Mister Frisky Shows He Can Really Travel--Can He Continue?

Your horse day begins last Saturday with the Grand National, televised from England, where a jumper trying to clear Becher’s Brook gets only halfway across.

The jockey gets all the way across.

Both are OK, but it reaffirms the ancient teaching that you never bet anything that leaves the ground.

At Santa Anita, you invest in something safer. He is called Mister Frisky. No junk bonds he, Mister Frisky starts 16 times and wins 16, a record pretty much resisting criticism.

So the cynic says, “He wins the Santa Anita Derby at a mile and an eighth, but I’d like to see what he does in the Grand National, which is four miles, 856 yards.”

“A Puerto Rican gentleman doesn’t go over hedges,” the cynic is told. “Mister Frisky is a Puerto Rican gentleman.”

At the conclusion of the Santa Anita Derby, which Mister Frisky wins by 4 1/2, you count in the winner’s enclosure 43 persons, plus three kids. That’s in addition to the horse and a Puerto Rican flag unfurled in front of him.

What you’ve got here is a new West Side Story in which a guy doesn’t sing that he meets a girl named Maria, but an 1,100-pound chestnut.

You haven’t seen so many happy Puerto Ricans since Roberto Clemente made the Hall of Fame.

What Mister Frisky does is make a farce of the breeding industry in which the illusion is created that the more one spends on a piece of horseflesh, the better one’s chance of succeeding on the track.

Well, a party named Jose Fernandez, and his wife, Marta, turn up at the sales at Ocala, Fla., spot a little critter that catches their fancy and buy him for $15,000.

Normally in the horse business, $15,000 buys you something not even a policeman would mount.

But Jose and Marta, who reside in San Juan, take home Mister Frisky and, before long, they start racing him at the local track, El Comandante.

They send Mister Friskey to Berlitz to learn Spanish, and he is soon pals with everyone in Puerto Rico, especially after he starts 13 times at El Comandante and wins 13.

Now his handlers decide to play Broadway, and they ship him to Santa Anita to determine whether this is some kind of island hero or a world-class racer.

Winner immediately of two stakes at Santa Anita, he is then entered in the Derby, where, in the post parade, in the presence of 44,000 gamblers, plus a national television audience, he commits a nuisance.

Two schools of thought exist on such an indiscretion. One is that the horse is now prepared to run a big race.

The other school holds that he has left his best effort on the track.

In this case, the first school prevails, because when the horses swing into the last turn, a little more than a quarter-mile from home, Mister Frisky advances from second place to first, and it is adios.

Now what the handlers of Mister Frisky are going to do is send him to Louisville for a promotion called the Kentucky Derby. It is hoped he can (a) deal with the distance of 1 1/4 miles (b) get a decent hotel room and (c) adjust to local peculiarities.

One time in Louisville, for instance, your correspondent orders for breakfast corn flakes, toast and coffee. The waitress brings up all three at once. You explain to her that when all three items arrive at the same time, the toast and the coffee are cold by the time you finish the corn flakes.

“What you can try,” she answers, “is having the toast and coffee first.”

A cerebration of such brilliance opens our eyes to a new life in which it is found that man can survive eating corn flakes last.

Whether you know a sesamoid from a $2 exacta, you are aware that 16 wins in a row in racing is a formidable achievement, a record matched on this continent only by the late Citation.

Whereas Mister Frisky is Delancy Street, Citation was Park Avenue, a son of Bull Lea, bred by fashionable Calumet Farm.

But comparing Mister Frisky to Citation is, at this point, a slight indignity to Citation, considering how Citation accomplished his 16 wins and how Mister Frisky accomplished his.

Winning 13 times at El Comandante and three at Santa Anita, Mister Frisky hasn’t quite endured the logistic agony of Citation, who, chronologically, ran his string at the following tracks beginning in 1948:

Havre de Grace, Churchill Downs, Pimlico, Garden State, Belmont, Arlington Park, Washington Park, Belmont, Pimlico and Tanforan.

Then injured, he didn’t race in 1949, coming back in 1950 at Santa Anita where, idle for a year, he draws 124 pounds, catches a muddy track--and wins his 16th.

You don’t want to water down what Mister Frisky has accomplished, because it isn’t trivial. But you’re not yet ready to conclude that he has taken his place with Citation.

“Now wait a minute,” backers of Mister Frisky protest. “Citation ran at a lot of places, but did he ever run in Puerto Rico? You go a mile and a sixteenth in that sun and you have put in a day’s work.”

El Comandante races year-round, but only three days a week, which may explain, in part, the population shift from Puerto Rico to New York.

In New York, you can get racing five days, if not six.

But wherever horseplayers, Puerto Rican or otherwise, gather today, glasses are being raised to Mister Frisky, about whom it is now asked whether he can go a mile and a quarter.

It was asked earlier whether he could go 4,000 miles, San Juan to Santa Anita, and he showed he could.