Rising Star Witty A Dominant Winner Of $200,000 Pennsylvania Nursery Stakes

Witty, a half-brother to graded stakes winner Caravel, handily defeated nine rivals in the $200,000 Pennsylvania Nursery Stakes at Parx Racing in a five and a half length triumph.

A homebred for Elizabeth Merryman, the 2-year-old Pennsylvania-bred son of Great Notion earned his second career victory and gave McLane Hendriks his first career winner as a trainer in the Pennsylvania Nursery.

After being forced to steady early, Witty moved up into contention on the backstretch under Carol Cedeno, settled in to save ground as the leader, Wispering Springs approached the quarter pole. Once in the clear, Witty responded when asked and drew away in the stretch.

“Very exciting…it's obviously a little bit stressful to train for your parents, but it makes it that much sweeter when you win,” said trainer McLane Hendriks. “I always kind of thought he was a turf horse, but he's been training so well on the dirt and handles it so well. We wanted to stretch him out a little bit here today and I do think he can get some more ground. It's exciting to have a horse like this and have a future wide open.”

Witty went off as the 2-1 favorite and returned $6.60 to win. Uncle Buddy ran second and Vine Jet completed the trifecta. The final time for the seven furlongs on a fast track was 1:26.44.

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Breeders’ Cup Presents Connections: Fire’s Finale Is Kenwood’s ‘Icing On The Cake’

The goal in horse racing may be to hit the wire in front, but the real nature of the sport can't be found in a single trip over the racetrack. Wins just wouldn't matter as much if they didn't require us to believe in taking chances, to maintain our hope through all the difficult times, and a little bit of luck.

Those are the reasons Robb Levinsky was unable to contain his joy when his Kenwood Racing homebred Fire's Finale won the Pennsylvania Nursery Stakes on Dec. 7 at Parx Racing in Bensalem, Penn. The 2-year-old Pennsylvania-bred is the last foal out of Levinsky's favorite racemare, Exchanging Fire, and was ridden by Mychel Sanchez, whose agent, Joe Hampshire, was the mare's regular rider.

“This race was like a gathering of old friends, and it's one I'll remember a long time,” Levinsky said, acknowledging that the win stands out as a rare high moment during the day-to-day struggles of the pandemic. “It's not been an easy year for the world, so racing has been an escape from a tough year for all of us. It's not perfect, it doesn't make up for everything, but it has definitely helped.”

Several of the dozen syndicate owners were on hand to watch as Fire's Finale made an impressive rally from behind the field to win by a length, earning his first stakes score in his seventh lifetime start. Levinsky's emotions ran over as he entered the winner's circle.

“We don't breed a lot of horses, but (his dam Exchanging Fire) was just a member of the family,” he explained. “I've been in this business for 35 years, so I try not to get overly attached, but we really loved her.”

Levinsky claimed Exchanging Fire for $50,000 in 2007 at Gulfstream Park. The next year the daughter of Exchange Rate won three listed stakes races and finished fourth in a Grade 3 race at Monmouth Park that year, and ran out earnings of nearly $250,000 through her 27-race career.

The filly retired at the end of 2008, and Levinsky knew that the stock market crash meant she wouldn't bring what she was worth at auction. He decided to keep the mare and breed her himself.

“We always knew she had talent,” Levinsky said. “I felt eventually she was going to reproduce herself, but it didn't happen right away.”

Exchanging Fire's first foal died at birth when he was strangled on his umbilical cord. After giving her a year off to recover, she was able to produce three more foals over the next several years, though none of those were particularly inspiring on the racetrack.

Her fourth foal, a bay colt by Jump Start born in 2018, seemed to have all the right things going for him. Unfortunately, Exchanging Fire colicked a month after the colt was born, and she died on the operating table at New Bolton when she was 14 years old.

“They couldn't save her,” Levinsky said. “With Fire's Finale, we got him onto a nurse mare and he survived, but he'd certainly had a rough start in life. It never seemed to bother him, but obviously it meant a lot to us for him being her last foal.”

The colt's early training was so promising that Levinsky decided he'd offer a portion to new-to-the-game owner Ralph Pastori, a CPA from New York. This year was Pastori's initial foray into the horse racing game, and he'd first approached Levinsky with the idea to buy shares of horses from the 2-year-old sales.

When the pandemic affected the schedule of those sales, Levinsky didn't find as many horses in his target price range, and he started to consider whether it'd be a good idea to offer up 25 percent of Fire's Finale.

“Everything was going well, and I told Pastori, 'Look, I honestly really, really like the horse,'” Levinsky remembered. “I said, 'You can definitely pass if you want, I just think he has a chance to be something special.'

