Go Spooky Go!

- Many many thanks for the reader/commenter for the kind words and the delightful story of Spooky Mulder and how he/she and 4-year old son, along with some help from a handful of others, actually cheered Spooky back to the winner's circle. You see, who said that your cheering doesn't help??

Spooky is a venerable 8-year old with a big heart, and 28 wins in 70 lifetime starts. And his latest win was accomplished after Tom Durkin delivered his generally fatal "Spooky Mulder couldn't stay with him" and the horse battled back for the win. There has to be a lesson for the sport somewhere in a story of a 4-year old kid falling in love with an 8-year old horse, and one that's not running in a Grade 1 stakes on ESPN.

While the kid expected to see his favorite horse's picture in the paper the next day because it was "exciting news," the parent offered that "our idea of exciting news and everyone else's is very different." Indeed, between Santos' win in the opener and Spooky's in the feature, there was easily a page worth of human and equine interest stories for the sports section in a more perfect world. Certainly we could lose a page of OJ Simpson for something like that, yes? While it's entirely possible, if not likely, that a tape of Saturday's spill made it onto a local sports report or two, there's no way in hell that the feel-good story of the trainer and jockey winning the next day got any follow-up mention at all.

Here's the race: