Go see a man about a horse

How do you put the finishing touches on a lukewarm racing season that was nearly washed off the map by Mother Nature? Well, you present an over-sized key to the city to a creature lacking an opposable digit to hold the damn thing and who has little, if any connection to Saratoga Springs other than the fact that he’s a horse that has shacked up here for a few summers.

And if that’s not going bombastic enough, you proclaim a semi-official “Curlin Day” while hoisting banners proclaiming “Curlin is coming” all along the main street. Or as the Times Union’s increasingly recalcitrant Marv Cermak might say, that’s the New York Racing Association again reaching into its “bottomless bag of money-making changes that are eroding Saratoga Race Course's historic charm.”

But with the cool September breeze now rustling the still-lush green foliage of summer, NYRA needed to do something to whip up the masses for a last push to the rail. The result was a Monday morning media extravaganza announcing the upcoming extravaganza on Saturday over a horse that trained but never actually raced in the city. The whole affair is oddly reminiscent of the Funny Cide procession that swept through the Saratoga Racecourse last year, when the gelding was presented with an oversized granola cake shaped like a Rolex.

So here we stand poised again to deify a horse for little other reason than to spin the turnstiles for one last push this summer. It’s not a bad idea either, considering NYRA’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and the fact that track attendance is down by nearly 17 percent; a factor that can largely be attributed to the faltering economy and poor early August weather.

While we’re elevating Curlin as the unofficial king of Saratoga, it’s probably best Saratogians are armed with a bit of trivia about the horse. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t named after the abbreviated post-beer binge term for the popular Canadian sport. In fact, he was named after Charles Curlin, an African-American slave who had the dubious honor of fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The name was allegedly picked by the horse’s former owner, Shirley Cunningham Jr., a blood-relative of the soldier.

Speaking of Cunningham, he was among a trio of class-action attorneys jailed after being accused of skimming up to $64 million of the $200 million judgment awarded in a diet-drug lawsuit. Curlin’s majority owner –the founder of the Kendall-Jackson vineyard –recently tried to foreclose on Cunningham’s minority share of the horse, but was unsuccessful.

So to sum things up: Black soldiers fighting for the side of slavery, crooked lawyers skimming settlement money from a bunch of hypertensive fat people and a winemaker trying to seize full control of a horse that has absolutely nothing to do with the Spa City. Now that’s Saratoga style.