Time to either pee or hurl

[The Indomitable DrugS]

I remember watching a training race in the morning at Mountaineer. A trainer had a horse who won the Phoenix Gold Cup at Turf Paradice in 1:07 and change a year or two earlier - he was coming back off of layoff and ran in a 35K claiming race at Belmont in his prior start. He thought the horse was doing well since he got him - and if he was impressive in the training race - he was going to come back at Presque Isle in five or six days for an alw race.

Some dirt cheap comebacking horse trained by a guy who hadn't won a race in about 8 or 9 years and is basically a feed man beats this classy sprinter out of the gate and is going better than him early ... is basically even with him for about four furlongs before he gradually starts to pull away unimpressively.

The trainer of the classy comebacker is so disgusted - he scraps the alw race and enters him in a 15K claimer - which he does manage to win by a nose.

When the dirt cheap comebacker is finally entered back - I give the trainer a call to see what he thinks - he starts whining "Jesus how did you find out the name of that horse!? For God sakes don't tell anyone - I've got this horse now and I'm all setup to make a score with him offshore" and on and on he went with the distressed whining.

As soon as I got off the phone with him - I thought to myself that he'll probably stiff the horse now. The horse is wrestled back at the start and basically wrapped up on the whole way. The next time it ran - it shot to the lead and went wire-to-wire at a fat price. The next morning - I get a call from the trainer bragging about how he scored with it. I was like "gee - man - why didn't you tell me he was running? If I only knew! Call me next time" I was playing with him as much as he was trying to play with me.