Top Row

Top Row

Albert Anthony Baroni is a carefully-tailored gentleman whose wise, sunburned Latin face has grown increasingly familiar to track followers for the past five years. Long ago, Mr. Baroni ran a restaurant in Reno, Nev. With the profits, he bought racehorses which he, himself, trained and ran at minor tracks. He first attracted national attention in 1933 when in Chicago he was arrested, indicted but never tried for giving horses heroin. By that time, track followers had noticed one remarkable thing about Mr. Baroni: His stable was being run at a consistent profit. However, any suspicion that this was disproportionately due to Mr. Baroni's sophistication in matters only indirectly connected with horseflesh was allayed by something he did in 1934. That year, Mr. Baroni bought a horse called Top Row.

Up to that time, Top Row's chief claim upon the attention of the turf world had been his name. His sire was Peanuts, his dam Too High. The combination had suggested to his owner, Mrs. W. Plunket Stewart, the last row of seats in the peanut gallery. As a racehorse, Top Row had appeared mainly in "claiming" races-- minor events for mediocre horses in which each entry is for sale at a specified price, for which he can be claimed by anyone who wants him. In these his efforts had been so undistinguished that Mr. Baroni got him for the modest sum of $3,500. He took the horse to California with the rest of his string. Top Row promptly began to win races. A small, unimpressive, 4-year-old bay colt, he returned to the East last summer to run against horses far out of the claiming class. Partly because Top Row's earlier achievements had been so limited, partly because his owner was emphatically outside that circle of socialite owners whose names are supposed to make racing news glamorous, sportswriters paid remarkably little attention to him. Nonetheless, while they were acclaiming Alfred G. Vanderbilt's Discovery the horse of the year, Top Row went quietly about the business of winning races. By September he had won six. He had beaten Discovery once, with a 29-lb. advantage in the weights which considerably diminished the prestige of the feat. When in October he beat Discovery again, this time in the Massachusetts Handicap after smashing Discovery's track record, turf followers were more impressed. Nevertheless Discovery remained the horse of the year.

Last week, suave Mr. Baroni and young Mr. Vanderbilt, ugly little Top Row and handsome big Discovery, in company with 13 other crack racehorses, the most eminent members of the turf world, all of Hollywood, and some 50,000 less distinguished citizens were at the Santa Anita, Calif, racetrack for the richest race in the world. The Santa Anita Handicap is for an added purse of $100,000. This year it was billed beforehand as a match race between Discovery and Mrs. Isabel Dodge Sloan's Cavalcade, the horse who beat Discovery regularly in 1934. Since then Cavalcade, incapacitated by a bad hoof, has been shipped around the country like a museum piece either in the hope that his injury would disappear or because of Mrs. Sloan's generous readiness to aid racetrack ballyhoo. Last week when Cavalcade was withdrawn from the Santa Anita Handicap, preparations for the big race were complete. Bettors, whose total wagers at the track's mutuel windows aggregated $1,250,000 the day of the Handicap, made Discovery favorite at 3-to-2. Top Row was', third choice at 6.4-to-1.

The race was run on a track still heavy from rain earlier in the week. There was one moment when Discovery appeared to have a chance to win. That was when he came up on the backstretch and tried to go around the field. Jockey Wayne Wright on Top Row came up inside Discovery at the same time, and Discovery, carrying top weight of 130 lb., fell back. There was another moment when it seemed as if Top Row might not win. That was when the horses were pounding into the stretch and Time Supply, the second choice, came forward fast along the inside rail. Jockey Wayne Wright moved toward the inside of the track. Top Row bumped a horse named Rosemont and Rosemont swerved over against Time Supply. The move looked like a foul, but it might have been, as Jockey Wright said later, due to his efforts to avoid a wet patch in the track. In any case, wise jockeys know that in an important race, track stewards rarely disqualify the horse that gets past the wire first. An instant later Top Row did exactly that. Time Supply was second, Rosemont third.

From the proprietors of a track whose insistence on fair play is so diligent that the finish of every race is photographed by an electric camera, Owner Baroni got $112,100, the purse and a $7,500 bonus for training the winner. Jockey Wright got $1,750 in addition to his pay. Top Row's total winnings rose to $211,820, highest of any horse now racing in the U. S.

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