Marquee Miss no sure thing

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – Two Augusts ago, Marquee Miss made her career debut in the $75,000 Arlington-Washington Lassie Stakes. It was a bold move, starting a filly off in a stakes race, but it paid off, as Marquee Miss won by three lengths, earning black type in her first trip to the post.

The better part of two years later, and Marquee Miss is set to run over Arlington’s Polytrack surface for the second time. The filly, trained by Ingrid Mason for Rags Racing Stable LLC, is one of seven entrants in Friday’s third race, a sixfurlong allowance for fillies and mares.

Since winning the Lassie, Marquee Miss has fashioned a successful career. At 3, racing at Oaklawn Park, she won the Dixie Belle and Martha Washington stakes, and last December, she won the Holiday Inaugural on Polytrack at Turfway Park. Unusually, Marquee Miss has notched all four of her wins in stakes races: She is 0 for 3 in allowance races and might be hard-pressed to win the one she’s in Friday, too.

That’s because she faces Puntsville, who could be Marquee Miss’s equal, and at a better price. Puntsville started her 2016 season in great form, winning the Isaac Murphy Stakes for Illinois-breds at this same six-furlong Arlington Polytrack trip. Puntsville never really found her footing the rest of last season and ran below her best in one Tampa Bay Downs start over the winter, but she has turned in five workouts for her first start since December and in the past has run well fresh for trainer Michele Boyce.

Gulick back at Arlington

Early this week, there was trouble back home at Jim Gulick’s 26-acre farm in Morriston, Fla.

“We’ve got some donkeys that are supposed to keep the place safe and secure, but they let their guard down,” Gulick said. “We have a fox. He came in broad daylight and got four of the chickens yesterday.”

There also are sheep at the farm. Recently, Gulick sold off a portion of his honeybee colony. He was not going to be around as much this summer to tend to the bees. In fact, Gulick recounted his fox-in-thehenhouse story while driving north toward Arlington Park, where, for the first time since 2012, Gulick is training a small string of horses.

A regular and considerable presence at Arlington during the 1990s, Gulick’s operation shrank and shrank until, five years ago, when he was down to about nothing, he basically pulled the plug.

“I was fortunate I had a fallback, coming back to the family farm,” he said.

Now, Gulick is back in Chicago. He ran a handful of horses during 2016 and won one race, but on Saturday alone he scored a two-bagger at Arlington, winning with Lu Sea, a filly he owns himself, and Princess La Quinta, whom he owns in partnership. Princess La Quinta showed some talent here last summer while racing for trainer Dee Poulos and was game in capturing a straight maiden race.

Gulick, 58, has long bought auction horses at bargain prices, and his two Saturday winners were of that type: Lu Sea cost $4,700 as a weanling, Princess La Quinta $6,500.

Gulick said four horses, including a pair of 2-year-olds, were headed north from Florida to Arlington and scheduled to arrive Thursday.

“That will give me a grand total of nine,” Gulick said.

That’s nine more than Gulick trained at this time last year. The bees and donkeys will be waiting for him when he goes back home again.