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Spend A Buck and the Jersey Derby shook up racing in 1985

This Memorial Day story from 30 years ago was so surreal that it still seems too fantastic to be true. You can also find a lot of people who will tell you the financing involved makes it a sad story rather than a happy one.

(Michael Mercanti/Staff file photo)
(Michael Mercanti/Staff file photo)Read more

This Memorial Day story from 30 years ago was so surreal that it still seems too fantastic to be true. You can also find a lot of people who will tell you the financing involved makes it a sad story rather than a happy one.

Regardless, it was an amazing sequence of events that culminated with a horse's run for the money after winning the Run for the Roses.

A horseman and Wall Street investor from Newark, N.J. had this vision of a glamorous racetrack in the middle of South Jersey where all the great thoroughbreds would come to run. It would be built on the same ground in Cherry Hill that had housed Garden State Park from 1942 until April 14, 1977, the date a massive fire killed three people and turned the grandstand into ashes.

The new Garden State Park would be magnificent, a towering seven-story structure with a glass-covered paddock and upscale cuisine. The piece de resistance was The Phoenix, a sixth-floor restaurant and banquet room named after a mythical bird that lived for centuries after rising from the ashes.

Newspaper accounts listed the cost between $130 million and $165 million. Robert E. Brennan, the chairman of the track and International Thoroughbred Breeders, Inc., put the cost at $200 million. By comparison, Baltimore's Camden Yards baseball park had a $110 million price tag.

All that was needed to complete the puzzle at Garden State Park was the best horses in the land. In order for that to happen, big money had to be dangled in front of the elite owners and trainers.

"There were a lot of unique things about the place," Brennan said last week during one of the rare interviews he has given since being released from a 10-year federal prison term in early 2011. "In order to be an economic success, however, we felt we had to be an artistic success and to do that we needed the best actors and actresses, which were the horses. That meant we had to pay them money to come."

Brennan, 41 years old at the time, devised a bonus system in an effort to attract the same horses that would run in the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. If a horse could win the Cherry Hill Mile on April 6, 1985, the Garden State Stakes (April 20), the Kentucky Derby (May 4) and the Jersey Derby (Memorial Day, May 27), it would be worth $2 million. That's four races in seven weeks against top competition and three of them, of course, would be staged at Brennan's Garden State Park, the brazenly self-proclaimed "racetrack of the 21st century." A $1 million bonus was offered to any horse that could win two of the first three races and the Jersey Derby, which seemed only a little more realistic because the winner of the Kentucky Derby almost always ran in the Preakness Stakes two weeks later.

"Our race, the Jersey Derby, was the oldest in the country and it preceded the Kentucky Derby," Brennan said. "We wanted to put a splash back in the race. We wanted to do something special.

"The purses of the Triple Crown at the time were paltry, but they promoted them as the three premier races for 3-year-olds and my entire lifetime the Triple Crown had been a big deal."

That was about to change, if only temporarily.

Spend A Buck's start

Dennis Diaz, a Tampa businessman, purchased Spend A Buck for $12,500 in Kentucky in March 1983. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was only the second horse Diaz had ever purchased. Spend A Buck's trainer, Cam Gambolati, a former Laundromat operator and statistician for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was in just his fourth year saddling horses. This was not the kind of tandem that won any graded races, let alone the most celebrated one of them all.

Spend A Buck's first year running was a good one. The horse had won five of eight starts and closed things out by finishing third in the Breeder's Cup Juvenile, running behind 2-year-old champion Chief's Crown and Tank's Prospect. His year, however, had also ended with arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone chip from one of the colt's knees.

Spend A Buck finished third in his late March 3-year-old debut at the Bay Shore Stakes at Aqueduct. It was not the kind of run that made you believe something extraordinary was about to happen, although jockey Angel Cordero Jr. promised afterward that "my horse can do better than this."

