Sport: It’s Nice to be Needed

Citation, the wonder horse, has covered a lot of ground since winning the $50,000 Tanforan Handicap last fall—but none in actual competition. Most of it has been in railway express cars between San Francisco, Miami, Baltimore and Belmont Park. Like a football hero on crutches, Citation was traveling with Calumet Farm’s first team while trainers fussed & fumed over his popped osselet.*

In Chicago, Trainer Ben Jones planned to put his star back into the lineup. But after one of his morning gallops, Citation’s ankle began to swell again. Ben Jones, as patient as he is wily, put his star back on the shelf with a crisp remark: “We don’t need him right now.” The rest of the team was clicking. Coaltown, whose efforts included a world-record mile—in 1:34—had the handicap division over a barrel; Kentucky Derby-winning Ponder, runaway victor in the recent $66,150 American Derby at Washington Park, was the nation’s top money-winning three-year-old. If anybody mourned Citation’s absence, it was the gloom-mongers who seemed to take morbid satisfaction in predicting that Citation was all washed up and would never race again.

At Belmont Park last week, Citation’s once-fevered ankle was ice cold and sound as a dollar. The trouble was that during his long wait on the shelf, Citation had developed a brood mare’s belly, the neck of a bull and a rump like the back of a taxicab. Around the barn, the standing joke is that the “big horse” must have been eating from the same trough with Jake Hizar, the fat (264-lb.) foreman. To pare Citation down to racing weight, Ben Jones is giving him a double dose of work—one gallop at 6 a.m. and another an hour and a half later.

Even so, Ben does not expect to have Citation ready to roll until winter. Casually, Ben adds, “We’ll need him for those big stakes in California.” Ben could afford to be casual about that announcement, but to other horsemen with an eye on the $100000 Santa Anita Handicap and sundry $50,000 prizes, Ben’s words were big, solemn news.

* A commonplace ankle ailment which is caused by the pounding of hoofs on race tracks and results in a painful growth, cartilage, on a front ankle.