Key Words

Hello World, Well, you can believe me when I say that even those of us who don't trust the malevolent spirit of Affirmed as far as we can throw it, like me, certainly didn't see that one coming, that's for sure. I mean, the poor horse didn't even make it to the big race in the first place, much less get a chance to win or at least limp off the field a heroic failure, alas. They tell me the powers behind I'll Have Another made the prudent decision to retire the colt after winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, rather than risk hurting him and the other horses in the race, by running him in the Belmont with a leg injury. I'm sure that I speak for everyone concerned when I say that we can all get behind this wise and magnanimous gesture, to protect life and limb of everybody involved, while taking the high road, the long view, and the sensible approach under the circumstances. But they're not fooling me one bit, I can tell you that. No, no, I have long since seen Affirmed's dastardly handiwork from the great beyond, more times than I care to recollect, working its fiendish magic behind the scenes with a ruthless precision that is chilling to behold. So the owners are free to spout whatever fairy tales they care to concoct for the occasion, but they'll never convince me that they came up with this idea entirely on their own, and without any supernatural intervention of any kind. Frankly, that's just nothing but a lot of horsefeathers, and I'm not buying it. But at least I'll Have Another went out on top, and the evil ghost of Affirmed didn't get his hooks into him while he was running, or anything even more diabolical. In fact, they had a very nice retirement ceremony for the young star (who probably wondered what all the fuss was about) and was given the honor of leading the post parade for the Belmont Stakes, which was a fine send-off for his return to California. So without the top two contenders in the race (the runner-up at the previous two races, Bodemeister, had not been entered in the Belmont to start with - a move that his owners might have regretted later, once I'll Have Another pulled out) it really became a wide open field for anybody to come along and win it, and no reason for any interference from Affirmed across the great divide, or any other previous Triple Crown winners for that matter. The handicappers settled on Dullahan as the consolation favorite, but it turned out to be the return of the prodigal Union Rags, just nipping Paynter at the wire, and Dullahan nowhere in sight. Way back in the beginning of May, Union Rags had been the heavy favorite to win the Kentucky Derby, but he finished a disappointing 7th, and as a result, wasn't entered in the Preakness at all. Perhaps helping his cause in the Belmont was a change of riders, with the veteran John Velazquez in the saddle, who we all remember from last year's upset win aboard Animal Kingdom in the Kentucky Derby, when the favorite Uncle Mo was a last-minute scratch. It's probably a good thing that there's no "jockey curse" equivalent of Affirmed's steely grip on the Triple Crown curse, or I'm thinking that poor John Velazquez would be in big trouble. In other sports disasters, the weekend subway series against the Yankees did nothing to enhance the Mets position in the standings, in fact, the three straight losses sent them tumbling into a woeful third, a full 4-1/2 games out of first place, thanks not, when previously they had been knocking at the very door of leading their division. Across the municipal divide, Da Bombers inched to within a 1/2 game of the top in their division, and hurdled over the pesky Orioles in the process. In an interesting O. Henry-like twist, the plucky Amazin's went on to sweep Tampa Bay out of first and clear the way for the Yankees to take over the top spot, while the Yanks were beating up on Atlanta, and giving the Mets a chance to climb over them into second. I guess that's why they say it's an ill wind that blows no good, although as long as the unquiet spirit of Affirmed is still rumbling around, I'm not so sure about that. On the frozen front, it's really true that the scrappy LA Kings went on to win the Stanley Cup over the New Jersey Devils in 6 games, becoming the first 8th-seeded team in NHL history to accomplish this feat, since they first started swatting pucks around with sticks back when the dinosaurs and I were young, Maggie. (Of course, this was way before the invention of the wheel, so there was no Zamboni to clear the ice, and it was a real chore to push that woolly mammoth around the ice in between periods, I can tell you.) As a matter of fact, the Los Angeles team was admitted to the NHL in the great expansion of 1967, and this is their first Stanley Cup in franchise history, including the years that the superlative Wayne Gretzky played there, from 1988 to 1996, so this was really a monumental event for the organization and its euphoric legion of fans. And frankly, the dinosaurs and I thought that the picket lines of unemployed woolly mammoths were just entirely out of place, for heaven's sake. Meanwhile on the hard wood, the NBA finals came down to the unlikely Oklahoma City Thunder and the all-too-likely Miami Heat, although it took 7 tough games for Miami to get past the Celtics, so being in the finals was no sure thing this time around. Professional basketball is new to Oklahoma (although the team is not all that new, being the former Seattle SuperSonics, who relocated to the Midwest in 2008) and the fans have turned out in force to cheer their players, even camping outside of the arena overnight during the playoffs, in a show of support that speaks volumes. (Even at the height of Lin-Sanity in The Big Apple, you would never catch even the most ardent Knicks fans sleeping on the sidewalks outside of Madison Square Garden, by golly.) On the other hand, they didn't have picket lines full of unemployed woolly mammoths to deal with either. Of course, everyone knows that Thursday was Flag Day, a fine time to show a little love to the good old red, white and blue, and long may she wave, by jingo. Around the old homestead, the admittedly erratic Flag Brigade did a creditable job flying the colors upstairs and downstairs, and remembered to take them back in again later, which is no foregone conclusion for this particular ritual, and I ought to know. Unlike the erstwhile Decoration Day on May 30, the weather on the 14th was fine for flag-waving, with plenty of sunshine and blue skies, and no rain in the forecast to threaten Old Glory's time to shine. So the neighborhood was improved with patriotic hues for the day, at least in our little corner of the world, and the star-spangled banner was the king of the hill for its own special holiday. And that's not just a lot of rockets' red glare, believe me. And speaking of the national anthem, of course, even the most wayward schoolchild remembers the fabled Francis Scott Key, the American lawyer, author and amateur poet who penned the words to the star-spangled banner, and then set it to a popular tune of the day - and the rest, as they say, is history, and they weren't just whistling Dixie, even if they wanted to. Well, for all of you fans out there of the twilight's last gleaming, it took my entire life to just find out something that I never knew before, and I can't help but wonder that this hasn't been more widely circulated, so that it wasn't such a big historical mystery, like the Loch Ness monster or whatever happened to Pink Lady & Jeff, for instance. It turns out that a distant relative of the famous anthem-writer was the equally famous scribbler F. Scott Fitzgerald (and even us wayward schoolchildren can recall his Great Gatsby, either with love or loathing) which in retrospect, seems so obvious that it's a wonder that it never suggested itself at any time previously. In fact, his actual full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, even though he was born 50 years after his famous namesake had gone on to his final reward, and I would think that the family relationship would have been more publicly acknowledged during Fitzgerald's career, so that everybody would have already long since known about it, and I wouldn't just stumble across it by accident 100 years later, and wonder where this had been my whole life. I guess somewhere in the great beyond, Francis Scott Key and Affirmed are having a big fat laugh at our expense, and frankly, my advice to the woolly mammoths would be not to turn their backs on either of them, or the Great Gatsby either, for that matter. Say, is that O. Henry that I hear whistling Dixie? Elle