It's crazy how one horse can change lives.
But it's one horse winning one race that I can credit for giving me the opportunity to spend summers in Del Mar.
I'll be in the stands for Friday's opening of the 84th summer season at the track Bing Crosby made famous, all because of a gigantic upset in a major race more than 50 years ago – before I'd even heard of Del Mar. It's allowed me to witness history “Where the Turf Meets the Surf”: Dare and Go's upset of Cigar in the 1996 Pacific Classic; the first Del Mar Breeders' Cup in 2017; Flightline's unforgettable performance in the 2022 Pacific Classic, winning off by 19 ¼ lengths; and much more.
To get to Del Mar, as the track's signature song goes, I've taken a plane, taken a train, taken a car. (My first trip there was on a motorcycle, but there's probably too many syllables for Crosby and his songwriting partners to have gotten that into the lyrics).
In truth, though, I've been riding a horse here for most of the 45 years I've been attending Del Mar.
Let's go back to Feb. 13, 1971, when a Cal-bred 4-year-old named War Heim sprang a massive upset in the Charles H. Strub Stakes at Santa Anita. Named after the track's founder, the mile and a quarter Strub culminated a series of three races for 4-year-olds that began with the seven-furlong Malibu and continued with the 1 1/8-mile San Fernando. (The San Fernando and Strub are no longer run, and the Malibu was moved to December, where it's become the final Grade 1 race of the year for 3-year-olds.)
I was a senior in high school in northern Illinois in 1971 who hadn't discovered horse racing yet and probably spent that February weekend shoveling snow. But my future father-in-law, Bill Watts, was at Santa Anita with his wife, Helen, and he'd either gotten a tip or had a hunch about War Heim. He never would say how he ended up betting on the horse.
Trained by Dale Landers for Hazel Huffman, War Heim was a son of Slipped Disc who came into the Strub off a decent third at 37-1 odds in the San Fernando. He wasn't an unproven horse, having won a division of the Del Mar Derby the previous year, but that was on grass. The Strub was on the dirt.
With regular rider John Sellers in the saddle, War Heim maintained a good position in the early going of the Strub and entered contention going into the far turn, then swept wide around the turn to engage the front-running Hanalei Bay for the final quarter mile, getting his nose in front of that foe just at the wire.
War Heim paid an even $100 to win, $29.60 to place, and $11.20 to show as the second longest price in a field of 10 led by the previous year's Travers Stakes winner, Loud.
To this day, I don't know how much Bill put on War Heim in the Strub, but there was no exacta, trifecta, superfecta, pick 3, etc., so it had to be a significant bet on the nose to win. And that's exactly what he got.
Two days later, while the country was celebrating the Presidents Day holiday on Feb. 15 (then it was just called Washington's Birthday), Bill took Helen and daughter Carol down the coast to Del Mar in hopes of finding a house to rent for the summer racing season. They'd been renting up the road in Oceanside previous years and wanted to get a little closer to the track.
Realtor Chiquita Abbott disappointed them at first, saying she wasn't aware of any rental properties at that time. Abbott, who recently authored a book, “To Del Mar With Love, Chiquita,” added that she did have a little “plain Jane” bungalow in the beach colony for sale that was steps from the beach and a short walk to the racetrack.
Bill won enough on War Heim to make a down payment on the house, which was priced at about what you can buy a modest new car for today.
Whenever he would later see John Sellers at the races, Bill would always say, “There's the guy who bought our house.”
For years, Bill and Helen rented out the house to faculty from nearby UCSD, then occupied it for the summer months. They did some renovations and eventually moved to Del Mar full time from the Los Angeles area when Bill retired from his career with Merrill Lynch.
They didn't miss a day of racing in Del Mar until age finally caught up with them. Both are gone now, and I can say I've never met two people who had more of a passion for racing than Bill and Helen.
The house that War Heim and John Sellers bought would eventually be passed down to Carol, who I'd met in 1980 while we both worked at Daily Racing Form in Los Angeles. We were married in 1983, and after moving to Kentucky in 1988, Del Mar became the summer vacation destination for us and our kids each year. Now it's our second home.
All because of a horse.
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