His name is all but forgotten, marginalized after half a century’s worth of racing lore. The most important people in his life are long dead. Painting him with the colors of the modern Thoroughbred palette is impossible. He was a freak, a dinosaur, the kind of creature that flew through children’s dreams, and for a glorious seven months of 1971, he was almost too good to be true.
His name was Ack Ack.
There have been 50 years of Eclipse Awards history since the representatives of the Daily Racing Form, Morning Telegraph, Thoroughbred Racing Associations, and National Turf Writers’ Association unified the sport’s season-ending championship honors. Also, they decreed that there should be a cracking good party, all black tie and spangles, with the winners paraded in pomp and circumstance rarely observed for the royalty of a sporting enterprise.
The 1971 exploits of Ack Ack, a fiery front-runner, gave those first Eclipse Awards the ultimate champion its nascent process deserved. Ack Ack’s record of seven wins and a second in eight starts portrayed a racehorse for whom no challenge was too great. If there had been boxes to check, he would have filled them all.
The human cast that ran with Ack Ack in 1971 was a glittery bunch, well suited to the spotlight. Most of it fell on the Academy Award winner Greer Garson, who by 1971 was no longer making feature films but still was a game TV trouper in appearances like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (aficionados will recall her as the first Mrs Farkel). In 1949, Garson had the good sense to marry oilman E.E. ‘Buddy’ Fogelson, and together they had raced a few decent stakes winners before Ack Ack came their way.
Ack Ack’s jockey was Bill Shoemaker, holder of 15 national championships, who in September of 1970 had passed Johnny Longden as the all-time race winner. His trainer was Charlie Whittingham, whose growing legend was amplified by his first national money title in 1970. Whittingham in turn entrusted Ack Ack to one of his elite grooms, Eugene ‘Snake’ McDaniel, who was also the man in the stall of Pretense, the best horse Whittingham trained before Ack Ack came along.
Ack Ack was bred and ran his first 21 races for Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, whose Cain Hoy Stable was named for his estate in South Carolina. Guggenheim was heir to the family’s international mining fortune, spending much of his life running the Guggenheim Family Foundation, although he did find time to be U.S. ambassador to Cuba.
He was among the founders of the New York Racing Association and established Newsday, the Long Island-based newspaper. Guggenheim bred and raced champions Never Bend and Bald Eagle, but his most famous horse was Dark Star, who inflicted upon Native Dancer the only loss of his career, in the 1953 Kentucky Derby.
By the standards of 50 years ago, there were no nuggets of odd surprise in Ack Ack’s pedigree. He was by Battle Joined, whose top line traced back through Colin and Domino, and out of the unraced Fast Turn, by Royal Charger’s fine son Turn-to.
Rich vein
Battle Joined, a foal of 1959, was quick enough at two to win the 6-furlong Saratoga Special and stout enough the following year to take the 13-furlong Lawrence Realization, all the while trained by Woody Stephens for Guggenheim’s Cain Hoy brand. The term ‘ack’ was military communication for the letter ‘A’, and ‘ack-ack’ was a pre-1942 reference to the anti-aircraft guns aimed at assaults from above.
On the mare’s side, Ack Ack tapped into a rich vein that could have been nipped in the bud in the early days of World War II. The Squaw was a daughter of Sickle (sire of Santa Anita Derby and Santa Anita Handicap winner Stagehand), owned by American racing giant Joseph Widener and foaled in France in 1939. The Squaw was kidnapped the following year by the plundering army of the Third Reich, who sent her back to the Fatherland. There she had a brief, poorly documented racing career before producing two German foals.
The Squaw (a name that hopefully would not be approved today) was returned to the U.S. and went on to produce a cohort of remarkable fillies. How (again, ick) won the Coaching Club American Oaks and became the granddam of Preakness winner Tom Rolfe. Sequoia won the Spinaway Stakes and later produced Sham, Secretariat’s noble foil. Cherokee Rose, The Squaw’s foal of 1951, also won the mile and one-half CCA Oaks. Fast Turn, by Turn-to, was Cherokee Rose’s first foal, hitting the ground in 1959.
Turn-to was Guggenheim’s ace 2-year-old of 1953 when he won the Garden State Stakes and Saratoga Special, on the disqualification of Porterhouse, Whittingham’s first champion. It has been said that years later Guggenheim recalled the Saratoga race when he was considering a California trainer for Ack Ack. First, though, Ack Ack was in the care of Woody Stephens, who ran him three times as a 2-year-old, then the following year he was switched to Frank Bonsal, best known for his work with 1963 grass champion Mongo. Bonsal developed Ack Ack into a solid 3-year-old miler, with victories in the Arlington Classic, the Derby Trial, and the Withers Stakes, on a DQ.
Whittingham’s negotiation
Whittingham entered the picture when Ack Ack turned four. His first significant California score came on another disqualification in the 7-furlong Los Angeles Handicap at Hollywood Park, followed by a track record for 5½ furlongs in a Del Mar allowance race. After winning the Autumn Days Handicap at 6½ furlongs on the hillside turf course at Santa Anita, Ack Ack was through for the year, clearly positioned as heir apparent to such brilliant West Coast sprinters as Kissin’ George, Viking Spirit, and Indulto.
Neil Drysdale, about to launch his own Hall of Fame career, was Whittingham’s chief assistant.
“He wasn’t a tall horse, not quite 16 hands, but he was a very muscular horse,” Drysdale said, reaching back through the years. “When you were walking him, he felt like a big horse when you had him on the end of the shank. Very powerful.”
