What Can Brown Do for You?

By Jeff Freedman

BALTIMORE  (Hollywood Today) – 5/18/08 — As expected by almost everyone, Big Brown won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Racetrack, capturing the second leg of the Triple Crown in impressive fashion.  Romping away to victory, the payout was $2.40 to win and show and $2.60 to place (an anomaly of the betting pool),

There have been confirmed reports the horse is given monthly steroid shots, but so far the racing commission has not disqualified the noble steed.

The steriod, Winstrol, is banned in 10 states, but not the states the Triple Crown races are in.   

Big bettors at the track who put down thousands on a sure thing to win a low payout, which multiplied by their investment, returns a hefty percentage, especially attractive in these troubled economic times.  If you had bet $100,000 on Big Brown to win, you would have won $40,000 – that’s a 40% rate of return.  Try getting that in a CD.  There’s no market fund around that gives that sort of earnings. 

Even better, if you had given yourself a margin of error – say a once-in-a-lifetime longshot noses out Big Brown at the wire – you would have won $60,000 – a whopping 60% return.  Not a bad day at work.

But they don’t call them bridge jumpers for nothing.  It’s an all or nothing proposition.  If your horse loses, so do you – you lose everything.  Not a percentage, not a little bit at a time, but everything.  Perhaps $100,000 in around two minutes.  It can ruin your whole day.  It could ruin your whole year.  So what can Brown do for you?

Well, you’ve got one more chance to cash in – if you’ve got the stomach for it.  In three weeks the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont will be run and Big Brown is hoping to deliver big:  becoming the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978 (that’s 30 years ago); hoping to help bring heroic attention the beleaguered sport of Horse Racing, which it needs so desperately after the Kentucky Derby tragedy of Eight Bells; giving bridge jumpers one last chance to make bank before he is retired to stud (the syndicate that owns him has sold him for a presumed $50 million to Three Chimney Farms in Kentucky for breeding with his mating fee likely to be in the $100,000 per range).

Could you do it?   Put down a whole week’s wages, a whole month’s wages, whatever savings you been accumulating for rainy days, on a race that takes less time than it does to boil an egg, on a race that can give you enough money to get over the rise in the cost of a gallon of gasoline, take a vacation to Europe where the dollar is probably not worth the paper it’s printed on and still maybe have enough left over for a great meal at your favorite restaurant.

There will be over 100,000 people in attendance at the Belmont and some of them will be bridge jumpers.  They might not be the ones screaming the loudest when Big Brown comes around the far turn and heads down the long, long stretch to make them or break them.  And they probably won’t be in the upper grandstand, where one just might be tempted to do something rash if their worst fear is realized. 

So there are a lot of people out there with lots of reason to hope Big Brown delivers.

But if Big Brown loses in three weeks I know one thing:  if I’m going back into New York City from the Belmont, I’m taking the Mid Town Tunnel.