stakes and the Central Bank Ashland, final preps for older, more storied races (Derby, Oaks) down the road at Churchill Downs in Louisville.
Eddie Donnally, an ex-jockey turned Eclipse Award-winning writer, said in the Oaklawn press box one day that a Keeneland visit is the closest European experience one gets in American racing. This, after all, is a track that considered its patrons so horse-wise that for years it did not employ an announcer, thinking fans could keep up with their favorites through binoculars and without an overhead guide.
A 2019 visit to Keeneland, where I took in opening weekend of the fall meet, proved an almost religious experience. Having trainers Shug McGaughey and Mark Casse aboard an outgoing flight from Charlotte, N.C., and jockey Mike Smith on a return hop to Dallas were rewarding enough.
Once pulling in off Versailles Road, something the late Kim Brazzel, a horse-playing turf writer, told me years ago at Oaklawn rang true: There is a difference between races and racing.
With a friend, I watched future champion filly British Idiom win the Alcibiades and the next day, my jaw dropped when Maxfield won the Breeders' Futurity. That neither ran for greater glory at Churchill Downs the next year mattered not.
Not everyone in the crowd was a "swell," as the expression goes. Waiting for her boyfriend, a young lady I met outside the paddock asked if American Pharaoh had any of his first foals running that day. She could have checked the program she was holding, but never mind.
Although from Georgia, which has no thoroughbred racing, she expressed an interest in The Greatest Game and wished to pursue a career in the sport once her studies end at the University of Kentucky. She has, it would seem, the same racing DNA as a young lady from Memphis who quit a job at Graceland and spent two years in the Racing Industry Development Program at the University of Arizona and now works for a racing website.
Shayna, my Georgia friend, is now a UK junior. Although basketball in the Bluegrass -- indeed throughout Kentuckiana -- has fallen off, racing is still part and parcel of being a Kentuckian. So much that an Ohio native who lives in Lexington calls Kentucky-bred horses her "brothers and sisters."
What does this have to do with Oaklawn, you ask? Just that while this may not the most stellar Fantasy field assembled, this is a racetrack to rank with the nation's best.
That even if Essential Quality did not stay over for a second local race, we should feel blessed to have had the unbeaten male juvenile champion for the Southwest. To see Monomoy's Girl, in her Oaklawn debut at age 6, take the Bayakoa was akin to watching Zenyatta (happy 17th birthday, Big Mama) win the Apple Blossom Handicap twice.
Already, we have seen the next-out Dubai World Cup winner (Mystic Guide) take the Razorback Handicap and Concert Tour, in the Rebel, remind us afresh that we are mere spectators in Bob Baffert's racing universe.
The only drawback one can locate is a virtual monopoly by what one horseman calls "corporation attorneys," three men that you could have boxed opening day in a trainers-race trifecta. Sadly, some prominent horsemen whose names would be instantly recognizable to many readers if listed here have not won a race, their barns reduced to poverty levels.
Racing, despite its flaws, keeps luring us back, the bugler's sound as familiar to its followers as "Oh, say, can you see" to the average American. The hope here is that more folks with disposable money will enter the sport. Cheers to Danny Caldwell, Mike Sisk, Staton Flurry and Jerry Caroom for showing us into the future while we can still thank John Ed Anthony for giving us Temperence Hill and, now, Caddo River.
The late Chick Lang Jr., taken from us much too soon, came to love Hot Springs and Oaklawn while serving as Oaklawn's operations director, a job first held by Eric Jackson. His family joined at the hip to Maryland racing, Chick had a sound bite for the ages when the American Graded Stakes Committee, like a scorekeeper marking down a basket for the wrong player, lowered the Apple Blossom Handicap from Grade 1 to Grade 2.
That dizzying decision was soon corrected -- the Apple Blossom, like the Arkansas Derby, was restored to Grade 1 -- but not before Lang observed, "All of our races are Grade A."
Oaklawn fans may never see another year like 2020, when in effect it had the whole racing show to itself for a stretch, handling $41 million on Arkansas Derby Day. But when they're throwing six-figure purses at Arkansas-bred horses on weekdays, I wouldn't worry about the quality of the racing program.
Expect to hear the usual clash of cymbals as another Oaklawn season goes into the books. Any current diminuendo on Central Avenue will change into a crescendo soon enough.