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Sad days in sports

All sports fans have idols. I won’t call them heroes because that name is reserved for people that wear uniforms without the name on the back and look out for our freedom and safety.

I guess a sports idol is someone that we look up to; we wish we could do what they do and do it as well as they do it. It is always a sad day when that athlete retires because he/she just can’t do what they used to do as well as he/she used to do it.

It just wasn’t the same checking out the box score for the Yankees after Mickey Mantle hung them up. Looking for the names of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer on top of the leader board after their skills had eroded was a sad chore also.

However, they had their days in the sun and retired because it was time.

Going down memory lane, when you first picked up the morning sports section, what did you look for?

For me, I would check out the Yankee box score to see how The Mick did. Later I would go right to the Cincy Reds lineup to see how many hits Pete Rose had. That guy had more 2-5 games than anyone in history.

Down the road, it would be to see if Wade Boggs added to his career hit list total and checking out the strikeout totals of Nolan Ryan was a given.

Now that it is harder to figure out who plays for who, my attention had turned to keeping up with horse racing. I’d grab that New York Post and go right to the racing results to see how many races Ramon Dominguez, my favorite rider of all time, won.

I will now have to find another daily task, because Ramon has announced his retirement as a jockey. In most cases, it would be great to be able to retire at 36, but in this case, he has no choice in the matter. On Jan. 18, he fractured his skull in a spill at Aqueduct Race Track in New York.

If you want to talk numbers, Ramon has some of the best in racing history. His mounts have won $191 million in purses, he has won on 23 percent of the horses that he has climbed upon and is 15 wins short of 5,000.

A native of Venezuela, Dominquez came to the U.S. in 1995 and dominated the Mid-Atlantic Circuit before bringing his tack to New York in 2008. Twenty riding titles later and a stellar 2012 season, when he set the record of over $26 million of purses won, his doctors recommend that he finds another line of work.

If we look up “classy people” in the dictionary there is a good chance we would find pictures of Mariano Rivera, Cal Ripken Jr., Matt Kuchar and Ramon Dominquez.

Popular New York trainer Rick Violette commented, “Ramon was one of the hardest working riders ever and one of the classiest people in our sport.”

So, Ramon, cherish those three Breeders Cup trophies on your shelf, enjoy your fine family, browse through your 4,985 winners circle pictures and remember all the joy and class  you brought to the racing industry.

You are already missed; with apologies to Phil Mushnick, I canceled my subscription to the NY Post.

On another note

Two rare sightings on June 15: Canoes and kayaks were on the first fairway of Stockbridge Golf Club, and all golfers were carrying, pulling or pushing their golf bags around Cranwell Resort.

We fought the rain and the rain won.

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Posted by on June 27, 2013. Filed under Berkshire Sports Guy,Columns,Opinion,Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
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