Billy Kelly

Billy Kelly (USA) 1916 Bay Gelding   Dick Welles (USA) x Glena (USA), by Free Knight (USA)

Described as “a lean mule” and “no bigger around than a polo pony,” Billy Kelly was not exactly a beauty contest winner. To be blunt, he was small, scrawny, and ugly. But looks aren’t everything, and within his skinny frame, Billy Kelly had enough heart and talent to rank among the best racehorses of his day.

Bred by Jerome Respess at Woodlawn Farm, Kentucky, the unlikely champion was by Dick Welles, a good racehorse who had won twenty of his twenty-five starts while racing mostly in the Midwest and Kentucky near the turn of the century. The dam, Glena, was by Free Knight, a half brother to the excellent gelding Freeland. Overall, the pedigree was one promising hardiness and racing quality, but it had little to do with the fashionable bloodlines of the day.

When Woodlawn’s yearlings were offered for sale in 1917, little Billy drew no attention from the more important buyers attending the sale. Trainer William Perkins noted two things about the youngster, however – sound legs and an excellent disposition – and bought him for $1,500 on behalf of racing newcomer W. F. Polson, who named his new acquisition in honor of a Buffalo newspaperman.

Billy Kelly made his first start on April 23, 1918, in a small purse at the old Lexington track. Several well-regarded youngsters were in the field and Billy went off as a considerable longshot but won handily. He repeated this performance in another purse, again dusting some promising hopefuls, and at this point Perkins and Polson decided that Billy had shown enough ability to be tried in stakes company. Sent to the post for the Idle Hour Stakes at Lexington, he won as he pleased by eight lengths over a muddy track; a few days later, he won the Bashford Manor Stakes at Churchill Downs by an easy four lengths on fast going.

The gelding next ran in the Spring Trial Stakes at Douglas Park but stopped badly after a quarter-mile and met his first defeat. He had gotten slammed badly and struck from behind during the race, and post-race examination revealed a cut to a hind tendon which put him on the sidelines for two months. By this time, however, Perkins and Polson had seen enough to be convinced that they had a very good horse indeed, and they nominated Billy Kelly to many of the major Eastern races for juveniles.

Billy Kelly did not reappear until the Saratoga meeting, but his Kentucky performances had earned enough respect from the handicappers that he was made the co-highweight with High Time for the Flash Stakes with 119 pounds. The bettor in the stands had a different opinion, sending the puny-looking Midwestern invader off at ten-to-one odds, but Billy won readily by five lengths from High Time and Star Hampton in new track record time for the five and one-half furlongs. Two days later, he won the United States Hotel Stakes under 127 pounds from another of the season’s good juveniles, the eventual Futurity winner Dunboyne. The winning margin was only a length and a half this time, but Billy was running within himself at the finish and under no pressure to do better.

By this time he had attracted the interest of Commander J. K. L. Ross, who was buying proven runners for his racing stable, but Polson did not want to sell. Ross did not lose hope, however. His trainer, H. G. “Hard Guy” Bedwell, was an astute observer of the racing scene and counseled patience, knowing that Billy was now at the handicappers’ mercy and that a loss or two might put him on the market after all. “Weight will bring him to us,” he said.

Bedwell proved prophetic. By this time, the racing secretaries had noticed that Billy Kelly was up to a lot more weight than his appearance suggested, and the little gelding was assigned 133 pounds for his next race, the Albany Handicap. The race was only four days after the United States Hotel Stakes, and the weary Billy lost by a length to Star Hampton under 115 pounds. Bedwell, sensing opportunity, again approached Polson on the subject of selling the gelding. This time, the answer was “yes,” although the price was high: $27,500, a sum that with Billy’s winnings on the track represented a profit of some $45,000 for Polson over the gelding’s original purchase price. As for Ross, he got not only Billy but a bonus in the form of a nondescript tabby cat, Billy’s stable pet. Billy and his cat were as inseparable as the legendary Godolphin Arabian and his feline companion, and the nameless tabby slept in Billy’s stall nightly until Billy’s death.

