Ruidoso
- By
Charles Carroll
Ruidoso means noisy in Spanish and they say it was the
babbling brook that the town was built on that was the basis for the
nameand not the hordes of Texans who start moving in about now
to get away from summer humidity of Dallas and Houston, and watch their
ponies run. But we New Mexicans have our doubts.
Ruidoso is one of the Meccas for horseplayers.
Saratoga, Belmont, Churchill Downs, Arlington, Del Mar, HialeahRuidoso?
Yuh, as a matter of fact.
Summers in Ruidoso are no longer so tightly focused on horse
racing as they once were. The Inn Of The Mountain Gods, on the
nearby and spectacular Mescalero Apache Reservation, pounded Ruidoso
Downs cut of the gambling dollar for many years before the Downs was
finally allowed to add slots just this past season. Maybe more
importantly, as far as marketing went, the casino did what casinos
do: it offered at least an okay place to sit and the normal
amenities to make the average gemoke feel like he was welcomewhile
Ruidoso Downs has always been a horse owners club. Thats how it
started, and it has never quite gotten over it. If youre not a
horse owner you are not quite charged with trespassing, but
dont even think about sitting down. It has also never quite
gotten over losing its claim to the Worlds Richest Horse Race, which
it held for many years, before Thoroughbred purses started breaking a
million regularly.
Ruidoso Downs has had a couple of heydays; by far the most
romantic was the first, when a bunch of rich cowboys and
cowboy-wanna-bes first formulated the All American Futurity for
Quarter Horse two-year-olds. They put up the money for the purse,
and you can almost picture the scenes and good, stout-hearted, cowboy
times in the Finishline Bar up in the pines of the old town where
Billy The Kid was a juvenile delinquent not so many decades
earlier. The purse for the All American Futurity was a million
buckswhen a dollar would buy you a steak and a beer, so maybe multiply
by twenty to get todays value. Whether the public came to
their race was completely incidental.
The second heyday was the one I got to see. This was
when every backyard in Texas and Oklahoma sprouted an oil well and oil
shortages put prices through the roof. It became high sport in
New Mexico to make fun of the Texas nuevos ricos (while at the
same time, taking a pot-shot in our own backyards now and then, hoping
for some Jed Clampert luck). This is when mansions were built in
the pines, and local society moved out of the bars into protected
private gatherings in gated communitiesand a half-dozen golf courses
were built (in what I, almost begrudgingly, admit really is a quite
beautiful high-mountain resort town). Quarter Horses of
fashionable racing bloodlines, and maybe something youve never heard
of: Cutting Horses, started selling for about the amount of the
purseas yearlings. The cowboy mystique was still there,
but its hold was beginning to slip. One thing didnt change: whether
the public came to their race was completely incidental.
This second heyday ended in the 80s, when Texas/Oklahoma oil
values declined, and the summer residents started spending at least as
much time with their $1,500 golf clubs as with their $150,000 allowance
horses.
I havent been to Ruidoso Downs since the slots were added,
and Im not sure what I will find. I have mixed emotions about
them anyway. I know they raise purses and they were a huge shot
in the arm for nearby Sunland Park (a New Mexico track within spitting
distance of El Paso, Texas, built there while pari-mutuel betting was
outlawed in Texas). But, I have this nagging nostalgia for live
horse racingbeing there, at the paddock, at the finish lineand
although it covers all forms of horse racing, there is no stronger
dose than the incredible experience of being close to Quarter Horse
racing.
Until about ten years ago, getting a trainers license in New
Mexico amounted to taking a written test, with no apprenticeship
requirement, so I spent a lot of time rubbing and hot walking for
one-horse trainers who trailered to the tracks. Ruidoso Downs,
for me will always be the premier place for getting close to horse
racingshort of riding the pony horse.
Ruidoso is not easy to get to. You can either fly into
Albuquerque and drive southeast for about three hours, or catch a small
plane between the two airports. You might want to do this soon,
since the town of Ruidoso is an even bigger fire hazard than Los Alamos
(some houses and condos were actually built around Ponderosa pine trees
which extend through their roofsand six inches is considered a fire
break). Ruidoso had a good-sized forest fire at the same time as
the Los Alamos disaster, but since it does not have a nuclear weapons
lab (as far as we know), you probably didnt hear about it. The
next time, without a lucky turn of wind, Ruidoso may disappear.
While it is still there, get there! Get there because
its kinda pretty. Get there because it is the absolute mother
lode of Cowboy Kitsch. Get there because Quarter Horse
handicapping can be extremely profitable (and they run a mixed
card, so you get more familiar thoroughbred sprints as wellalthough
its a bullring, with one of the longest runs to the turn youll ever
see, and forget about the two-turn, 7.5f route).
But, most of all, get there for one special purpose:
to stand by the Ruidoso finish line during the Quarter Horse futurity
and derby trials. Not the big events themselves, when you are
packed in bodies and noise of fellow groundlings who dont have
permanent name plates on tables in the turf clubbut the earlier
trials, when the fastest horses in the world are running as fast as
they can, and you have some elbow room and only moderate noise from the
crowd. That is when you will feel the distant rumble come roaring
down the track until the ground literally shakes under your
feet. The horses in a 350-yard sprint are not
decelerating and they are not strung out along the far rail, 60
feet awaythey are accelerating, as you will never see in a
Thoroughbred race. They are so close youll feel clods of dirt
fly in your own facenot some distant jockeys on a TV
screen. You will hear the outside horses huffing and puffing like
freight trains and the jockeys' last-second yells and whacks of the
whip, as they go by in the fastest gear that horses possess.
After youve done this you can go back to your comfortable
seat at MGM, or NYOTB, and be good for another year or two. This
has nothing to do with handicappingit has everything to do with
recharging your horse racing battery. The finish line experience
at Ruidoso in a Grade-I Quarter Horse trial is not something you
analyze, it is a physical experience that makes body and spirit come
together with the pure instinct of why humans love horses and why this
is the greatest sport on earth.
