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Smarty jones horse1/4/2023 ![]() ![]() In a 2003 incident, the colt spooked, reared and smashed his head on the top of the starting gate. That Smarty Jones ever amounted to much on the track is all the more remarkable considering something that happened before he ever raced. One of the two horses they kept was Smarty Jones, produced by the couple's winningest horse, I'll Get Along. Roy Chapman, we learned, was in failing health and disbanded the couple's small breeding operation in Pennsylvania. McNair and Smarty Jones shared the same birthday and, Mrs. That was the day many of us met Roy and Patricia Chapman, the colt's owners, she naming the Southwest winner for her late mother, Milly "Smarty Jones" McNair. Servis said not to expect too much in the Southwest, that the screws were not fully tightened, and though the colt won with room to spare, the trainer said he was only about 75 to 80 percent fully cranked. Trainer John Servis thought he had something special early in 2004 before Smarty Jones, 3-for-3 off two starts at Philadelphia Park and one at New York's Aqueduct Racecourse, started at Oaklawn. ![]() Cella offered $5 million to a horse that, in Oaklawn's centennial season, could sweep the 2004 Rebel and Arkansas Derby at his track and then the Kentucky Derby. In a magnanimous gesture that earned his family the Eclipse Award Order of Merit, Charles J. Smarty Jones made the cover of Sports Illustrated for winning the 130th Kentucky Derby, though the purse money for America's greatest horse race represented chump change to what an Arkansas racetrack owner contributed. His greatest payday on the racetrack came in Kentucky, where one can find tobacco, whiskey, horses and basketball at their best, many Bluegrass State denizens will tell you. Smarty jones horse code#A horse about whom Whitney Houston's "Didn't We Almost Have It All" could be played in the post parade and that will be loved in the 501 area code (which includes Hot Springs, Ark.) as long as they run horses at Oaklawn Park. ![]() With two Triple Crown winners in the last four years, Smarty Jones has become something of an artifact, one who got close to the gates of history but not through the portal. Smarty Jones dominated the sport in 2004 like Zenyatta did in 2010, when the Eclipse Award voters got it right and named Big Mama Horse of the Year despite her Breeders' Cup Classic defeat. That honor went to Ghostzapper, the Breeders' Cup Classic winner, in an inexplicable decision to this day. It would be the last race Smarty Jones ever ran and should have made him Horse of the Year. Smarty Jones did something similar in the Belmont Stakes when eight lengths ahead of the third-place horse, a tremendous show of force in that rivals pressured him out of the gate. Seattle Slew, whose frontrunning speed carried him to the 1977 Triple Crown when undefeated, ran such a race when second to Exceller in the 1978 Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park. Sometimes, a horse covers himself in glory in defeat. Tom Durkin, calling the race, described the stretch run in a doleful tone of voice. Smarty Jones, going for the Triple Crown, finished second to Birdstone by one length.īelmont Park, with 120,000 people jammed inside, turned cemetery-like silent as Smarty Jones was passed in the stretch for the only time in nine career races. That's when for some of us, the music died. Some were still knocking his supposed lack of stamina influences (which come from the dam's side) up to the minute he surged ahead on the backstretch in the 2004 Belmont Stakes. (Smarty Jones, as we will see, ran once at Belmont, a mile and a half on dirt.) In assessing his status as a Triple Crown contender, some never got past his broodmare sire, Smile, whose very name screamed sprint pedigree. For the record, his parents were Elusive Quality and I'll Get Along, the former once holding Belmont Park's track record for one mile on turf. ![]()
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