Despite the jockey's promise, Spend A Buck went off as the 17-10 second choice in the Cherry Hill Mile. With Cordero aboard, he won the mile race by 101/2 lengths and a few murmurs started about the bonus being offered by Brennan. Gambolati immediately tamped them down because he knew how difficult it would be to win four competitive races in just seven weeks.

Two weeks after his first race at Garden State Park, Spend A Buck won the Garden State Stakes by 91/2 lengths, running nine furlongs in 1 minute, 454/5 seconds, just two-fifths of a second slower than the world record for the distance that had been set by Secretariat in 1973.

The Kentucky Derby was next, but first a small controversy ensued. Diaz misread the conditions of the bonus and thought if Spend A Buck won the Kentucky Derby his owner would receive $1 million.

"He's got to come back and win the Jersey Derby," Garden State Park president Bob Quigley said.

A horse racing tempest never seen before or since loomed on the immediate horizon.

Dazzling at the Derby

Chief's Crown, the colt that won the Breeders' Cup Juvenile, went off as the favorite at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Spend A Buck was the crowd's second choice at 4-1. It was never close. Spend A Buck went wire-to-wire and won the Kentucky Derby by more than five lengths in a time of 2:001/5. At the time only Secretariat in 1973 and Northern Dancer in 1964 had run the first leg of the Triple Crown faster. Spend A Buck's margin of victory was the largest in 39 years.

This was obviously a special horse, but the winner's share of $406,800 was chump change compared to what could be won if Spend A Buck opted to run in the Jersey Derby on Memorial Day rather than the May 19 Preakness in Maryland.

"The only thing faster than Spend A Buck that day was the airplane I sent to Kentucky to hijack Dennis and Cam," Brennan said. "I picked them up and brought them home to New Jersey. If somebody wanted to interview Dennis, I had them come to my house."

Plenty of people wanted to interview Diaz and they all wanted to know the same thing: Was the novice horse owner going to break from Triple Crown tradition by not running the Kentucky Derby winner in The Preakness?

It was immediately clear which way Diaz, who died in 2007, was leaning.

"We're in the business to win purses, and I think maybe this business of making stud horses has gone too far," Diaz said the Derby win. "We have the chance for a $2.6 million payday if we win the Jersey Derby and, by God, don't think we won't do that."

Three days after the Kentucky Derby, Diaz's decision became official and the owner of Spend A Buck and the owner of the track that lured him away from the Preakness both became despised. Chick Lang, the general manager at Pimlico at the time, called Brennan a "snake oil salesman."

"He said I was a disgrace to horse racing and tradition," Brennan said. "I liked him. He was a hard-boot kind of guy, but he was so mad at me because I had put up a bonus to attract horses. . . .

"I respect tradition. I like it. But what we wound up doing was enhancing tradition. Triple Crown tracks came to the reality that in order to maintain a position of prominence they would have to change what they were doing."

Time to get paid

Bob Brennan had purchased an insurance policy for the bonus being offered by his racetrack, although at the time Garden State Park president Bob Quigley vehemently denied any such policy existed.

"I don't think the company was too worried about it until Spend A Buck won the Kentucky Derby," Brennan said. "But I think they had to change their underwear when Dennis announced he was coming to the Jersey Derby. I suggested to the people in the company that they come to the track and put down some money on Spend A Buck to try to recover some of their money. They showed up on Jersey Derby day with a suitcase full of cash and they did bet on him."

A lot of people showed up at Garden State Park on Memorial Day 1985. The announced crowd was 30,360 and the race was televised locally by Channel 3, which was then an NBC affiliate. It was also televised by other network affiliates in markets across the country. Brennan said the track did not get much money for the television rights.

One person who did not show up at Garden State Park on Jersey Derby day was Angel Cordero, the jockey who had ridden Spend A Buck to victory in the Cherry Hill Mile, the Garden State Stakes and the Kentucky Derby. He had committed to ride Track Barron at Belmont Park on Memorial Day.

There was more to the story, according to Brennan.

