Triple Crown timeline spans Whitaker’s life

And so another colorful Triple Crown mystery presents itself, served up fresh on a platter and begging for insight. Will he or won’t he? Is Justify the real deal, a champion to follow in the footsteps of fellow redheads Sir Barton, Omaha, Whirlaway, Secretariat, and Affirmed? Or will he be another chestnut disappointment, close but no tiara, joining sad old reds like Charismatic, Smarty Jones, and California Chrome.

Nothing plays better on the racing screen than a chestnut like Justify, a colt who wakes up each day ready for his closeup. If Justify could rise above a mud-splattered Churchill Downs mosh pit, then find the camera on a foggy day in Baltimore, Belmont Park’s vast expanse should present no problem, telegenically speaking. And with this critter, a glamor puss from head to hoof, it seems like the higher the definition the better.

But just to be sure, let’s ask an authority, someone who knows what plays on the tube and how most of these Triple Crown dramas pan out. Sounds like a perfect time to check in with Jack Whitaker, the Renaissance broadcaster who was doing the Belmont Stakes on CBS when most homes still suffered through prime time on blackand-white Zenith consoles.

Whitaker was a solo Derby telecast host for the first time in 1966, when the classics lost both Graustark and Buckpasser and had to make do with Kauai King. After KK won the Derby and Preakness, Whitaker was looking down the barrel of the first Triple Crown winner since Citation, 18 long years earlier. Then Amberoid won the Belmont, and that was that.

For his sins – and his network contract – Whitaker also got to host a game show during the summer of 1966 called “The Face is Familiar.” I remember watching it. It was fun, but then again, there wasn’t much on.

Back on the sports beat, Whitaker deployed his unflappable demeanor to navigate Super Bowls, the Masters, and the CBS Sports Spectacular. Horse racing, though, was his own true love, never more fully flowered than when a Triple Crown was on the line.

Whitaker turned 94 this year on the day before the Preakness. He retired from the airwaves some 14 years ago, but he continues to pay close attention. Reached at his suburban Philadelphia home, in the Keystone State of his birth, Whitaker was asked if the prospect of a Triple Crown winner on Saturday in the 150th running of the Belmont Stakes still gets his blood bubbling.

“It’s so good for the sport,” Whitaker said. “That’s what I like about the Triple Crown. But do you think he’ll make it? It’s about the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen – a horse who never raced as a 2-year-old, with only five races, and looking like he was getting pretty tired at the end of the Preakness.”

Yep, there’s all that. Justify’s win by just a halflength at Pimlico over the onrushing Bravazo, with Tenfold lapped alongside, summoned for Whitaker those worrisome occasions when a Derby winner’s close shave in the Preakness served to make him vulnerable in a Belmont rematch, or fall victim to fresh legs.

“Woody Stephens always seemed to have one lying in the weeds just for the Belmont,” Whitaker noted, referring to the training legend who won three of his five straight Belmonts with horses who ran in neither the Derby nor the Preakness. “If Woody was around today, oh boy would he love to have one those in on Saturday.”

Born in 1924, Whitaker gets to claim a personal history that embraces 11 of the 12 Triple Crown winners, although he was just six when Gallant Fox won the 1930 Triple Crown and barely 11 when Omaha, a son of Gallant Fox, followed suit in 1935.

Whitaker turned 13 three days after War Admiral escaped the 1937 Preakness with a narrow victory over Pompoon, after which The Admiral aired in the Belmont. Then, in 1941, Whitaker celebrated Whirlaway’s Triple Crown by graduating from Philadelphia’s Northeast Catholic High School for Boys.

By the time Count Fleet iced his 1943 Triple Crown with a 25-length crushing of two opponents, Whitaker had been drafted by the U.S. Army and was on his way to basic training. Back home in Philadelphia after the war, he continued his higher education at Saint Joseph’s University, while King Ranch’s Assault was otherwise occupied winning the 1946 Triple Crown. Then, after graduation, Citation’s Triple Crown of 1948 would have been part of the news Whitaker read during his first broadcast job on station WPAM in Pottsville, Pa.

Whitaker’s career at CBS embraced the Triple Crowns of Secretariat (1973), Seattle Slew (1977), and Affirmed (1978), occasions to which he gladly rose. Later he moved to ABC, where the Triple Crown migrated in the 1980s, and where his feature segments became the most popular draw of the racing shows, apart from the races themselves.

If nothing else, the date of this year’s Belmont Stakes has Whitaker’s attention. It was on June 9, 1944, that the 20-year-old soldier hit Omaha Beach in Normandy with a contingent of D-Day casualty replacements. He subsequently was wounded in the arm courtesy of a German artillery shell.

“I went to one medical unit after another,” Whitaker once recalled. “But because I could still walk, they told me to keep walking. So I did, and eventually ended up back in England. I was lucky.”

So was racing.