Santana’s 3rd Fantasy a true Pearl

That the race will produce another Kentucky Oaks winner is subject to debate. Odds lengthen whether a third Preakness champion will emerge.

There may not be another Shedaresthedevil or Swiss Skydiver in the field. Pauline’s Pearl may not go down in history with Rachel Alexandra or Our Mims as a celebrated winner of the Oaklawn race. She may instead belong in the Hoso (1975) wing of Fantasy Stakes-winning fillies.

But if we’re wrong and Pauline’s Pearl becomes one of the great ones, we’re likely to remember the 49th Fantasy in a more favorable light. And look upon her performance with truer appreciation that it might have received Saturday.

First impressions were that it was a $600,000 Grade 3 race someone had to win. That one of the six entered would score her first graded victory and collect the 100 Kentucky Oaks qualifying points available.

Though it was the richest Fantasy ever, it came across as a glorified soft opening to what Oaklawn — the late Terry Wallace in particular — proudly calls the Racing Festival of the South. It fell on the Saturday before Easter, when racegoers quite naturally may have other plans and the national racing calendar overflowed with major stakes from three major fronts — Kentucky, New York and California — with more A-list participants.

What was one to think when a local winner of two Oaks preps, and with an Arkansas owner, skipped town to run at Keeneland? Fortunately, Pauline’s Pearl so distinguished herself that her presence, rather than Will’s Secret’s absence, may be the lasting memory.

Pauline’s Pearl, as an oddson favorite, did not exactly surprise anyone. It was, after all, the fourth Fantasy victory for trainer Steve Asmussen and the third for jockey Ricardo Santana Jr. And, by Tapit out of Hot Dixie Chick, she was to the manor born — owned and bred by Barbara Banke, whose late husband, Jess Jackson, raced mighty Curlin, two-time Horse of the Year in Asmussen’s barn.

Not that anything was inevitable about it for the longest. Ava’s Grace, the pacesetter and 8-1, clung to the lead for David Cohen while Santana resorted to all of his skills aboard the favorite.

When the fillies turned into the lane, the season-long Oaklawn trainer’s race reached a new level with Asmussen, Robertino Diodoro (Ava Grace) or Brad Cox (Coach) likely to win.

Coach ran the best of her three Oaklawn races but could not pull if off after reaching contention from outside. She finished third and, in Cox’s hands, her defining races may lie ahead. No one seems to have a better hand with young fillies than Cox, who won his second Kentucky Oaks in three years with, remember, the 2020 Fantasy show horse.

Whatever else she may accomplish, Ava’s Grace goes down as one of the toughest-beat Fantasy seconds — right up there with Nell’s Briquette (1981, to Heavenly Prize) and Althea (1984, the next week’s Arkansas Derby winner for Wayne Lukas after a troubled Fantasy run against My Darling One). Ava’s Grace is yet another fine Diodoro runner by the young sire Laoban, whose late-running Grade 2 winner Keepmeinmind ran afoul of the weather at Oaklawn. We look forward to charting her progress.

But as a stage hand called out when Gloria Swanson, playing Norma Desmond, visited the set in “Sunset Boulevard,” put the light where it belongs. Pauline’s Pearl won the race — the Perils of Pauline was more like it — and attention, as for Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” must be paid.

Her mile and one-sixteenth in 1:43.64 broke no track or stakes record. I care not what Beyer Speed Figure she receives. Others, quite frankly, look more imposing in Kentucky Oaks 147 April 30 at Churchill Downs.

And yet, and yet. It says here Pauline Pearl would have fallen short if not for one of Santana’s great efforts. The rider’s left-handed strokes seemed to reach the filly’s central nervous system, propelling Pauline’s Pearl forward in those desperate final yards.

Times have changed — with purses out of sight, the jockeys’ room has more quality pilots than ever, for one thing — since Pat Day won 137 races here in 1986, greatest of 12 straight years that the Hall of Famer led the Oaklawn standings. “Most of them,” said the late Lynn Whiting, for whom he won a Kentucky Derby, “with a hand ride.”

But much as Pat had his Day in the sun and Larry Snyder, too, brought professionalism to the track — in tribute, Oaklawn appointed him a steward and named the winner’s circle in his memory — Santana is crafting a Hall of Fame-worthy career.

A matured journeyman, his bad-boy days on the track behind him, Santana has reached full growth in the sport. If not for repeated brushes with the stewards that grounded him long enough one year to finish behind Cohen in the standings, he might be working on nine straight riding titles. Another time, a misunderstanding with Asmussen, for whom he rode first call, cost him valuable mounts, possibly a Fantasy victory for the trainer that went to Luis Contreras.

Hey, few jockeys raised more of a ruckus in “the room” than Day, especially before he got right with God one night in a Miami Beach hotel room. Calvin Borel, of all people, was involved in a dust-up at Churchill Downs on a Breeders’ Cup Friday.

Riding horses is a stressful job and making weight is a constant challenge. Some jockeys handle the pressure (media included) better than others. It is not a job for the squeamish or even one who does not bother to watch race replays.

Others may have been better on a day-to-day basis (Day comes to mind) or finished strongly more often on a horse (the late Garrett Gomez and Day, again, were his equals). But he can be called the Great Santana with confidence.

Winning a second Oaklawn stake for Asmussen aboard Arkansas-owned filly Abrogate, Santana gave us another Saturday in the park to treasure. On a card we were expecting less, Santana and Asmussen, with four victories each, offered racing to remember.