Scheinman: 1 Kentucky Derby 2024 bid has a familiar ring to it

Last October, I started looking at a 2-year-old named Liberal Arts, who was running in the Grade 3 Street Sense Stakes at Churchill Downs. The longest price in a short field, the more I looked, the more I liked and took a swing at the window, and he won easy by 2 3/4 lengths. 

So this horse, trained by kind of an unknown named Robert Medina, lodged in my brain. This winter Liberal Arts showed up in Arkansas and ran Feb. 3 in the Southwest Stakes (G3). He came in third but whooshed past the top two after the wire, clearly prepping, and Medina announced he is pointing for the Arkansas Derby (G1). 

I loved Liberal Arts’s eye-popping and ill-fated sire Arrogate and was sorry he died so young. So last Saturday, I did something I almost never never do – put money on a Kentucky Derby Futures Wager, betting Liberal Arts to win and wheeling him in an exacta key box with all the other horses for $78. Probable payoffs on some of those exactas were posted at $9,999 as he closed at 57-1.

A couple days later, I wrote to my friend John Sparkman, bloodstock editor at the old Thoroughbred Times, and asked what he thought of Liberal Arts’s profile. He wrote back, “I’d say he is one of the genuine candidates that is more likely than most to get the trip and, in fact, get better over the trip.”

Sparkman also noted Liberal Arts is related to City of Light and Careless Jewel, two monsters I completely overlooked when I first began mucking around this horse in the Thoroughbred pedigree database. So I went back in to further explore the family.

There I saw Liberal Arts is related to $5 million winner City of Light through an old mare from 1970 named Careless Notion. Of 12 babies, Careless Notion dropped 11 fillies, and, whew, what a family. One of them was Martha Booth, the line Liberal Arts comes through. Another was Fabulous Notion, whose daughter Paris Notion produced City of Light, winner of the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile, Pegasus World Cup, Malibu, Triple Bend and Oaklawn Handicap. Then I saw that another, Not So Careless, had a daughter who produced Careless Jewel, who swept the Delaware Handicap, Alabama and Cotillion in succession in 2009.

Well, then one of those 11 really hit me, and I did a double take. Careless Notion also was the dam of a broodmare named The Way We Were, who just so happens to be the mama of one of my two all-time favorite racehorses, Fighting Notion, who I covered back in the misty times when just a cub reporter for a suburban Maryland newspaper called the Montgomery Journal. His owners Herb and Arlene Kushner lived in the county, and any chance to write about racing I took.

Fighting Notion was trained by Nancy Heil

, who is still at it at age 80, beloved around Maryland racing like a tiny, adorable favorite aunt and based at Laurel Park. The son of Fighting Fit held the track record for six furlongs – 1:08.14 set in the Housebuster Stakes in 1992 – at Laurel for years. If you do an Equibase search, you’ll see this missile’s best speed figures rank up there with Arrogate. Virtually no horses run as fast as he did anymore.

Two years prior to the track record, in 1990, Heil and the Kushners must have shared a high fever and entered Fighting Notion in the Preakness Stakes. That was the year of Summer Squall and Unbridled, so he was quite a long shot coming in off a fourth in the Cherry Hill Mile at Garden State, a second in the Deputed Testamony Stakes and an allowance win May 1 at Pimlico.

The day before the race I visited Nancy at her barn, and absolutely nobody else was paying attention to this nobody trainer, so we happily whiled away the morning together, and she let me in the stall with a bag of carrots for Fighting Notion. He was such a gentle and lovely chestnut sweetheart, and since my newspaper didn’t publish on weekends, I didn’t have to rush away and type up another story. 

It was playtime, and I just knew this horse was going to do something. I had a notion. 

Late afternoon the next day, with the sprawling infield crowd a Budweiser away from bedlam, and inebriated me right in the thick of it, I decided to hop up on a stranger’s keg – you won’t ever see that again – and call the race off a jumbo screen.

No one could really see what was going on, so a gang of drunk and easily distracted fans assembled around me when I began in my best Dave Johnson impression, “And they’re off in the Preakness Stakes.”

Jockey Albert Delgado, who in 1982 won the Eclipse Award for outstanding apprentice rider, sent Fighting Notion right to the front, and they motored along with the horse’s perfect, rolling, lubricated action. Mister Frisky, who had won 16 straight races going into the Kentucky Derby, sat right off him with Gary Stevens, but when they got to the three-eighths pole, Mister Frisky had no next gear.

With his enormous white blaze guiding the way, Fighting Notion opened it up, and they spun around the turn heading for home. Up on the keg I called it as best I could, making stuff up all the way, but my heart was in my throat, because Fighting Notion was still there at the top of the lane. I rose to the moment and shouted, “And down the stretch they come,”  and my new legion of followers cheered me on.

Right before the eighth pole, Summer Squall and Unbridled, of course, reeled him in, flying by in their own world, but Fighting Notion stayed on courageously inside the sixteenth pole before tiring to fifth. Atop the keg, I yelled, “And Unbridled wins the Preakness,” and the gang let out a huge cheer, except I quickly realized Unbridled had not won the Preakness, and before anyone noticed this trivial mistake and ran me up a pole, I hopped down from my perch and disappeared into the impenetrable sea. None of those people hanging on my every word knew who I was anyway.

Fighting Notion had a bunch of great races still in him but no chance for babies since he had been gelded. When he retired, Nancy took him to her farm for what should have been a long, happy life, but it was not to be. Fighting Notion perished with five other horses in a massive barn fire just two weeks after retiring in 1995, and poor, sweet Nancy was sent reeling, heartbroken.

She never forgot, though, and it all came back for her when a horse she bred herself, an amazing story in his own right, won the 2020 Maryland Million Sprint at odds of 16-1. Thirty years later.What had she named this unlikely homebred? Karan’s Notion.

So here we are with spring in the offing, and this whole thing with Liberal Arts and Fighting Notion has a powerful sense of kismet for me. I may not hit my Derby future bet, but, boy, the Preakness sure is coming into focus.

John Scheinman is a two-time Eclipse Award winner for best feature or column.