Afleet Alex tugs at plenty of heartstrings
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- I see the jaded look in your eye. I hear the distrust in your voice. Your defenses are up, your cynicism is keen.
Too many dark, divisive stories have diminished the games you once loved unconditionally and naively. There are steroids in baseball and officiating conspiracy theories in the NBA playoffs -- but then again, at least there are NBA playoffs. There is no such competition for the Stanley Cup.
But here gallops your spring pick-me-up. Good old horse racing, coming through again, right on cue. Here is a story you can wrap your arms around, without skepticism. Here is a story that won't stop, about a horse that won't stop delivering new thrills and fresh goosebumps.
Here is Afleet Alex, heir to the warm feelings left by Kentucky Derby predecessors Funny Cide and Smarty Jones. He's ready to run for the roses Saturday. He's ready to reward the dreamers who helped him get this far. And he's ready to remind the jaded that it's still a joy to be a sports fan.
To feel the joy, you must meet the breeder of Afleet Alex. Doctors told John Silvertand, riddled with cancer in his colon and liver, that he had three months to live. That was in 2002.
Today, Silvertand is here to see the colt he helped survive three years ago when it was a newborn, and to see the full-grown horse that is helping him survive now.
"It's kept me going," Silvertand said of Afleet Alex's charmed run.
He endures the hell of a chemotherapy IV drip every Monday. But this week, Derby Week, his doctor canceled.
"You're getting enough juice from this horse, and from everything written about you this week," he told Silvertand. "You don't need any of mine."
So his wife, Carolyn, drove 60-year-old Silvertand and their 12-year-old daughter, Lauren, to Kentucky from Palm Beach County, Fla. This will be his first Derby, thanks to the horse the Silvertands literally nursed to life.
The family happened to be at the mare's boarding farm in Ocala, Fla., when Afleet Alex was born. The colt's mother, Maggy Hawk, had no clostrum in her milk and could not nurse her baby. Lauren Silvertand, a Romanian orphan adopted by John and Carolyn, fed Afleet Alex several times during his first days with formula in a Coors Light bottle.
"I don't think he had any trouble taking the bottle," Silvertand said. "When you're really hungry, you'll take anything."
For several days, until a nurse mare could be vanned in from Kentucky, Alex was bottle-fed. He was a scrawny, ugly thing, but he was going to make it.
"The foaling manager almost slept in the stall with this little boy," Silvertand said. "He was definitely brought up by humans, not by horses.
"They say if you've got a bottle-fed baby he's not going to amount to much. This disproves that."
They also said Silvertand would never see this day. He has disproved his grim prognoses many times over.
Silvertand watched Afleet Alex run in the Champagne Stakes and the Breeders' Cup this past October, then made it to the Arkansas Derby last month. After that, there was no keeping the relentlessly optimistic British expatriate away from the Derby.
"With what I've been through, it's touch and go," Silvertand said. "Every day I put my legs out of bed, it's a good day. I wish the rest of the world felt the same way.
"I hear people say, 'I have a headache,' or, 'I'm having a bad day.' Well, try being in my shoes for a couple of days. It's a difficult thing to go through, especially when you have a young daughter at home. But we're coping very well."
With the help of a horse.
To feel the joy, you must meet the members of Cash Is King Stable, the owners of Afleet Alex. Don't worry about gussying up for the occasion; these people are straight outta Philly and likely to offer an unvarnished "How are youz?" greeting.
Five of them put up $20,000 apiece to start the stable, and the first purchase was Alex. Three of them had never owned a horse before, and now they're at the Kentucky Derby. It's like shooting 69 at Pebble Beach the first time you pick up a golf club.
Meet Joe Lerro. He's the 44-year-old party boy in the Donovan McNabb jersey with the video camera up and running, taking in video of the Twin Spires on a crisp Kentucky morning. Lerro has made some money with a beer distributorship and some real estate, but his favorite venture is a pizzeria he owns in New Jersey called Joe Joe's Place. On busy nights, Lerro will get behind the counter to toss dough and pour beers himself.
| “ | We've had a joyride, and we want to give something back. ... We want to be in [racing] for the next 20 years. Obviously we're a little spoiled, but, hey. ” | |
| — Chuck Zacney | ||
| “ | We want to be a lot spoiled! ” | |
| — Joe Lerro |
In 1983 and again in '84, Lerro and some buddies road-tripped to Churchill Downs and watched the Derby from the feral environs of the infield. After the races were run in '84, Lerro wandered over to the clubhouse, "to see what it would be like on the other side."
