Before the Big One

"If my horse doesn't win this race," said white-haired Clifford Mooers with a grin, "my face will be as long as that post. I'm not a very good loser." Then Cliff Mooers climbed to his box in the stone grandstand at Keeneland track. The odds board showed that his horse, a long-barreled chestnut named Old Rockport, was 4-5 to win the $20,000 Blue Grass Stakes, his last big test race before the Kentucky Derby.

In his 59 years, crinkle-eyed Texan Cliff Mooers has collected a wide assortment of animals ranging from Alaskan huskies (he was a gold prospector in 1913) to mynah birds, flamingos, monkeys and penguins. After World War I, in which he served as a flyer, Cliff Mooers went into the oil business, made some fortunate strikes and became president of the Shasta Oil Co. That gave him a chance to do something else he wanted to do: he established a deer sanctuary on his Texas ranch where he ran everything from mule deer to rare muntjac barking-deer imported from India.

But nothing ever gave him more excitement than what was, for Cliff, the newly discovered horse game. He bred Old Rockport himself (and named him after his favorite Texas golf course). After Old Rockport won the $100,000 Santa Anita Derby last winter (TIME, Feb. 28), Mooers got a transcription of the announcer calling the race; he still listens to it entranced, tears rolling down his cheeks.

For the Blue Grass Stakes, Old Rockport had the same jockey who rode him to victory in the Santa Anita, sensational young (18) Apprentice Gordon Glisson. But soon after the four-horse field charged from the starting gate, Glisson found himself boxed in by three veteran riders, Johnny Longden, Ted Atkinson and Conn McCreary. The cagey veterans had the young "bug" rider where they wanted him, and they kept him there.

Glisson eased back, snuggled the rail and waited for an opening. In the stretch, Old Rockport finally moved out from the rail. But either the horse failed to respond with a 4-5 effort, or Glisson was too smart to use his colt up with the $100,000 Derby only nine days off.

It was a blanket finish, with little more than a length separating all four: Mrs. Royce G. Martin's Halt, J. A. Kinard Jr.'s Johns Joy, Greentree's Wine List and --fourth--Old Rockport. Hard-Loser Cliff Mooers had a grin on his face. Said he: "We can afford to lose this one if we can get the big one."

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