Sport: Fast Molasses

Gentle, happy-go-lucky Pavot is indifferent to almost everything but food. He eats like a farm horse, but races like a champion. He is solid brown and in a race looks like fast-pouring molasses. He seems to be on springs when he jogs, hugs the ground when he runs. If he were less rangy, he would be a ringer for famed War Admiral.

At Belmont Park last week, never-beaten Pavot (rhymes with Jimmy Savo) toyed with 14 rival two-year-olds. Despite an injured hoof, he added the Futurity Stakes (winner’s share $52,200) to his seven previous victories, for a first-season total earnings of $180,350. So doing, he placed himself squarely behind a traditional eight ball: in 54 years, not one Futurity winner (Man o’ War and Top Flight included) has won the Kentucky Derby the following spring.

Owner Walter Jeffords of Glen Riddle, Pa., who turned down an offer of $150,000 for his prize property, thinks the difference between the Futurity’s 6½ furlongs and the Derby’s mile-and-a-quarter might not be too long a reach for a horse with Pavot’s appetite and disposition. (The only time Pavot ever showed any sign of temper was in the Hopeful Stakes at Belmont last month, when Jockey George Woolf, intent on running a front race all the way, twice tapped him between the ears with the whip, both times got a turnaround dirty look from his mount.)

This month Pavot will retire to the same 1,650-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where War Admiral prepped for his 1937 Derby victory. He should add 150 lbs. to his big frame while being winter-trained on mild workouts and gallops. Meanwhile bespectacled Oscar White, his trainer, isn’t worried about the Futurity-Derby bugaboo and doesn’t think Pavot is.