Scorn of this bright stripe does not come down on Arp's corporate head all that often, nor should it. The horses are cheap, and the occasional suspicion of chicanery arises. "Who took that fucking win picture, anyway?" Five-Times Mike might ask. "Fucking Ray Charles?" But for oldtime horsemen like Harold Calhoun and Dale Arnold, the integrity and beauty of the game are everything, even if none of your colts will ever get a shot at the Kentucky Derby -- or the Ohio Derby. For his part, Calhoun prays the video-lottery measure passes so that maybe 4,000 souls will drift into the track to play the machines, suddenly notice those four-legged things prancing around that strip of dirt out there and start asking a couple of questions. The Seabiscuitmovie, for all its too-bright Hollywood colors, won't do the trick, Calhoun believes. But slot machines might.
"We got four million people in the state, and we can't get a thousand of 'em out here," he says, his eyes quizzical.
Fred Harper
Anthony Camera
Veteran horseman Harold Calhoun longs for the
good old days of racing instead of the runs at
Arapahoe Park.
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But for those who do go -- general manager Seymore believes many of them, at least the confirmed non-bettors, are the same people who go to the zoo and to Ocean Journey -- the rewards of horse racing can be rich. Even at a track so plain. A track so obscure. All right, say it, then: a track so bush in sight of a city that fancies itself so thoroughly big-league.
Consider, if you will, the third race at Arapahoe Park on Sunday, July 13. Six claiming horses aged three or older, every one of them for sale that day for the bargain price of $6,250, were to run a flat mile for a purse of $7,600. The number-five horse, Hilukwa, had won his most recent race, at Albuquerque, but the six horse, a Kentucky-bred named Up Jump the Devil, had already won at Arapahoe (where oxygen debt plays a role, just as on the gridiron or hardwood). And last April 4 at Hawthorne, Chicago's second-drawer track, he had won a cheap race with Larry Sterling Jr. aboard. According to the conventions of quack science and voodoo, Devil looked pretty good.
He was. Before a rapt audience of maybe 800 humans, he managed it. Like Seabiscuit, like Secretariat winning the storied 1973 Belmont Stakes by an astonishing 31 lengths, Up Jump the Devil simply followed the urgencies of his heart. He may have been an anonymous $6,250 claiming horse running in the 100-degree heat of a Sunday afternoon in the grasslands of Colorado, but he understood his mission. Under Victor Escobar (fourteen wins in 126 mounts this year), he broke from the gate in a lather, his dark coat shimmering in the sun, remained close to the leaders through the long backstretch and took aim in the turn. At the quarter pole, Up Jump the Devil flashed by the others under Escobar's urging and streamed under the wire a good piece of daylight ahead of the competition. He paid $7.60 to win, $3.40 to place and $2.40 for the show, in case you keep track of such things. Beneath the numbers, though, you couldn't help feeling it, a flood of emotion, as he flew past, far out on the scorched prairie, among a glory of sunflowers. Out of the depths of his courage, Up Jump the Devil had done that one pure thing commanded by the fires of his instinct, the thing that lit the fuse of our desire, too. He ran.
