While Allen “Black Cat” Lacombe served as a beloved Fair Grounds publicist decades ago, it’s hard to love anyone Saturday in the race named after him.
That’s not because the $100,000 Lacombe Memorial, a turf route, lacks talented 3-year-old fillies, but because several among seven entrants have shown talent at a similar level.
It will take luck to unearth a winner, something Lacombe, as his nickname suggests, lacked during an illustrious New Orleans life.
Lacombe, according to a 2014 newspaper profile commemorating the 25th anniversary of his death, once picked all nine winners on a Fair Grounds card and failed to bet any of them. He tipped a local sportscaster on a live harness-racing runner: A wheel fell off the horse’s sulky. Lacombe even ran a joke campaign for Louisiana governor in 1959. He came in seventh of 11 candidates and said he earned $49 in the process.
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The winner of Saturday’s Lacombe, carded for about 1 1/16 miles, won’t pay that much. Play With Fire holds morning-line favoritism at 3-1, with Lady Orient and Merry and Bright the supposed outsiders at 8-1. Those two in fact finished, respectively, fourth and seventh last summer at Saratoga in the P.G. Johnson Stakes. Merry and Bright was better at the time and probably still is, but she was scratched Feb. 7 from an intended first-level allowance comeback and instead races Saturday for the first time since the Aug. 28 Johnson.
Exclusive Star got a perfect trip tracking a slow pace notching a third-out maiden win Jan. 20 at Fair Grounds and might not be quite good enough. The Brad Cox-trained Fionn has knocked out maiden and first-level turf route wins at the meet, but the horses behind her in those starts sit on a lower form run than the Lacombe competition.
Play With Fire and Aterradora debuted in the same maiden turf route Nov. 30, Aterradora leading before Play With Fire ran her down to win by one length. Play With Fire got a look on dirt Jan. 19, finished an even fourth, and trainer Brendan Walsh now sends her back to grass.
She’s a main player, but so is Aterradora, who in her second start broke from post 10, surged from a stalking position to lead at the stretch call, only to be run down, as had happened in her debut, and finish second. Third time out, Aterradora waited on nobody, jockey Jareth Loveberry taking the filly farther off the pace than in her first two outings before the filly delivered a sustained run to win by more than three lengths.
In Aterradora’s second start, on Jan. 4, Love and Poetry ran her down to win by one length, going away. She hasn’t started since, but beginning Feb. 3 has kept to a steady work pattern for Cherie DeVaux, the leading turf trainer at this meet. Love and Poetry figures to make the last run under new jockey Axel Concepcion. Black Cat Lacombe will not be betting on the filly. Perhaps luck will be on her side.
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