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Weighing In By Evan Shipman 1 1Nashua Nashua Brings Gotham Season Into Focus Regard Colt Ideally Sound and Adjusted Grey Lag Major Test for Le Beau Prince PrinceJAMAICA JAMAICA L I N Y May 4 Everything preceding the running of tomorrows Grey Lag Handicap can be dismissed as hors doeuvres but with the return of tion local sport has arrived at the main course and now unless an ¬ ticipation has dulled our sense of perception we can settle back to enjoy substantial fare The big Nasrullah fouryearold thanks to the modern medium of television is familiar to racing enthusiasts and even the casual public from one end of the country to an ¬ other The Metropolitan circuit however proudly claims Nashua as its own The husky brown colt will be greeted as an old friend when the veteran Mr Fitz saddles him and gives Ted Atkinson a leg up If some one of the eight excellent members of the division opposing him in this severe ninefurlong test proves better able to handle Jiandicapper Jimmy Kilroes nicely distributed weight assignments the result of the feature wil inevitably be considered a deception deceptionYes Yes we all want Nashua to win so much so in fact that the odds on the champions chances are sure to be topheavy wiith the burden of sentimental support Nevertheless handicaps as you have been warned ad infinitum are a coldblooded business Certainly Kil ¬ roes skillfully distributed figures have not been de ¬ signed to effect the favorites defeat but these weights have very definitely been allotted with the specific aim of giving every Grey Lag starter an equal opportunity a state of affairs that ought to make Nashua against the field a precarious proposition and that may encompass his downfall Since with any luck we are going to see quite a bit of Nashua during the next couple of months one understands that his immediate objective will be the handicappers Triple Crown of Metropolitan Suburban and Brooklyn we would like to explain our own attitude toward this interesting thoroughbred thoroughbredThis This Is Not a Great Thoroughbred ThoroughbredIf If we start off with a negative statement be sure that it is in no way inspired by the faintest hostility to Nashua but only in order to maintain a sense of proportion toward a horse who for nearly a year now has been all but smothered under a heavy blanket of superlatives Nashua then is not in our humble opin ino a great thoroughbred any more than his per ¬ sistent rival the Californian Swaps is a great thor ¬ oughbred They are both fine colts brilliant coltsbut to call either one great is to confuse the issue at once burdening them with an overload of responsibility and depriving the truly great among modern thorough ¬ breds such as Citation Count Fleet Tom Fool and Native Dancer of the rare distinction that ought to accompany the employment of this treacherous and muchabused adjective It is a great deal more fun to talk about what Nashua is rather than what he is not Well hes the soundest good horse since On Trust TrustAs As we have said Nashua is a big fellow We have not yet been close to him this season but even last year as a threeyearold he was already an imposing individual everything about him on a large scale His proportions are ideal so perfect that at first one does not realize just how big he really is and with that the cleanest legs the best feet you ever saw on a thorough ¬ bred That alone is enough to make him a hero to the trainer plagued as that fraternity is with every variety of faulty underpinning Then there is his disposition No matter what you have heard or read to the con ¬ trary Nashua is superbly gifted temperamentally In terms of horses he is remarkably intelligent as a good look at his eye will confirm and he is generous and fine in a manner not ordinarily associated with thor ¬ oughbred stallions He has personality if you get what we mean and with that an ideal nervous consti ¬ tution one perfectly adapted to the matter at hand which in his case is racing racingHorses Horses Like Humans Are Not Machines MachinesHorses Horses thank God are not machines and being subject to the ups and downs of mere flesh and blood they as with the human athlete can turn in a bad one For us the statement that Nashua was simply temporarily not himself is explanation enough of his poor showing on the occasion of his last start at Gulf stream Park One of the reason why a truly great horses record is not spotted with such setbacks is that the great horse has such a wide margin of superiority over his contemporaries Citation too had his off days but apart from the Saggy race at Havre de Grace he escaped defeat during his wonderful three yearold season because he was at least 10 points better than the next best of his age Otherwise he would have been beaten not just the once that Maryland race was a pure accident but two or three times and it would have happened at Chicago that summer where the great son of Bull Lea Hydroplane by Hyperion was emphatically not himself nor anything like him ¬ self But he won Excluding all such vagaries of form and condition we have every right ttf expect a literally blooming Nashua in this Grey Lag As we know he thrives under Mr Fitz often severe regimen hes a glutton for work and the kind of punishing bruising race he fancies bulldogging his opposition from the drop of the flag bullying them to submission is the product of early morning hours that might stale or cripple a more delicately adjusted equine constitution Not NotContinued Continued on Page FortySeven WEIGHING IN INBy By EVAN SHIPMAN Continued from Page FortyEight FortyEightNashua Nashua Like Gallant Fox long before him Nashua represents his trainers methods at their apogee Mr Fitz and his charge were made for each other So who is going to test him tomorrow Joe Jones is good now so is Find the latter remarkably sharp after his long absence from the wars We doubt that Fisherman is going to regain the brilliant form he flashed so briefly a year ago this spring That leaves the latest sensation the gray importation Le Beau Prince as the afternoons verita ¬ ble question mark Le Beau Prince just another obscurely bred colt at home has now won his every start in this country won themall looking for horses as the saying goes Well hell find his horse to ¬ morrow and it will be time enough to talk about his class when we see what he makes of the discovery
