Cigar, Suffolk Downs, and My Mom

by Sue Finley

In the summer of 1994, my mother, a non-smoker and an inveterate racing fan, was diagnosed with lung cancer. The early diagnoses were dire–six months from one doctor, one year from another–but she finally made her way to Sloan-Kettering, where she was treated by a fellow racing fan, Dr. Vincent Miller, who advised her to take out a lease on an apartment in Saratoga as usual, and to not worry about signing one for the following year, either. `We’ll think of it as a chronic disease rather than worrying about a cure,’ he told her, `and we’ll manage it.’ She started treatment. By the end of October, we had good news. The tumors were receding.

The morning of November 26, the day of the NYRA Mile, she woke up and told my father that she had a dream that the six horse had won the race. They hadn’t planned to go to the track, but they packed the car, sat in Equestris, and watched Cigar, the six horse, gallop home the easiest of winners. She quickly became a fan, and her condition continued to improve.

She enjoyed a good Christmas, and was happy when Cigar’s 1995 campaign not only started early, but was a successful one. She watched the simulcast of his Jan. 22 allowance win at Gulfstream, and was fully invested in his performance by the time the Feb. 11 Donn Handicap rolled around. (I didn’t tell her I was rooting for Holy Bull.) 

Some time early on in the streak, she decided that his success on the track and hers at the hospital were somehow linked; his poor performances on the turf the previous summer coincided with the onset of her illness, and his turnaround in late October with hers. She became convinced that as long as he continued to do well, she would, too.

Knowing the intangible differences that can be made by a positive outlook, this conclusion of hers meant that his races were now fraught with stress for her family.

She traveled to Pimlico to see him win the Pimlico Special, and was stunned to hear that he would make his next start at her `home’ track, Suffolk Downs.

My mom led a small life, in both good and bad ways. She grew up in Massachusetts during the Depression, was forced onto Welfare at the age of 8 when her father abandoned her and her four young siblings, and forced back off Welfare at 16 (and effectively out of high school) in an incredibly unenlightened policy at the time so as to no longer be a drag on society. She got a job as a cashier in a restaurant to help feed her little brothers, met my father when he returned from the war, and stayed home and raised a family. She never flew in a plane, or left North America, and the one true love her family instilled in her was racing. They went to Rockingham, Narragansett, Lincoln Downs, and Suffolk, were $2 gamblers, and loved a good show parlay. To her husband and children, of course, she was everything.

The Mass’Cap that year fell on June 1, her birthday, and we arranged to name a race on the card after her, and for her to present the trophy to the winning connections. She walked into the clubhouse, saw her name up on the toteboard at the track she had enjoyed for years in anonymity, and burst into tears. I’d say she had never felt as special as she did at that moment.

The streak continued, of course, throughout the year, and we breathed a sigh of relief when he won the Classic and was put away for the winter. He picked up right off where he left off the next year, and reeled off four in a row.

When he ultimately retired to the Kentucky Horse Park the next spring, she drove down to see him, and until she died three years later, a picture of them together sat on the piano in her family room.

One of the great things about a life in racing is that your memories are somehow more vivid; as if the intensity of the sport burns them into your consciousness forever, so that you remember not just where you were standing when Personal Ensign won her 13th straight, but what the air felt like at the time; or how you sat on the green cement wall at Santa Anita for a good view of Shoemaker’s last ride; or what it felt like to cross the undulating grandstand floor at Suffolk which made it impossible to read your program while you walked, lest you trip on a sudden rise or dip.

And so it is that I remember the exact television monitor in the Saratoga backyard where we watched the streak come to an end in the Pacific Classic. If my mom took it as a bad omen, she hid it well. But inside, we all died a little bit that day.

Suffolk Downs closed this week. Cigar passed on a few days later. Somehow, it felt like losing my mom all over again. 

In the `small’ life she led, racing was the star, and the highlight, I daresay, the day she stood in the Suffolk winner’s circle a few races before her hero, and felt she was a part of his story.

She was `just’ a fan, and he was `just’ a horse, and his connections will never know just how much the streak meant to our family, and how for that one and a half years, a horse gave hope to a dying woman, and let her think that maybe everything would somehow, miraculously, be alright.

I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t shed more than a few tears today. 

Farewell, my friend.