Broadway Producer Makes a Winning Trip

For a horse that lives at Belmont Park and has a classic New York name, Broadway Producer sure seems like a Marylander. The 5-year-old son of sire Not for Love was bred in Maryland by Larry Wolf, the late Rouse Co. executive, and sold at a Timonium auction. He scored his biggest victory -- the $190,000 Maryland Million Turf -- earlier this year at Laurel Park.

Yesterday, he took a van ride down Interstate 95 and easily beat a solid field of Maryland handicap runners by three lengths to take the $50,000 Jennings Handicap at Laurel.

Ridden by jockey Dale Beckner for the first time, Broadway Producer tracked leader P V Lightening comfortably on the inside in third place. With three-sixteenths of a mile to go, Beckner angled off the rail and out and around the leader and pulled away without so much as raising his whip.

P V Lightening, a stakes winner in September at Delaware Park, finished second as the slight favorite over Broadway Producer, seven lengths ahead of Easy Red.

The winner ran the Jennings, listed at a distance of "about" a mile and one-sixteenth, in 1 minute 43.73 seconds and paid $5.20 for a $2 win ticket.

In the winner's circle after the race, Bill Reck, a dental insurance salesman from King of Prussia, Pa., represented the vast Sovereign Stable partnership that owns Broadway Producer. Nearly 200 people support the 12 to 15 runners who make up the syndicate, with at least 15 of the syndicate members invested in Broadway Producer, according to stable president Matt Gatsas.

"It's unbelievable; this is what it's all about," said Reck, who drove the 127 miles to Laurel for the race. "You say to yourself, 'If only I could have a Saturday afternoon horse,' and this is a Saturday afternoon horse."

Broadway Producer was a late foal, born in May, and has proven to be a late bloomer. In his first 20 starts, he won only once, in an off-the-turf maiden race on a sloppy track. His other two wins, however, have come in stakes races, the Maryland Million Turf and the Jennings yesterday, which boosted his lifetime earnings to $293,446.

His versatility -- with wins on an off-track, turf and dirt -- has excited his connections.

"He's getting good right now," Gatsas said. "I think he's a better dirt horse than turf. He's been wintering in Florida, but I think he's getting better on dirt so we'll stay up here" in New York.

The northern base likely will include continued forays down to Maryland, said trainer John Terranova, who watched the race from a barn monitor at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, Calif., where he traveled to race his promising 2-year-old, Laragh, to a win last night in the Grade I $429,500 Hollywood Starlet.

"He's a nice, solid, sound horse," Terranova said. "He's getting to be like the old man of the barn. He's definitely one of the barn favorites."

Racing Notes: Sweet Goodbye, the rising 3-year-old filly trained by Chris Grove at the Bowie Training Center, scratched out of a race with the boys in the Jennings to run today in the $75,000 Ladies Handicap at Aqueduct. Grove scratched Sweet Goodbye -- who has won five of six starts, all by open lengths -- in the Jennings because the racing secretary at Aqueduct expressed concern about having enough runners for the Ladies, a 1 1/4 -mile race. Sweet Goodbye is the 5-to-2 morning-line favorite. . . .

Another top Maryland 3-year-old filly, Access Fee, will race at Aqueduct today, running for trainer Lawrence Murray in the $65,000 Foil Stakes, a six-furlong race.