It's a plaintive cry heard often, from athletes who came along too soon to reap the awards of eras they had to watch from the sidelines long after they had retired.
Hank Aaron, who died this week at 86, topped out at a $220,000 salary and $40,000 year-end bonus during 1974, the season he broke Babe Ruth's homerun record. Mike Trout is currently being paid $35.5 million a year by the Angels.
Ben Hogan, winner of 64 tournaments, nine majors, and a career grand slam, earned total purses of $330,000 and change, which probably bought a lot in the 1940s and '50s. But come on. Kevin Na, a winner of five tournaments, made $1.1 million for simply winning the Sony Open in Hawaii last week on Oahu.
And so it goes. Sports fans have given up adjusting such numbers to inflation and have accepted the fact that today's professional athletes playing in the upper echelon exist in a world of their own, divorced from the realities of everyday life, no matter how many selfies they take with folks on the street.
Then there is horse racing, a sport through the looking glass, which has trended as more rewarding to be a part of the past than the present. Not even the distant past at that, as the Pegasus World Cup Invitational (G1), to be run Saturday, Jan. 23 at Gulfstream Park, so vividly illustrates.
There is no sense going through the permutations of the Pegasus purse structure from its debut in 2017 to its current manifestation. Let's just note that Arrogate, the first winner, took home $7 million, followed by Gun Runner ($7 million), City of Light ($4 million), and Mucho Gusto ($1,662,000).
This year's purse of $3 million is the same as last year's, and it's nothing to sneeze at. If the winner beats Knicks Go and Code of Honor they will have earned their money for the 9 furlongs of hard work. Still, there always will be some longing among those who labor on commission—jockey and trainers—for the good old days of four years ago.
"When Mucho Gusto won last year, I said, 'Look at these poor people, running for only three million bucks," said Michael McCarthy, who trained City of Light. "Somebody's taking a serious pay cut."
McCarthy was laughing at himself since he is back this year and delighted there is still as much as $3 million in the pot. He's also the only Pegasus trainer who knows what it feels like to win the race. His runner City of Light, winner of the 2018 Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile (G1), blew the doors off the 2019 Pegasus by nearly six lengths against a field that dwarfs Saturday's lineup in depth of class. Among the beaten that day were Tom's d'Etat , Audible , Gunnevera , Bravazo , and older male champion Accelerate.
For this version of the Pegasus, McCarthy has brought what amounts to a reasonably sharp knife to a small calibre gunfight. Independence Hall , a son of Constitution who races for WinStar Farm, Eclipse Thoroughbreds, Twin Creeks Racing Stables, and RKV Racing, was well regarded enough in the Runhappy Malibu Stakes (G1) on Dec. 26 at Santa Anita Park to be 4-to-1 in the face of heavyweights Charlatan and Nashville . The fact that he finished a distant fifth without putting up much of a fight has remained a mystery that McCarthy has yet to solve, although a sharp 6-furlong work out West before the colt left for Miami went a long way toward turning the page.
"I can always use the trainer as an excuse," McCarthy said. "The slower track may not have been to his liking that day. You had a horse like Nashville come all that way and didn't show up, after he'd run so well on fast racetracks. So, I just don't know.
"I do know our horse has done well since," McCarthy added. "He's a very professional guy who goes about his business every day. He deserved to be bet like he was in the Malibu."
A year ago, Independence Hall was in the early conversation for the spring classics after winning the Jerome Stakes at Aqueduct and then finishing second in the Sam F. Davis Stakes (G3), while trained by Michael Trombetta. The colt went to the sidelines after a poor showing in the Curlin Florida Derby (G1) and did not resurface until last fall under McCarthy's watch in California, when he won an allowance optional claiming race at Del Mar. Then came the Malibu.
The Pegasus will be run for the second time without any race-day medication, which means Independence Hall will be running without Lasix for the first time in his career.
"That's always a concern, since statistics show that so many of these horses have some sort of pulmonary hemorrhage at some point," McCarthy said. "We scoped him after the Malibu, and he was clean. He worked three-quarters in 12-and-change without Lasix the other day. And this horse has been very healthy, so it's not as much of a concern."
As far as that goes, the McCarthy spends every day thanking his lucky stars that he recovered from a bout with COVID-19 last spring, when the pandemic was gathering speed.
"It took me a good two months to feel like myself again," the trainer said. "The crazy thing is, I had asthma as a child, but I never once had trouble taking a deep breath. Never had a cough or a temperature. You get fatigued easily. You get clouded mentally from time to time. But with people losing their lives, or losing quality of life, by those accounts my symptoms were swift, and they haven't recurred."
This makes McCarthy all the more grateful to have a horse and his stable involved in an event like the Pegasus, even if Independence Hall is hanging up there at 20-to-1 on the line.
"When I was here with City of Light, I felt like he was liable to throw in any type of spectacular performance, and he did," McCarthy said. "This time, we'll need to get lucky. But just in case something happens, I've brought my good suit."