Bearing Ross’s silks for the first time, Billy met the starter again in the Sanford Memorial Stakes. He got “only” 130 pounds for the race and won handily by eight lengths over sloppy going. That bumped him back up to 135 pounds for the Grab Bag Handicap, in which he conceded from thirteen to thirty-five pounds to his rivals. The weight and the concessions mattered not a whit to Billy, who won by a comfortable length and a half from the speedy Sweep On. His performance drew Billy a weight assignment of 140 pounds for the Adirondack Handicap, and there Ross drew the line. Although Bedwell was convinced the gelding was up to the task and the proposed field was undistinguished (the eventual winner was Routledge, under 111 pounds), Billy Kelly was sent to Maryland for the fall season. There, he defeated older horses in an overnight race, won the Annapolis Stakes and Eastern Shore Handicap against his own division (defeating Routledge in the latter while conceding him nineteen pounds), and defeated older horses again, this time in the Columbus Handicap.

His next start was a match race against the year’s other crack juvenile, Eternal, in the McLean Memorial Cup. He lost by a head after his jockey, Earl Sande, allowed Andy Schuttinger on Eternal to grab the early lead. The race was to have some repercussions two years later, for when Earl Sande was unexpectedly taken off Sir Barton in favor of Frank Keogh the night before the Triple Crown winner’s match with Man o’ War, many felt it was because Commander Ross (who owned Sir Barton) remembered Sande’s ride on Billy Kelly against Eternal and lacked confidence in the young jockey‘s ability to handle the pressure. In fairness to Sande, however, Billy Kelly had come out of the Columbus Handicap with a gash below the ankle of his left hind leg and still had an open wound at the time of the match race.

Despite the loss to Eternal, many racing historians rank Billy Kelly as co-champion juvenile of 1918 with his conqueror. He finished the season having won fourteen of seventeen starts with two second place finishes, against six wins and one second from eight starts for Eternal. The rivals had split their two meetings, with Eternal winning the match race but finishing unplaced behind Billy Kelly in the United States Hotel Stakes.

Billy had grown to a more average size by the time he made his three-year-old bow at Havre de Grace, but he was still a lean and angular fellow and no great shakes for looks. In fact, a visiting cavalry officer at Ross’ farm who was unaware of the horse’s identity when the lazy-seeming gelding was led out for inspection had tendered the opinion that Billy might be given away for a children’s hack but did not look fit for much else.

Pretty or not, Billy had not lost a whit of his speed over the winter, as he proved in his opening races of the season. Facing his elders in the Harford and Philadelphia handicaps and conceding weight to good sprinters, Billy won both easily and was installed as the favorite for the Kentucky Derby. His status nearly killed Bedwell, who not only had to deal with the constant attention of railbirds and the media but with the knowledge that Commander Ross had a heavy bet riding on the comparative finish between Billy Kelly and Eternal Cooked up by the notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein, the bet was a “horse-and-horse” wager based solely on whichever of the two horses finished ahead of the other in the running. $50,000 lay riding on the outcome with the only stipulation being that if neither horse finished among the first three, the bet was off. Never comfortable under heavy pressure and scrutiny, Bedwell lost weight almost visibly and by Derby Day was, in the words of Commander Ross’ son J. K. M. Ross,. a “walking wraith.”

Bedwell need not have worried, although Billy didn’t win the race. His entrymate, Sir Barton, had been sent in as a pacemaker for him but did not tire as expected and instead won galloping by five lengths. Billy Kelly was easily second best with Eternal unplaced, so it was a good day for the Ross stable all around.

