Philly's Smarty is great, but he's no Secretariat

By CLARK GROOME

Smarty Jones: A  remarkable bonus for Philadelphia

Who do you think was the only athlete ever to appear on the covers of Newsweek, Time and Sports Illustrated in the same week?

It wasn't Mark McGwire or Lance Armstrong or Wayne Gretsky or Andre Agassi or Magic Johnson or Mickey Mantle or Julius Erving or Martina Navratalova or Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus or Cal Ripken or Wilt Chamberlain or Joe Montana or Barry Bonds.

It was — trumpets call to post please — Secretariat.

That's right, it was a horse, perhaps the greatest horse ever to race. (While some would tout Citation for that honor, most who saw both choose Big Red.)

I've been blessed over the years to witness many of the great sporting events of the last half century: Cal Ripken passing Lou Gehrig as Baseball's Iron Man; the 1998 Sammy Sosa/Mark McGwire duel for home run supremacy; several Wimbledon and United States Open tennis classics (most notably the Pete Sampras/Agassi match at Flushing Meadow three years ago); every inning of the Phillies/Houston Astros League Championship Series in 1980, widely viewed as the greatest playoff series in baseball history; Wayne Gretsky scoring any number of goals; two perfect games and several no hitters; and the classic contests between Dr. J.'s Sixers and Larry Bird's Boston Celtics (including the game when they, totally out of character, exchanged blows). I was in Franklin Field when the Eagles won their last championship on December 26, 1960.

None of them has remained as indelibly imprinted on my memory as what occurred at about 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 9, 1973.

I was at a wedding reception. The party was well underway when the bride's father disappeared, leading a string of friends to the TV. Gradually the tent emptied. The TV room got so full that it was hard to move.

And they're off. Well not exactly "they." It was really "And he's off." For the next two minutes and 24 seconds that soon-to-be cover boy of the country's three most prestigious weekly magazines gave what may be the greatest individual performance in the history of sport. It certainly was the greatest horse race ever run.

With Ron Turcotte aboard, Secretariat won the longest Triple Crown race by an astounding 31 lengths, which is something like one-sixth of a mile.

I don't need the videotape to replay that run, even all these 31 years later.

That is why I was so excited about this past Saturday's Belmont. Homeboy Smarty Jones had a chance to move into the realm of sport's most elite athletes.

And then, as you by now surely know, out of nowhere came the 36-1 Birdstone. It was such a shock, such a disappointment that when interviewed on NBC within a couple of minutes after he won the race, Bridstone's jockey Edgar Prado, still atop the winning mount, apologized. He said he was just doing his job but that he was sorry it had to be him.

Speculation about why Smarty lost range from simply running out of gas to never really settling into the race to being the victim of all the hype and all the pressure, something horse experts say these magnificent thoroughbreds can and do feel.

So he lost. While the ultimate victory was never his, what he did for his city and his sport should not be underestimated. The winning horse's owner, Marylou Whitney, a member horse racing royalty, praised the horse hers had just unexpectedly beaten. So did Birdstone's trainer, Nick Zito.

Sure, lots of other horses have won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and then come up short at Belmont. But this was different. According to all the experts the previous oh-so-closers were horses that "could win the Triple Crown;" Smarty was a horse that "should win the Triple Crown."

He didn't, which says more about the 11 horses who did than about him. This may be the toughest accomplishment in sport: three different races at three different distances at three different tracks over just five weeks. There are no "wait Œtil next years" in the Triple Crown.

Be grateful that we were blessed with Smarty Jones and that, as a remarkable bonus, he was a Philly boy.