Allen Jerkens

The handle on Thursday's nine-race card at Hawthorne was $2,080,655. That may not seem like much, but at Hawthorne, which opened Mar. 5, it was a cause for celebration. It was the fourth time this year that the Chicago-area track had topped the $2-million mark in handle, something that happened just once all of last year. What's going on? The answer, says Hawthorne Racing Analyst Jim Miller, is that bettors are gravitating towards the track's 12% takeout in the win, place and show pool, an industry low. "The lower takeout...

If anything, you would think it the very last thing that might appeal to one who has spent decades acquainting himself, at viscerally close quarters, with all the things that can go wrong with a Thoroughbred. Yet here he is, sharing the same vicissitudes as those clients for whom--weighing the ups and downs of their trade--his veterinary skills so long served as a vital fulcrum. As one of the original partners of the Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital, Dr. Scott Pierce could scarcely have gone into breeding with fewer illusions....

For better or worse, we're all products of our environment. Better, plainly, in the case of Jimmy Jerkens and Wesley Ward--both raised by exemplary practitioners in a trade that this weekend sees each send a gifted sophomore dashing round a single turn. Each of these trainers, of course, has long stood on his own two feet. So we'll wait and see how much flexibility Jerkens may consider latent in Green Light Go (Hard Spun) after he returns in the Roar S. at Gulfstream Saturday. Sprinting, after all, could yet turn...