Through the first month of 1971, Ack Ack traded decisions with Jungle Savage, trained by Johnny Longden, in the 6-furlong Palos Verdes Handicap and the 7-furlong San Carlos Handicap. But then, on January 22, 1971, Harry F. Guggenheim died at age 80 after a siege with cancer. In short order, Whittingham negotiated the purchase of Ack Ack by the Fogelsons, while retaining a percentage of the horse in lieu of a commission. The sale price was announced as $500,000, which was close enough.
About that time, word also began to leak that Whittingham was betting on Ack Ack, who’d never won beyond a mile, in the Santa Anita Handicap future book offered at Caliente Racetrack, across the border in Tijuana. By way of sly confirmation, local jockey agent Pete Wilson batted away doubters, saying, “I suggest you do likewise.”
In his first race carrying the colors of the Fogelsons’ Forked Lightning Ranch – dark pink with a blue lightning bolt – Ack Ack stumbled badly at the start of the 8½-furlong San Pasqual Handicap. Shoemaker hung on as Ack Ack gathered up his 129-pound burden, then went on to win by three-quarters of a length over Delaware Chief.
The subsequent San Antonio had reverted to an allowance stakes, which meant Ack Ack got a breather on the weights at 124 pounds. There were ten others in the gate that day, perhaps encouraged by his so-so San Pasqual, but after a smooth start they never saw which way he went. At the end of 9 furlongs, Shoemaker was wrapped up, 3½ lengths clear.
Whittingham licked his lips, checked his future book tickets, and dialed his training to the $145,000 Santa Anita Handicap on March 13, in which Ack Ack would be carrying 130 pounds, courtesy of racing secretary Jimmy Kilroe.
“We hate to put that much weight on a horse until we have to,” Kilroe said in a television interview. “But we had to do something to make it a contest between him and the horses who had been chasing him.”
They still were chasing him at the end of the handicap (watch this video), although his stablemate, the high-stepping Cougar II, made it interesting at the end, closing to within a length and a half. The time was 2:03 on a surface slowed by rain.
Greer Garson’s verdict
In his routine follow-up to a major race, Santa Anita publicist Dan Smith dropped by the Ack Ack barn for a Whittingham debriefing.
“Why don’t you go talk to the owner instead?” Whittingham said. “Mrs Fogelson is right over there.”
So he did, in the warmth of Whittingham’s tack room office, with tape recorder running in the presence of cinema’s Elizabeth Bennet, Marie Curie, and Mrs Miniver rolled into one Greer Garson.
“I asked her what it was like to own a horse like Ack Ack,” said Smith, who went on to a long career as head of Del Mar’s marketing and media department. “She was very theatrical. ‘You cahn’t own a horse like Ack Ack,’ she said, ‘any more than you would own a mountain, or a river.’”
In mid-June, Ack Ack embarked on his summer tour with a reminder of his speed in the 5½-furlong Hollywood Express. He won by three in what amounted to a training move under 130 pounds. Eighteen days later, on the fifth of July, Ack Ack shifted to the grass in the American Handicap, again under 130, and dismissed the opposition with front-running ease.
At a guaranteed $175,000, the 1971 Hollywood Gold Cup offered North America’s richest prize of the year for a race open to all comers. Racing secretary Jack Meyers put on his Walter Vosburgh pants and assigned Ack Ack 134 pounds, more than any horse had carried in the history of the track. Whittingham entered three runners, just in case, and scratched the two not named Ack Ack, then sat back and watched his horse devour an outclassed field by 3¾ lengths.
‘Ack Ack was indeed a terror’
Observing Ack Ack from his perch in New York, Daily Racing Form’s Charles Hatton was impressed. There was nothing to match him down East.
“Ack Ack was indeed a terror,” Hatton wrote, “terribly fast and terribly competitive. He could be rated, but Shoemaker has light hands and it would be unthinkable to fight him needlessly. Riding him must have been a pleasure involving only tying on securely.”
To that point, in the era of widely recognized American championships, no Horse of the Year title had ever been earned with an exclusively California campaign. The closest case was Swaps, whose five major West Coast stakes wins in 1956 were seasoned by victories in Miami and Chicago. This fact was not lost on the Ack Ack camp, which is why the October 2 Woodward Stakes at Belmont Park was circled for his next important engagement.
But then, shortly after settling in for the Del Mar meet, Ack Ack suffered a near fatal bout of colic that ended his 1971 campaign before he could take his show on the road. He recovered, but his scheduled retirement made any scrambling for a late-season appearance impractical.
Notable legacy
After four campaigns, Ack Ack retired to his birthplace of Claiborne Farm, where he spent his stallion years passing on the best threads of a pedigree that still wind through the DNA of the game. His sons included Youth and Broad Brush, while his daughters produced Benny The Dip, Sharp Cat, Royal Anthem, Lost Code, and North Sider. Ack Ack died in 1990, still at Claiborne.
The first Eclipse Awards Dinner was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan on January 26, 1972. Ack Ack was heralded as champion sprinter, champion older horse, and Horse of the Year.
Among the other champions honored that night was the 3-year-old filly Turkish Trousers, Ack Ack’s stablemate, along with 2-year-olds Riva Ridge and Numbered Account, 3-year-old Canonero II, older mare Shuvee, and turf horse Run The Gauntlet. To no-one’s surprise, Whittingham grabbed the trophy for champion trainer and the Fogelsons were deemed the sport’s top owners. Laffit Pincay Jr completed a near West Coast sweep in winning the first of his five seasonal awards as champion jockey.
“This was the most magnificent tribute to the Thoroughbred horse since the inception of the sport outside the Roman Wall of Chester, England, in the 16th century,” wrote Daily Racing Form’s Charles Hatton, giving a nod to the game’s British roots. “Those who savor the romance as well as the excitement and drama of the turf cannot fail to note Ack Ack is the most accomplished of a season of champions.”