Sport: Blue Jacket, Brown Cap

Last week eight fillies were sold in Lexington, Ky. To sportswriters, whose occupational disease is sentimentality, this sale was an occasion for mourning. It followed hard on an announcement by Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney that he was going to give up racing for good, and it marked the beginning of the end of a Grand Old Stable.

That stable was figuratively erected on Wall Street when, near the end of the 19th Century, Financier William Collins Whitney began to buy race horses with the open intention of winning more races than Speculator James R. Keene. He never succeeded. But in 1900, with the help of famed Jockey Tod Sloan who was imported from England for the occasion, a Whitney horse, Ballyhoo Bey, won the Futurity Stakes, richest race in the world for 2-year-olds. Next year Volodyovski, racing in the silks of William Collins Whitney, won the English Derby and gleeful Mr. Whitney set up Coney Island Jockey Club to $6,000 worth of champagne.

In 1904 the famed stable was inherited by Son Harry Payne Whitney. Before he died in 1930 Harry Payne Whitney’s horses had won almost $4,000,000. Six of his horses had won the Futurity. Two had won the Kentucky Derby. In six of 25 years his stable had been the turf’s leading money-winner.

Sportswriters’ hearts missed a beat when Son Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, after inheriting the family stable in 1930, intimated that he was less interested in racing than in playing polo. In those Depression days a Wall Street delegation actually beseeched him not to impair public confidence by giving up the country’s No. 1 stable, an act which would have looked like economy in high places. Sentiment and enthusiasm for a horse named Equipoise finally determined his application to the Jockey Club for permission to race under his father’s colors, “Light-blue jacket, brown cap.”

Equipoise went on to become one of the greatest thoroughbreds of all time and the second largest money-winner in history. Four years in a row C. V. Whitney — called “Sonny” in sports headlines to distinguish him from his equally horsy first cousin, John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney — won more prize money than any other owner in the country. But maintaining a racing establishment is expensive business. In 1926, when Trainer Jimmy Rowe was complimented on a $407,139 Whitney season, Rowe said: “Yes, Mr. Whitney had a pretty good year. I don’t think his stable cost him more than $100,000.”

When Equipoise in the spring of 1935, after making an unsuccessful attempt to win the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap, was retired to stud $38,000 short of Sun Beau’s record winnings of $376,744, Sonny Whitney began to think of selling. Last year 24 of his yearlings were sold at Saratoga. Few weeks ago Sonny Whitney’s Old Westbury polo team won the U. S. Open Championship from Jock Whitney’s Greentree team (TIME, Oct. 4), and Sonny Whitney’s two entries finished fifth and seventh in the Futurity. After that it was certain that the light-blue jacket and brown cap would be seen on the turf no more.