Ever think you'd get there, with your own horse?
"Not in a million years," Lerro said, laughing. "Not in a lifetime. In eight lifetimes."
Meet Joe Judge and his wife, Barbara. When the offer to join a thoroughbred ownership group came last year, the director of patient accounts at Our Lady of Lourdes in Delran, N.J., took a reluctant pass. He couldn't afford to invest in something as high-risk as race horses.
When he hung up the phone, Barbara told him to dip into their retirement savings and do it.
"You always do everything I want to do," she told him. "I know you want to do this."
They laughed telling the story on the backside of Churchill on Thursday. They'd watched last year's Derby at Philadelphia Park, home track of Smarty Jones, and joined in with the screaming and cheering. When it was over, Barbara thanked Joe for making her go.
"I told him, 'There will never be another day like this again at the racetrack,'" she said. "And now we're here."
Meet Bob Brittingham, his wife, Terese, and son, Daniel. Keep an eye on the boy, and his neckwear for the race. Last October at the Breeders' Cup, when Silvertand figured he might not make it to the Derby, he gave Daniel a horse-racing tie and told him to wear it for him. Daniel plans to wear a different tie Saturday, but before the big race he will switch to the gift from Silvertand – and the breeder will be there to see it.
Meet Chuck Zacney, the 43-year-old brains of the operation. It was Zacney who came up with the crazy idea and pitched it to the group, Zacney who recruited trainer Tim Ritchey to select a horse – and Zacney who had to make the calls for a little more money when he and Ritchey settled on a $75,000 2-year-old purchased in Timonium, Md.
One other thing Zacney did: He named the horse, after his son and Brittingham's daughter, both named Alex. And since the colt blew up into a star, he has been donating a portion of the group's winnings to Alex's Lemonade Stand, a cancer-research charity started by a little girl from Philly who died of the disease at a young age. There's a lemonade stand at Churchill Downs this week, in fact.
"We've had a joyride, and we want to give something back. ... " Zacney said. "We want to be in [racing] for the next 20 years. Obviously we're a little spoiled, but, hey."
"We want to be a lot spoiled!" Lerro chirped.
And meet Jen Reeves, a single mother who works for Zacney at The Sirrus Group, a regional medical billing company Zacney founded. She'll be joining the party late Saturday.
That morning, her 8-year-old son, Paul, is receiving first communion in Philly. Then they're hustling out of church and to the airport for a 12:39 p.m. flight to Louisville.
"My kids come first," said Reeves, who also has a 6-year-old named Connor. But as she told Paul, "We're out of here by 11 o'clock, so you better have that wafer in your mouth."
Once she gets to Churchill, a girl who grew up going to Atlantic City Race Course with her grandfather can commence pinching herself.
"I've never even won a T-shirt on the radio – and I used to call and call," Reeves said. "Now we're at the Kentucky Derby. ... This is a lifetime dream for me."
And so the common-man consortium will gather amid the swells and the high-rollers, the captains of industry who could buy and sell their group with a day's revenues. The very idea that their horse is knocking heads with a colt owned by George Steinbrenner, who can spend $200 million on a baseball team without flinching, is comedy to the Philly Five.
"George will be drinking champagne," Lerro said. "We'll be throwing back shots and beers."
To feel the joy, you also must meet Jeremy Rose. He's the jockey, and as with the rest of the group, this is his first Kentucky Derby.
Unlike the rest of the group, the Pennsylvania native didn't exactly grow up with visions of Secretariat dancing in his head. The 26-year-old's first visit to a racetrack was in 1999 -- and if it hadn't been for a weight change in college wrestling, he'd never be here today.
After starring in Pennsylvania high school wrestling as a 103-pounder, Rose had college scholarship offers. But when they raised the minimum weight from 118 to 126, he knew he'd get squashed. Instead, he turned to the other little man's sport: riding.
