Light One Up For Cigar
Our Sportsperson of the Year isn’t a person, but it’s been that kind of a year in sports. Judging by the cover of Time magazine, it’s been a lean 1995 elsewhere too. Newt Gingrich?
Our annual award is considerably more modest, for we deal with the insulated realm of athletics, where scores and highlights are supposed to detach us from budgets and Bosnia.
Regrettably, it doesn’t always work that way, which is why our Sportsperson of the Year for 1995 is a horse, Cigar.
There are still a few days left before we turn the calendar, and sports has taught us to expect the worst.
However, there’s very little chance that Cigar will cheat on his taxes anytime soon, beat up his wife or girlfriend, report to work drunk or strung out on drugs, demand a guaranteed contract, flip the bird to fans, or utter a stupid or insulting word.
The worst thing Cigar could have done this year was lose a race, and he didn’t even do that. Cigar won 1995, going away.
It wasn’t close. There can be a photo, but it will be team picture for excellence. Cal Ripken was so professional that he didn’t even suffer guilt by association with baseball. Michael Jordan returned, as did Monica Seles and Mario Lemieux. So did Mike Tyson, ready or not.
Hakeem Olajuwon never left, though written out of a few scripts, nor did Greg Maddux’s bashful brilliance. Rebecca Lobo put women’s basketball in the front row beside the San Francisco 49ers, but make room for Northwestern’s Wildcats, the best in class. They went from nowhere to the Rose Bowl without handcuffs, no easy trick in college sports.
But 1995 felt like a slap in the face, as in Benedicte Tarango, whose husband Jeff completed the Wimbledon doubles entry of ugly Americans. Dennis Conner was a boob at sea, Ben Wright is still explaining those spike marks on his tongue, and Sir Roger Bannister broke yet another barrier by announcing that black sprinters have “certain natural anatomical advantages.”
That eliminates Peter McNeeley, the fraudulent canvas-back who went from horizontal hold to selling us pizzas. NCAA gumshoes took time out from scandal mismanagement to outlaw end-zone prayers, Art Modell spoke for ownership with his brazen act of greed, and a woman who is no baseball fan - Judge Sonia Sotomayor - put all those macho men in place by putting the game back on the field.
Meanwhile, all Cigar did was win friends, admirers and 10 races without defeat. He won on six tracks in six states. Cigar was bred to run on grass and was switched to dirt, but he never complained about being mishandled or disrespected.
Cigar missed the prestigious Triple Crown as a 3-year-old, but he never blamed a trainer, demanded to be traded to another barn or went on strike. He merely went to the post, relatively late in life, and beat the best toward a single-season record of $4.8 million in earnings.
Above all, after Cigar won the 1-1/4-mile Breeders’ Cup Classic, America’s richest race, in record time from a poor post position on an off track, he didn’t preen or point or engage in trash talk or dial his agent. Cigar did what the real superstars do. Cigar humbly bowed his head and let everybody else gush.
“Best horse I’ve seen since Spectacular Bid,” said Chris McCarron, a jockey. Others mentioned Cigar in the same breath as Secretariat, John Henry, Kelso. But Cigar, for all his flair, showed the right stuff. The only baggage he carried was 126 pounds of his rider, Jerry Bailey.
If only Cigar could talk, but better that he can’t. His silence was golden in 1995, and coming soon in 1996, O.J. Simpson’s documentary on how to practice 3-wood shots from a sand trap in the backyard late at night.