“I took a chance with my reputation, which is very important to me, and I kind of had to go out on a limb a little. But he had trained so well up to that point, and fortunately that worked out!”

Trained by Kelly Breen, Fire's Finale took a couple starts to figure out the racing game, but the colt never finished worse than fourth in his seven starts this season. Following the stakes score, his record stands at 2-2-1 with earnings of $108,315.

Fire's Finale in the Parx Racing winner's circle

“It was certainly emotional to keep him ourselves, rather than try to sell him at one of the sales or something, and to see him have this kind of success,” said Levinsky. “I think Fire's Finale has a chance to be a really good horse for us next year as a 3-year-old.”

Breen wasn't able to attend the race at Parx that Monday afternoon, so Levinsky's long-time friend and former neighbor Ron Dandy was in the paddock before the Nursery Stakes to saddle Fire's Finale. It was Dandy who told Levinsky about the jockey connection, just before the race started.

“I didn't know the rider who was named on him at all, I just knew he was leading the standings at Parx,” Levinsky explained. “Ron said, 'He's a really nice young man, a good up-and-coming rider. You know who his agent is, don't you? Joe Hampshire!'”

Hampshire rode Exchanging Fire at Parx when she was still running, and his wife met Levinsky in the paddock.

“She remembered Exchanging Fire, and I'm sure Joe has ridden a lot of horses,” Levinsky said. “It was really cool, kind of like a full circle thing.”

Despite struggles brought about by the pandemic altering racing schedules, Levinsky's stable has won 19 of its 90 starts in 2020. The syndicate is three-for-three in December alone, with wins in the opening-day feature at Gulfstream and a filly breaking her maiden at Laurel.

“It's been a very fulfilling year for us,” said Levinsky, adding, “This is not the norm, I'm not trying to say that it is; we recognize that it's special. Fire's Finale winning a stakes to end the year was really the icing on the cake.”

Levinsky knows how hard it is to earn those stakes wins, describing Kenwood Racing as a smaller operation with a matching budget. He earned TOBA's Outstanding Thoroughbred Owner – Breeder award in 1989 and won the prestigious California Derby in the 1990s with a horse named Prime Meridean, but he said the day-to-day wins can often be the most emotionally significant ones.

“We've been tied in with this horse, especially, for so long, it's just that much sweeter,” said Levinsky. “I think Fire's Finale has a chance to be a really good horse for us, and next year I hope he gets to have a big 3-year-old season. First and foremost, though, and not to sound like Pollyanna, but I truly hope that the whole world will be better next year.”

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Thoroughbred Idea Foundation: Casinos Are Evolving, Racing Is Not

As the winner of last week's Pennsylvania Nursery returned to Parx's weather-protected winter “winner's circle” – a side of the track's covered paddock – a banner was easily noticeable taking up key space in the frame of the track's broadcast feed.

“Online Casino – Now Live”

Adjacent to that, though covered to some degree by the winning connections, was another banner touting the Parx mobile app for sports betting.

Here was the casino side of the business marketing quite obviously to anyone who happens to be watching racing, a certainly less productive side of the Parx business.

It's more than just marketing – it is a sign of a business that is evolving.

Parx, and other Pennsylvania racetracks, have housed slot machines since they were legalized by the state's legislature in 2005. Table games followed, with poker. And sports betting. And fantasy sports. And video gaming terminals (basically, machines at truck stops in rural Pennsylvania). And most recently, something called “interactive gaming.”

Interactive gaming is the so-called “online casino” – slots and table games with real money wagering on mobile devices – being advertised in the Parx winner's circle. After more than a decade of just traditional land-based casinos, Pennsylvania took legal gambling to the mobile device space, into your hand, anywhere within the well-populated state.

As it relates to racing, the sport receives purse supplements from land-based slots only, nothing from any of the other non-racing wagering platforms, which notably includes interactive gaming.

In February, before the pandemic-related closures hit state casinos, the total from all slot machine play in the state's casinos was $2.499 billion, with $20.2 million designated to the Pennsylvania Race Horse Development Fund (PRHDF). Interactive (mobile) slots play, from all sources in the state, totaled $254 million, equating to just 10 percent of all land-based slot play.

By October, interactive slots handled $1.114 billion, up more than four times the handle from eight months earlier, while land-based play had dropped to $1.937 billion, down 22 percent, while the total cut to the PRHDF dropped to $15.9 million, a 21 percent fall.

