THE SMOKE FROM CIGAR

By STEVE WULF/HALLANDALE

ABOUT THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN TELL that the best Thoroughbred in the world rooms and boards in one of the stalls of Barn 7 at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, Florida, is by the poem taped to the door of trainer Bill Mott's office. "Once in a lifetime/ It's said about horses like you," writes one Kristen Sharer. "But to you, that's nothing./You've more winning to do."

He's not particularly handsome, yet he gets Valentine's Day and get-well cards--and poems--from women of all ages. His breeding is nice though hardly impeccable--Mama was Solar Slew, a daughter of Seattle Slew, but Papa was a rolling stone named Palace Music. Only 18 months ago, Cigar was a nondescript bay five-year-old with two victories in 13 starts. Today he is the nicest thing to happen to horse racing since Secretariat.

What happened between then and now is that Cigar won 13 straight races, 11 of them stakes, at six different tracks. He has passed such legends as Kelso (11) and Spectacular Bid (12), and is bearing down on Man o' War (14), Buckpasser (15) and, the greatest of all, Citation (16). A stone bruise to one of his hooves prevented Cigar from racing in the Santa Anita Handicap last month, so win No. 14 will have to wait until March 27, when Cigar runs in the $4 million Dubai World Cup.

"Standing still like this, he doesn't really look all that impressive," Mott says while slipping Cigar a sugar cube. "But come race day, he's a different horse. He grows bigger, like he's been pumped up. And look at the intelligence in those eyes." Indeed, Cigar can make even a casual visitor feel like Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms.

The horse is only days away from his own travel to Dubai, which is a long way from South Dakota, where Mott grew up as the son of a veterinarian. "I located it on the globe the other day," says the 42-year-old trainer, though in truth he has been hard at work on the logistics of the trip for months. He knows that Dubai's track surface is like Belmont's, that the hay there is from Washington State, and that the journey for Cigar will take 18 to 20 hours, stall to stall, counting a refueling layover at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Fortunately, Cigar flies well, as befits a horse owned by Gulfstream Aerospace magnate Allen Paulson and named not for the smoke but for an aviation checkpoint in the Gulf of Mexico.

In January '94, Paulson asked Mott to take on the then disappointing Cigar. Though bred for the turf, he behaved like a speed horse, so after four more unsuccessful races on the grass, the trainer decided to try him on dirt. Bingo. Cigar closed out the '94 season with two victories. But even then Mott wasn't aware of what he had. When Cigar and his jockey, Jerry Bailey, won the first of their 10 races together in '95, Mott and his family were vacationing in Costa Rica.

Then came victories in the Donn Handicap and the Gulfstream Park Handicap. At the Oaklawn Handicap in Arkansas last April, Cigar was accidentally whipped in the face by the jockey aboard another horse; most horses would have backed up after such a blow, but Cigar just got mad and blew away a stellar field. During the Hollywood Gold Cup in California last July, Cigar was hit in the head by a huge clod of dirt, and Bailey needed all his strength to hold back the horse before letting him go on to an easy victory. Cigar's folk-hero status was further enhanced after the Woodward Stakes at Belmont in September, when a cigar-smoking Jack Nicholson met him in the winner's circle. Cigar's final victory in '95 came in the Breeders' Cup Classic at Belmont on Oct. 28. As the horse headed home, the track announcer shouted, "Here he comes! The incomparable, the invincible, the unbeatable Cigar!"

A few weeks after that race, Bailey stopped by Mott's barn at Belmont, and the trainer asked him to get up on Cigar one more time, just to walk him around shed row for a few minutes. Says Mott: "I sort of wanted the two of them to savor their year together. None of us--not me, not Jerry, not Mr. Paulson--may ever be part of something so special and wonderful again."

As the poem on the door says, "It's the lead you seek/When you look them in the eye./Their hearts must be breaking/As you glide right by."