I’ve always had a thing for fast fillies - fast trotting fillies that is. And although I’ve never really been associated with one - they can be quite expensive to buy - many of my all-time favourites fall under that gait/sex combination.
Maybe it’s because on the trot, the best girls can often beat the best boys? I mean who didn’t love watching Atlanta and Ramona Hill win the Hambletonian? Who wasn’t happy to see Peaceful Way, Bee A Magician and Hannelore Hanover win the Maple Leaf Trot?
I know that I loved all of the above.
I did try to buy a nice looking trotting filly one time - at Pompano Park. I had a few horses claimed from me in 1994, so my girlfriend and I went down to Florida for a holiday. We were at Pompano one night and saw the most beautiful, three-year-old, chestnut Balanced Image filly you’d ever laid eyes on; her name was Imageofa Clear Day.
She had just won the maiden in 2:01.1, and had only won in 2:07 at age two, so when we went to the backstretch afterwards, introduced ourselves to her trainer, Richard Macomber, and offered him $35,000 for her (everything that we had), it didn’t seem like an insulting offer.
Mr. Macomber didn’t act insulted either, but after he kindly told us that she wasn’t for sale, we just petted her for a while and left.
Later that year, on October 21st, when she won the Breeders Crown at Garden State for Bill O’Donnell and Doug McIntosh, I did at least feel inspired that my eyes and my opinion had not let me down.
Fast forward to the summer of 2012, and my job at TROT.
When I started here in 2006, my job was to sell the advertising in both the magazine and on the SC website. My job description didn’t say anything about editing, writing, or content creation, but it didn’t take long for me to get involved in that end of the operation either.
Let’s just say that as a horseperson, I’m a bit anal about using the correct terminology when it comes to our sport. The magazine was very good at it, but in my mind it wasn’t quite perfect - and I wanted perfect. We’re the official publication of Standardbred Canada, so if we don’t get every word exactly right, why should outside media do so when reporting on us?
The things that bothered me in some of our stories weren’t glaring, but they still bothered me. A Standardbred driver doesn’t have seven ‘mounts’ on a card, he has seven drives. A ‘mount’ is what a jockey has. A horse doesn’t head around a ‘corner’ going to the half - it’s a ‘turn’. And the wings of the ‘starting gate’ (not ‘start car’) don’t ‘open’ to start a race - the wings of the gate ‘close’. A Thoroughbred gate ‘opens’.
Those errors may not bother you, but they did, and do, bother me… so I asked one day if I was allowed to proofread and edit stories. My offer of doing extra work was not denied.
I also became more and more involved in the content creation aspect of the publication. It made sense, as I knew many people in the business and had my finger on the pulse of the game so-to-speak. Some of my story ideas were accepted and some were denied, but I was always heard.
Back to the summer of 2012…
On August 2nd at Mohawk I watched a two-year-old trotting filly (of course) by the name of Bee A Magician, win an OSS Gold elimination from an impossible spot - in just her fifth lifetime start. Caught behind dead cover and well out of it, through a dawdling middle half of just :59.3, the Kadabra filly would have to wait until next week’s final for a win it seemed. Nope. She circled them with ease, to win by 3 ¼ lengths, and in the August 9th final, she came from 15 lengths out at the half to win by a comfortable five!
I took my Bee A Magician-story-pitch to my manager, and was told that ‘We don’t like doing stories on 2YOs at this time of year because by the time the story is written, printed and mailed out, she may have finished up-the-track three weeks in a row’. It was, and still is, a sound argument. Heck, even Somebeachsomewhere didn’t get a TROT feature until his freshman campaign had ended in the fall of 2007.
But I PROMISED them that this filly was different; that she wasn’t just a horse. I knew horses and I argued (at length) that she was a superstar - and that if we waited, someone else would get that first feature.
My boss finally agreed. Maybe just so I’d stop pestering him perhaps?
The Bee A Magician feature ran in our September, 2012 issue, and the filly would win the Champlain (Aug. 30), sweep The Peaceful Way (Sept. 6 & 15), and sweep another OSS Gold pairing (Oct. 2 & 9), before finally tasting defeat - through bad racing luck - when third in the Breeders Crown. She’d finish her year with a 9 ¼ length romp in the OSS Super Final.
The rest is history, and with $4,196,145 in earnings, she’s made more money on North American soil than any trotter in history.
Now, almost 12 years to the day that I first saw her race at Mohawk, Bee A Magician will enter the Canadian Horse Racing Hall Of Fame.
Congratulations Bee!
Just like Imageofa Clear Day, you didn’t let me down or make me look bad. You both proved that I can spot one early on, on the track at least. Now I just have to spot one like you at a yearling sale!
Dan Fisher [email protected]