"I was going to send my helicopter up there to get him," he said. "I had done it before with Willie Shoemaker and a lot of other jockeys. We wanted to pick up Cordero and have him swoop in and ride in the Jersey Derby. But [the New York Racing Association] was so mad at me that they wouldn't let us land the helicopter up in New York and they would not release him from any of his mounts."

Track Barron finished third in the Metropolitan Mile at Belmont and Cordero earned $4,000 for the mount. Laffit Pincay replaced him on Spend A Buck and earned $260,000 after winning the Jersey Derby. Cordero later blasted Diaz for not paying him any of the bonus money.

"I win three of the four and get nothing," he told the New York Post. "They should have at least given me part of it."

Spend A Buck's last run at Garden State Park would not be an easy one. He went off as a 1-20 favorite against a strong field. Creme Fraiche finished second and went on to win the Belmont Stakes 12 days later.

Two strides out of the gate, Spend A Buck stumbled and the overflow crowd gasped. For several strides he was crowded by Purple Mountain. Instead of being out front from the start as he was in his previous three races, he was challenged to the finish.

"I thought he was a beat horse" a quarter mile from the finish line, Gambolati said.

Creme Fraiche was ahead of Spend A Buck by a nose as the horses entered the stretch and El Basco rallied to be among the leaders as they headed for the finish line. Pincay used his whip three times and Spend A Buck responded with a $2.6 million final sprint to the finish, beating Creme Fraiche by a neck.

It would stand as the richest single payday in horse racing history until the local, lovable Smarty Jones won a $5 million bonus from Oaklawn Park for winning the Kentucky Derby and two other races at the Arkansas track.

Spend A Buck "showed extraordinary courage in that race because he was very beatable that day," Brennan said. I think the strength of Laffit Pincay carried him across the line."

Two declines

Spend A Buck ran two more races with Pincay aboard in 1985, finishing second to Skip Trial in the Grade I Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park before beating a group of older horses in the Monmouth Handicap at the same summer meet. He was retired after injuring an ankle in September while training for the Pennsylvania Derby. He won 10 of his 15 starts and never finished out of the money.

Spend A Buck won the Eclipse Award as horse of the year and retired to stud in Kentucky before later moving to Brazil, where he died from an allergic reaction to penicillin at the age of 20 on Nov. 24, 2002.

By the end of 1985 Garden State Park was bleeding money, attendance was dwindling and the lucrative purses were being reduced. It was clear even then that Spend A Buck's run for all that money was going to be the track's signature shining moment.

"Quite frankly I miscalculated the impact of casinos," Brennan said. "I should have built one."

By the end of 1986, the Triple Crown races, with a sponsorship from Chrysler, had instituted their own bonus system worth $5 million to any horse that won the Triple Crown. It was later sponsored by Visa but was discontinued after 2005 without ever being paid. A smaller bonus of $1 million, which was based on a points system, was paid for a while.

Garden State Park's last truly magical moment came in the 1986 Jersey Derby when in a twist of irony Snow Chief won the race just nine days after winning the Preakness.

The disdain Brennan felt from the traditionalists in the Triple Crown community paled in comparison to the contempt he felt in later years. He was perpetually involved in legal battles with the SEC and when he was indicted for bankruptcy fraud in 2000, Forbes Magazine described Brennan as a "major stock swindler." He received a 10-year prison sentence that he started serving on April 17, 2001. Garden State Park, Brennan's racetrack of the 21st century, ran its last race 16 days later with only 2,000 people in attendance.

Brennan served most of that time at the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix, N.J., and was released in January 2011.

He is 71 years old now and writing his memoirs at his home in Belmar, Monmouth County. He said he learned to be more patient and humble in prison.

Brennan also said all his memorabilia from his long career in horse racing - he owned a lot of stakes-winning horses - was confiscated when he went to prison. All he has left from that magical Memorial Day 30 years ago are the memories and they are quite fantastic.

@brookob