His summation of what it takes to be a successful jockey: "You've got to have balls, first off. And you need to know horses, too. Some people just don't get run out of horses."
Rose went to Puerto Rico to break yearlings, then began riding at Delaware Park. He won the Eclipse Award in 2001 as the nation's leading apprentice jockey, winning 312 races, but remained a nobody nationally until Afleet Alex came along.
Rose was aboard when Alex rolled to easy victories in his first two starts, both at Delaware Park. He kept the ride when they relocated to Saratoga and won twice more – really stoking the group's optimism, and starting speculation that perhaps the stable should find an A-list jock for an A-list colt.
After finishing second in the Champagne Stakes and the Breeders' Cup Juvenile, Rose got one more chance on the horse at Oaklawn Park in the Mountain Valley Stakes. He won the race – but still was taken off the mount in favor of John Velazquez.
Rose said he saw it coming when he lost the Breeders' Cup. Sure enough, the phone rang after the Mountain Valley and Ritchey reluctantly told him, "I got a little pressure from the owners to make a change."
But Rose stayed in Arkansas, wound up winning the spring meet riding title at Oaklawn and, most important, kept riding Afleet Alex in his morning works. When the horse bombed in his next race, the Rebel Stakes, running sixth with an undetected lung infection, Rose was the first person back at the barn to check on Alex.
"That showed us how much he cared about the horse," Lerro said.
Turns out Rose had a lung infection at the same time.
"That's how close we are," Rose said. "When I get sick, he gets sick."
And when it came time for the big Kentucky prep, the Arkansas Derby, Rose was back in the saddle. He confidently guided Alex to a smashing eight-length victory, punching his ticket for Louisville.
"He's just a great kid," Ritchey said of Rose. "He's very likable, a good person. I can talk to him almost like a son.
"Fate is a funny thing. The lung infection might have been fate's way of saying, 'You know what, Jeremy needs to be on the horse.'"
To feel the joy, you must meet Tim Ritchey. The trainer calls himself "a 30-year overnight success story."
As a small child, he used to ride horses on his uncle's farm outside of Pittsburgh. His uncle gave riding lessons, but the whole operation came to a halt every year on the first Saturday in May.
"We'd put the horses away and go in and watch the Kentucky Derby," Ritchey remembered. "There would be 20, 30, 40 people on the floor in this small room, watching the Derby."
Ritchey was a horseman from then on. As a rider, he trained for 18 months with the U.S. Olympic equestrian team, nearly making it to the Munich Olympics in 1972. After riding steeplechase horses for a while, he turned to training.
This would become his life's work. He tried working in his dad's auto parts store once, lasting 30 days.
"I went back to the racetrack," Ritchey said with a shrug. "I wanted to have a job I absolutely love."
It was not absolutely lucrative. Ritchey was like a thousand other trainers, busting it every predawn morning to get cheap horses ready for claiming races. He had some successes and developed a solid reputation in the Mid-Atlantic, but he was a million miles from the Baffert-Lukas-Zito level of the game.
And then came the day Ritchey eyed Alex at that 2-year-old sale, and dropped Cash Is King's money on him. Less than a year later, Ritchey can say, "I know this is the horse of my lifetime."
He sensed as much late last July. After Alex won the Sanford Stakes at Saratoga by 5½ lengths and set the stakes record, Ritchey sat down with his neophyte owners for dinner at Delaware Park and started talking. Big.
He talked about the Breeders' Cup, and about following the path his buddy John Servis took Smarty Jones on last year, through Arkansas. Then he brought up the Kentucky Derby.
Judge asked him: "Have you ever had a horse in the Breeders' Cup?"
Ritchey: "No."
Judge: "Have you ever had a horse in the Kentucky Derby?"
Ritchey: "No."
Lerro to Judge, after dinner: "Is this guy out of his mind?"
Turns out Ritchey was perfectly prescient. After 30 years of work, he finally had the horse to validate his talent.
Saturday is his moment. And Jeremy Rose's. And Cash Is King's. And John Silvertand's.
And, if you want to feel good about sports again, it could be your moment, too.
Pat Forde is a senior writer for ESPN.com. You can write him at ESPN4D@aol.com
