Evening Attire.qxd:Jerkins feature.qxd
23/1/09
18:48
Page 2
Evening A ATTIRE
How an old warrior rocked a nation By Bill Heller
EVENING ATTIRE
N old-school trainer’s old gray gelding became a rock star at the age of 10 before retiring last fall. Last summer his final race, a dazzling, 8 ¼-length track-record victory in the $250,000 mile-and-a-half Greenwood Cup at Philadelphia Park July 19th, was featured on YouTube. Earlier last summer, one fan put together a five-minute YouTube video tribute to the late-running gelding who gave trainer Pat Kelly and his family thrills for nine years, winning 15 of 69 starts and earning just under $3 million. In December 2007, Evening Attire captured the Grade 3 Queens County Handicap by a head at the age of nine. Then, last summer at 10, he finished second in the Grade 2 Brooklyn Handicap. When the horses returned to be unsaddled, the Belmont crowd clapped for Evening Attire, ignoring the winner, Delosvientos. Evening Attire’s subsequent tour de force in the Greenwood Cup made him an automatic qualifier for the first Breeders’ Cup Marathon last October at Santa Anita, but he never made it. He would have been a popular participant - the fans at Philadelphia Park went wild after he captured the Greenwood. “Everybody was jumping up and screaming, ‘Go Evening Attire!’” his jockey, Jose Espinoza, said. “Everybody was screaming about the horse. He’s famous. He’s very special for me and I feel so excited for him.” Evening Attire’s success at nine and 10 was achieved despite his penchant for staying in the gate an extra second or two at the start, almost as if spotting his opponents years of wear and tear wasn’t enough of a handicap. So he gave them a head start. “If you ever watch him walk, he’s got stilt legs,” Kelly said. “We call him a giraffe. He’s not a fluid walking horse, so his first move is always kind of a hop to get going. I think it has to do with his long legs, but he’s always broke a step slow. Believe it or not, he would break slow as a youngster.” Halfway through his nine-year-old season, Evening Attire took his gate hesitation to a new level. Kelly found a way to gauge it, probably from playing touch football as a youngster when defenders have to count before they cross the line of scrimmage. “I count one-Mississippi, twoMississippi, three-Mississippi,” Kelly said. “One-Mississippi is not too bad; twoMississippi is okay, and three-Mississippi is trouble.” Yet in his final victory, he broke well from the outside post in a field of six. “He was great,” Kelly said. “He might have been a no-Mississippi. He actually broke pretty sharp. He was the outside post and when he’s the outside post, and he walks into the ISSUE 24 TRAINERMAGAZINE.com 33