Ten months later, he won his hurdle debut at Fair Hill for trainer Jonathan Sheppard and jockey Michael O’Brien. “They drove me to Baltimore, put me in a brace, blah, blah, blah and everything healed OK but I remember spending time in bed watching the men land on the moon.” “It was 1969 and we were galloping up a gallop in a cow pasture and came upon some cattle grazing and he did a very athletic drop of the shoulder and pitched me right over his ears and broke my back,” Sanger said. Inkslinger shipped to his new home at Derry Meeting Farm, where Sanger rode him in some early work. The bay colt by Bronze Babu out of Laurel Wreath was a half-brother to three winners (one a minor stakes winner), but otherwise would not have made many short lists. “He wasn’t particularly beautiful or flashy looking. “We were walking through the shedrows looking at horses, I saw this yearling and it was like a bolt of lightning hit me,” she said of Hip 23, a Maryland-bred colt from the Glade Valley Farms consignment. Then married to Jenney, Sanger went to the 1968 Fasig-Tipton yearling sale at Timonium with George and Sally Straw-bridge and Bob and Diana Crompton. I laughed, apologized to her (several times) and then told her that story about my brush with her horse in the 1980s. Editor’s Note: if you ever need to receive bad news, get it from Martie Sanger. His owner, Martie Sanger, called to let me know I fouled up.
In a cutline to a photo in the August edition, I wrote that Marshall Jenney was leading Inkslinger after a 1970 win at the Colonial Cup meeting. He comes to light here because I made a mistake. It didn’t seem possible then – or now – that we would cross paths. I was 16 or 17, which meant Inkslinger was 14 or 15 but he seemed to be from a different era. It was indeed him, and it’s still one of the great thrills in my racing life. He could have been a champion if he’d stayed in America. The kid said hello, paid his respects, tried to explain what it meant to have such a horse in such a barn – an aluminum-sided, oversized shed. Old, retired, on his second or third career but Inkslinger. The only other person in the barn simply stared at the kid, and then the horse. “THE Inkslinger? Right here, Inkslinger is in this barn on this day?” “Is this Inkslinger?” the kid walking past with some tack for a chunky Paint in the next stall asked. Then his halter nameplate came into proper view. Something said class, like he’d been places and done things. The horse just stood there with his head over the yoke screen in a five-stall barn on a Pennsylvania afternoon.
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