In total, slots play in Pennsylvania, via land-based machines or interactive play, grew from $2.753 billion in February to $3.051 billion in October, up nearly 11 percent.

This has been bad news for racing, in that not only has land-based play declined, directly impacting the size of contributions to purses from slots, but customers have flocked to mobile play in droves. Land-based casinos are shuttered until after New Year's Day, potentially helping the interactive push even more.

While it is possible post-pandemic mobile play will decline sharply, betting against mobile play seems an odd choice considering the way our lives are impacted by mobile technology and its simplicity. Give customers several months to acclimatize to the comfort of mobile slots play, and they might be gone from land-based play for good.

As troubling as this is for Pennsylvania racing purses, the key point is that Parx has greatly developed their gambling options and technology over time. The market evolved and Parx Casino evolved with it.

What about racing?

The evolution of racing's wagering product over the same period has been negligible. Those who benefit directly from wagering – horsemen – have accomplished little in terms of convincing management to focus on improving or modernizing racing's wagering product.

Pennsylvania accounted for 10 percent of all Thoroughbred races run in America in 2019. For 2021, the state's racing commission has awarded 20 percent fewer race days than 2020, though the number of races may not fall that dramatically. Regardless, the question should be how Thoroughbred racing can evolve wagering, most notably in light of this incredibly competitive wagering marketplace.

Pennsylvania is hardly alone in this battle.

Racing in Delaware and West Virginia, both which share borders with Pennsylvania, are in similar straits: highly evolved and competitive betting markets, both with online play permitted, racing purses benefit exclusively from land-based play, all while their racing wagering products have generally withered.

Maryland has yet to embrace interactive wagering, but it will surely do so at some point in the future, a move which could hamstring horsemen, who are on the hook for more than $140 million in debt repayments which is to come from their share of land-based video lottery terminal revenue, should the tracks redevelopment plan there take off.

New Jersey, however, has not shared revenue from the state's casinos with horsemen…ever. The horsemen have had to get more creative, leading the multi-year lawsuit which successfully enabled the widespread legalization of sports betting, and are plotting steps to serve greater American racing as a test case to evolve fixed odds wagering on racing.

New Jersey racing has also been directly subsidized by the state, a subsidy which was cut 25 percent for 2021.

The “industry” has ignored the sport's wagering future for decades. If it does not evolve and modernize, the business will shrivel. It has to change in order to have a hope of succeeding. The livelihoods of tens of thousands of dedicated horsemen hang in the balance as time passes. The representatives of those horsemen must pursue aggressive modernization of wagering to remain competitive.

Horsemen don't often see their role as one of being an advocate for wagering advances, but as the casino business modernizes away, the horsemen have little choice but to get involved…finally.

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Fire’s Finale Returns From Two-Month Layoff To Capture Pennsylvania Nursery Stakes

Fire's Finale came from last with a half mile to go, swept past eleven rivals and went on to win Monday's $80,000 Pennsylvania Nursery Stakes for state-bred 2-year-olds at Parx Racing by a length. It was the second win in seven starts this year for the Jump Start colt, his first stakes victory, and pushed his freshman earnings to just over $101,000.

After a busy schedule, making six starts though mid-October, trainer Kelly Breen opted to rest Fire's Finale for nearly two months before returning to the races for the Nursery. Breaking his maiden in that sixth start here at Parx, winning in a special weight over a sloppy track, maybe he had started to figure things out. Returning to the work tab at Belmont in November, he posted a bullet work at five-eighths on Nov. 17 and then impressed with another bullet work at half-mile on Nov. 25, the 2-year-old working the best of 92 that day.

The colt's late season development continued into the Nursery.

Taken back in the early part of the race by winning jockey Mychal Sanchez, Fire's Finale began to make headway as the race entered the far turn. Able to make a run on the inside of horses in the bulky field, he followed the move of Kidnapped as they rounded the far turn. While Kidnapped got first run on the two tiring front runners, Just a Thought and Beren, Fire's Finale was still moving well and coming off the turn was able to angle out for a clear path and started to kick into high gear in the final furlong. Kidnapped held the lead briefly in the stretch, but Fire's Finale surged past with about 70 yards to go and moved away at the end to win by a full length.

The final time for the seven furlongs on a fast track was 1:25.35.

Owned by Kenwood Racing and Degaetano and Pastore, Inc., Fire's Finale went off at odds of 11-1 and returned $25.80 to win.

Kidnapped, the 5-2 second choice, was next to last early, ran a terrific race with another big run from the back but simply could not hold off the winner and settled for second. Just a Thought (18-1) in a pace duel with Beren, held on for third.

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