Longtime owner with famous friends was in the Breeders’ Cup winners’ circle as a partner in Classic hero Sierra Leone
There is an old story about Peter Brant, growing up privileged in the borough of Queens, New York, and a classmate of Donald Trump.
As 12-year-olds, on a Saturday, when they weren’t attending the same ritzy school, they took a train into Manhattan and got off at 53rd and Fifth Avenue.
Young Donald did the only logical thing: he bought a switchblade knife, and after kicking around the great city for several hours, he and Brant caught a train back to Queens.
A week went by before Fred Trump, the future president’s father, heard about the excursion. Posthaste he pulled Donald out of school and sent him about 100 miles away, to a military school.
I can’t remember whether that story was told to me by Pete Sokoloff, who acted as a sort of unofficial PR man for Brant.
It sounds like Pete, who fashioned himself as a horse racing handicapper, an art collector and also a philosopher. When a friend complained one day about losing a photo-finish at Saratoga, Pete said: “If the game was easy, they wouldn’t call it gambling.”
While Sokoloff might have been an art collector, it was his sidekick Brant who was really an art collector. He once bought up so many works by Andy Warhol that Warhol said to an associate: “I need to meet this guy.”
If somebody was going to corner the market on what Warhol did, Warhol wanted to find out what made him tick. They met and became friends.
Between Warhols, Brant also collected horses – and on Saturday, in his late 70s, after leaving the game for about 20 years, he was back in the winner’s circle, minutes after Sierra Leone won the $7m Breeders’ Cup Classic at Del Mar.
And what had Brant been doing in the meantime? Playing gentlemen’s polo, what else? In his youth, he was rated the best in the US with a mallet.
Brant owns just a piece of Sierra Leone as part of a Coolmore partnership, just as he owned 25% of Swale, the 1984 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner. (About a week after the Belmont, Swale reared up along the shedrow at Belmont Park, collapsed and died, of an apparent heart condition. By then I was in France on vacation and the office found me. I called back and said: “Nobody in Paris knows how Swale died.”)
After several years with LeRoy Jolley training his horses – who included the champion sprinter Gulch – they had a falling out and Brant, a hands-on owner, noticed that Jeff Lukas, the son of the Eclipse Award-winning Wayne Lukas, was doing good work with the stable’s New York division.
Brant signed on with Wayne Lukas, who was based in California, but it was really Jeff Lukas he wanted. (Jeff Lukas’s budding career effectively ended when Tabasco Cat, running loose in the barn area at Santa Anita, ran him down and incurred serious neurological injuries).
One day Pete Sokoloff called and said he and Brant would be at the Beverly Hills Hotel in a few days if I wanted to stop by to learn why he was switching stables. We were to meet in the Polo Lounge, a most appropriate setting for someone who excelled on the playing fields of Long Island.
The day before, I had a meeting at the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy had been shot. The stinter I am, I parked on the street and returned to find my car stolen.
The morning of the meeting with Brant, the police called to say they had recovered the car. But when I got in, the key box was missing. The thief had ripped it out and started it with ingenuity.
The attendant at the impound had a gadget that he used to start and turn off the ignition.
“Can you sell me one of those?” I said.
“I’d give it to you, but it’s the only one I have,” he said.
He started the car and told me I was on my own as far as turning it off. At home, with the car idling and after some rooting around, I found a simple table knife whose handle was a perfect fit for the key box.
At the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Peter Brant waiting inside, I handed the valet guy the knife and said that was the best I could do.
Boy, did he have a story to tell. Boy, did I have a story to tell Brant.
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