Text size:

Part owner wisely turned down sale of Big Brown

Johnette Howard

May 16, 2008

BALTIMORE

If he had behaved like a died-in-the-wool pinhooker is supposed to behave, Paul Pompa Jr. might not be making the trip of his racing life down to Pimlico tonight to watch his so-called super horse, Big Brown, try to pick up the second leg of the Triple Crown in tomorrow's Preakness. Bethpage's Michael Iavarone would not have gotten a 75-percent stake in the horse. And Darley racing stable owner Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the most powerful man in the sport, would never have heard two little words that the Sheikh almost never hears: No sale.

No sale?

"I didn't say Darley was involved in the bidding - you did," Pompa said in a telephone interview yesterday, careful not to ruffle egos just in case he and the Sheikh have some future cause for business someday.

You see, in addition to being the latest member of the Maktoum family to rule Dubai for the past 600 years, the Sheikh happens to run the most breathtakingly extravagant and far-reaching racing operation in the world. He transports his hundreds of horses around the world in tricked-out 747 jets. When the weather gets too cold for them in, say, England, he lets them winter in the sun in Dubai. He made headlines at the Keeneland sale two years ago by dropping $59.9 million.

Johnette Howard Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

And Pompa? He's a 49-year-old guy from Jersey who typically owns no more than 25 horses at a time. He isn't exactly hurting for cash, but he still sweated it out two years ago when he feared he was going to lose his contract as the biggest shipper in the New York City area for UPS. He's only been in the racing game since 2000.

Operators like him are what's known as a pinhooker. A pinhooker is a person who buys horses as yearlings and sometimes hurries them into training over the winter, then sells them quickly after racing them for just a single season as 2-year-olds, same as some other cold-eyed speculator might try to flip houses or stocks for profit.

The worst pinhookers are accused of being less interested in racing than they are in making money.

Though Pompa's story with Big Brown began fairly typical - he bought him for $190,000 as a yearling - the day everything changed is when Big Brown ran on the closing day at Saratoga last September and blew away the field, winning his first-ever race by a jaw-dropping 11Â¾ lengths on turf.

"We went up there just looking forward to having a nice fun day at the Spa," Pompa recalls. "My trainer then, Patrick Reynolds, told me Big Brown was ready to run a big one, but we also knew it was a tough field. They let him off at 14-1 odds. He got in the gate and just took off. Then he just kept opening up and he kept opening up and, you know" - here Pompa laughs at himself - "I got a little worried.

"I thought, 'The jockey's going out too fast.' But then the horse just kept opening up and he kept opening up ...

"The next thing I remember is Tom Durkin, the track announcer up there, saying, 'And Big Brown demolishes the field!'

"We were sitting there like, 'Oh my God. We've got a monster here.' "

Iavarone and whomever was watching the race for the Sheikh had the same thought. Pompa says he had barely gotten into his limo for the long ride home to Jersey when his cell phone started ringing.

"I was the first to get him on the phone that night - literally that night," Iavarone said. "I had never heard of Big Brown ... But I was convinced this horse was in another world. A freak."

For the next week or so, the bidding raged back and forth between the Sheikh's men and Iavarone. ("You said those names, not me," Pompa repeats.) And Iavarone says, "We almost lost the horse to them a couple of times."

In the end, what decided the deal was even a pinhooker like Pompa succumbed to his sentimental heart. And the age-old thrill of going racing. And - oh, yeah - a sale price of about $3 million on top of the 25-percent ownership stake that Iavarone would let him keep, unlike the Sheikh.

"A lot of these other people - and I'm not mentioning any names," Pompa says one last time, "they give you the money and you're out. It's over and out. With this horse, I just thought, 'How sick would I be watching him in the Kentucky Derby if I did that?'"

Now on to Pimlico they go.