Merry Christmas to one and all…
Now we move on to the Great Race Place – Santa Anita – for the next several months. As the face of So. Cal racing changes, we have a lovely long meeting at Santa Anita, a truly beautiful location… Remember to be careful when betting the two inside posts when coming out of the 7 furlong chute (6.5 and 7.0 furlongs.)… And we also have the winter meet at Aqueduct on the Inner Dirt track, which as far as I am concerned is a terrific place to play…
We we come to the end of an era…. What comes to mind, was a general feeling that Hollywood was a really good place to be a handicapper. Sometimes you get the feeling that a track favors the insiders, but that was never really the case with Hollywood. As a form reading handicapper, I always felt that the horses I liked ran as I had hoped a correct number of times… As a proof the Power Page always produced solid results at every meet, while some meets would be exceptional one season and maybe not so exceptional another, HOLLYWOOD was always solid for me and my Power Page… An as we close this meet, I will proudly be able to post winning stats for TOP RATED horses…
My single best memories of races at Hollywood is always the same…. Skip Away winning the Breeders’ Cup in 1997 in an absolute tour de force…And so once again, I am happy to remind everyone of how this was one of the really great race horses of our time… Most fail to remember that as a 3 year old, he defeated the great Cigar and his duels with Cigar and Formal Attire are some really amazing races… At that time he was a 3 year old. His race in the BC in 1997 was one of the most dominating races ever seen in the BC, but it seldom is mentioned by anyone other than me…. And in terms of earned numbers, no horse has ever run a bigger race in the BC Classic than SKIP AWAY. He earned an 84.5 that very day… The highest number ever earned since I began publishing in 1992 was Cigar hitting an 87.5 the year before in Chicago…
So at this time, all I can say to Hollywood Park is – “So Long – Farewell”…
