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Santa Anita - a long and storied history

By Larry Bortstein
First Published: 14 October 2009 - Issue Number: 14

p>There would seem to be little historic significance to the seventh race at Santa Anita on October 16, 1988.  The six-furlong allowance event was captured by an Idaho-bred two-year-old named Bet on the Blurr, who won by a head in 1:10.60 under Eddie Delahoussaye.
The true significance of the mundane race on a mundane day at the Oak Tree meet comes from discovering the name of the winning trainer.
It was the first victory in a Thoroughbred race for Bob Baffert.
“I felt like I had just won the Kentucky Derby,” said Baffert, who would go on to win the actual Kentucky Derby three times and is the most recent trainer enshrined in the National Racing Museum and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
In 1988, Baffert, a training star of Quarter Horses for a decade, was beginning an attempted conversion to the world of Thoroughbreds and didn’t know if it would work out.
“A Quarter Horse jockey had worked the horse five-eighths in about :58 seconds and couldn’t believe how much slower Thoroughbreds were,” Baffert recalled. “I worried about it because I didn’t know any better.”
Baffert eventually figured it out. He has been a towering presence in Southern California and American Thoroughbred racing for most of the past 20 years. When he entered the Hall of Fame in August, he joined such past and present Santa Anita training luminaries as Tom Smith, Red McDaniel, William Molter, Mesh Tenney, Charlie Whittingham, Laz Barrera, Ron McAnally, Jack Van Berg, Bobby Frankel, D.Wayne Lukas, Richard Mandella and Neil Drysdale.
The roster of conditioning notables who have done business on the Santa Anita backstretch also includes such potent  combinations as brothers Mel and Warren Stute, as well as Mel’s son Gary, and father-son duos Charlie and Mike Whittingham, Wally and Craig Dollase and Richard and Gary Mandella.
Marty Jones, who is carving out a solid reputation of his own, is a third-generation trainer, following his late grandfather Farrell, an eight-time training champion at Santa Anita, and retired fathe...

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