All That Glitters Should Be Gold

"Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion man."—Jeff Lebowski Don't get me wrong. I'm not angry. I'm just very, very disappointed. Disappointed, as in a Pet Rock in my Christmas stocking, a scoreless tie in the Super Bowl, a vegetarian barbecue. That kind of disappointed. Once again, for the sixth time, in fact, voters spread out across this great racing landscape rejected the idea that the horse who did business for parts of six seasons as Kona Gold was not worthy of election to the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. You've all been there, of course. It's pretty cool, and I can't wait to visit post-COVID to play with the new interactive kiosks dedicated to the horses, trainers, and jockeys enshrined therein. But for every racing star inducted, the truly dedicated racing fan will have a worthy horse that is overlooked. For this weary Westerner, that horse is Kona Gold. It is too late to make the usual case for Kona Gold this time around. That horse has left the barn—in a stakes and track record 1:07.77 while winning the 2000 Breeders' Cup Sprint (G1) at Churchill Downs, among many other flights of brilliance, as codified by 17 Beyer figures of 110 or higher in his 30 starts. Sorry, I said I wasn't going to do that. Anyway, hats off to American Pharoah and Todd Pletcher for their election to the Hall of Fame. They were among 10 nominees to the Class of 2021, and as a member of the committee that puts the ballot together, I thought it was a pretty handsome list. Voters could vote for as many of the nominees that they deemed worthy. But with eight of the 10 nominees rejected, I'm feeling a little stupid. How could we have gotten it so wrong? Clearly, as nominators, we are lousy at the job. In frustration, I reached out to a few voters among the 150 who returned Hall of Fame ballots this time around. It is an eclectic bunch, embracing print journalists, broadcasters, historians, authors, racing officials, track announcers, handicappers, bloggers, and podcasters. A good number are retired or merely dabbling. Many have no daily connection to the sport, or at least no particular deadlines for their work. They all love the game. If my sampling is to be believed, I discovered that nearly all of my known friends on the voting list voted for Kona Gold. Clearly, I don't have enough friends. I also learned of some interesting, self-imposed rules and admitted prejudices harbored by voters that, at least in the case of Kona Gold, would have steered votes away. They included:—A confession of a dated, yet apparently still vibrant "East Coast" bias against candidates who do most of their racing west of the Mississippi River. This unwritten rule was officially repealed in 1978 when Native Diver, who ran 80 of his 81 races in California, was elected to the Hall of Fame. Clearly, his 34 stakes wins and three consecutive Hollywood Gold Cups helped, and his one bad race in Chicago was not held against him. Hopefully, the ranks of voters who continue to be confused as to the relative merits of winning at Saratoga Race Course or Santa Anita Park is dwindling. Thankfully, after a long, dismal slog through the early decades of the Hall, the 21st century has brought a happy little cluster of inductees with fulsome West Coast records, including Ancient Title, Best Pal, and Lava Man. Game On Dude also was rejected this year. Go figure.—Five's the limit. Or four. Or three. Or whatever some artificial maximum of "yes" votes some voters place upon themselves, inventing a guideline that was far from the intentions of Hall of Fame caretakers when they went to a ballot without rigid horse-trainer-jockey categories. The idea that candidates were pitted against each other was discarded. It was felt that voters deserved to judge nominees on their own merits, with no limit on how many or what kind could enter. In any particular year, there could be two jockeys enshrined, or three trainers, or zero horses. All they had to do was get 50% of the votes, plus one. Yes, voters can vote for them all. It probably would never happen, but why go into the process imposing a personal limit when that work has already been done? We're talking history writ large, not consumption of Oreos.—Good, better, best. This one's a pip. In justifying why they voted for only, say, the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years or a trainer whose horses have earned more than $400 million, I have heard it said by more than one Hall of Fame voter, "It's called the 'Hall of Fame,' not the 'Hall of the Very Good.'" Very catchy, and if they would like to submit a list of names of the "greats" it would save the rest of us a lot of time. They might as well be summoning the pithy wisdom of Supreme Court associate justice Potter Stewart, who declared in a 1964 censorship ruling about obscene content in a film, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."—Then there is the 50 Percent Club, those folks who won't even stoop to consider a Hall of Fame candidate who has failed to win at least half their starts. I admire such evangelical fervor, and I wish that the history of horse racing was so cut and dried. Kona Gold won 14 of his 30 starts. Missed it by that much. Then again, by their standards the 50 Percenters would retroactively purge the likes of Alysheba, Arts and Letters, Bewitch, Challedon, Gamely, Precisionist, Seabiscuit, Sword Dancer, and Skip Away. They all won fewer than half their starts. But at least they all were very good. With Hall of Fame voters bringing such a variety of baggage to the process, I think it is time for their votes to be made public. Hall of Fame management has cloaked the totals in secrecy for far too long—haven't they heard transparency is trending?—and full reporting of how voters voted would be both healthy and enlightening in this age of social media interaction. For now, those of us frustrated by Kona Gold's annual rite of rejection can feel the pain of the fans of Jim Rice (count me among them), whose career included those three remarkable seasons with the Boston Red Sox, 1977-79, during which he hit 124 home runs and was 1978 American League MVP. Rice was elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in his 15th and final year of eligibility. "The only thing I can say is I'm glad it's over with," Rice said at the time. "It doesn't matter that I got the call this year versus getting it in my first eligible year. What matters is—I got it." Under the current rules, there is no statute of limitations on how many times a candidate can appear on the ballot for horse racing's Hall of Fame. Kona Gold's record will not dim with time. Hopefully, next year he'll get the call, or the next, or the next. And it will be a great day when he gets it.