Billy skipped the Preakness four days later (won, of course, by Sir Barton) and was shipped to Belmont with his stablemate, where he took on older sprinters again in the Toboggan Handicap. He won by a head over the older Lucullite to “cheers that might have been heard at Sandy Hook” in the words of the great handicapper Walter Vosburgh, though in fairness to Lucullite, he was conceding weight and got the worst of the start. Billy then spent the next two weeks helping get Sir Barton fit for the Belmont Stakes. Sir Barton was that trainer’s headache of a horse that needed a great deal of work to get and stay fit but would not exert himself in morning workouts unless pushed hard, and Billy Kelly was one of the few horses who could push Sir Barton as needed without getting burned out himself. Several other horses in the Ross stable who were used as Sir Barton’s work companions did not fare so well, among them War Pennant and the English importations *Foreground, *Hillhampton, and *Roselyn. War Pennant in particular was a sacrifice to Sir Barton’s rising star; winner of the Champagne Stakes and several other stakes events at two, his best race at three was a second in the Travers Stakes.

Perhaps wearied by his morning duties with Sir Barton, Billy Kelly made only one start at Saratoga. He did not win but was hardly disgraced, running third to the crack older sprinter *Naturalist. He had a good fall season, however. After defeating Sir Barton in a six-furlong overnight race at Havre de Grace, he ran second to his stablemate two days later in the Potomac Handicap and then took the Highweight Handicap under 133 pounds and the Susquehanna Handicap in track record time for six furlongs. The stable then moved over to Laurel, where Billy took the Capitol Handicap before running second to the four-year-old The Porter in the Laurel Stakes. The gelding finished out the season at Pimlico, winning the first race of Pimlico’s three-race Fall Serial at weight for age and running third and second, respectively, to Sir Barton in the other two. All told, Billy Kelly won eight of nineteen starts at three and was second five times. In the opinion of the great racing writer Joe Palmer, Billy Kelly ranked behind only Sir Barton and the fine colt Purchase, who defeated Sir Barton in the Dwyer Stakes, at the top of the three-year-olds of 1919.

At four, Billy Kelly began the year well with a repeat score in the Harford Handicap and a defeat of Sir Barton in the Belair Handicap, both at six furlongs. He then ran a spine-tingling second to Dunboyne in the Paumonok Handicap at Jamaica but came out of the race sore and was forced to the sidelines. He did not quite recapture his earlier form when returned to racing but nonetheless won six of twelve starts for the season, and the only runner who consistently carried higher weights was *Naturalist.

Rested for the winter, Billy Kelly returned to the racing wars in fine fettle as a five-year-old, winning six races from April through June including his third straight running of the Harford Handicap and the Connaught Cup at the old Blue Bonnets track near Toronto, Canada. But then Billy turned in three uncharacteristically bad races in a row, returning to the judge’s stand in obvious distress after each. The cause of his problems was not revealed until after the third race, when a thorough examination revealed a sponge pushed deep into one of Billy’s nostrils. The perpetrator of this cruel act was never caught but would probably have been subject to lynching by the Ross stable staff had his identity been unmasked, for gentle Billy was a stable pet and loved by everyone connected with him.

Billy recovered from his mishandling to win three straight races but bled heavily in his fourth race after the sponging was discovered and was pulled up by his jockey without finishing his race. He managed to return to the races before the end of the year but to little avail, failing to win in four starts and plainly coming nowhere near the form he had enjoyed in the spring of the year. He continued in training, however, and by the spring of 1922 was doing so well that it was decided to let him try for a fourth consecutive score in the Harford Handicap. Given the fact that Billy had not won since late in the previous summer and had not raced since the previous fall, it must have come as a surprise to the Ross stable that Billy Kelly was asked to shoulder co-topweight of 132 pounds with the mighty Exterminator. Granted, sprint distances were not Exterminator’s forte, but he was no mere plodder, and at age seven he was in peak form. Billy ran valiantly, but after a hard drive, “Old Bones” came home a widening length in front of the Ross colorbearer.

It was Billy Kelly’s first and last start of 1922, for he came back so utterly exhausted that Ross made the decision to retire him. By midsummer, however, Billy had become thoroughly bored with the life of an honored pensioner, so much so that he would jump the fences of his spacious paddock to join the yearlings in a nearby pasture. That gave the farm manager the idea of trying Billy over a few of the brush fences set up for schooling steeplechasers. The gelding took to jumping immediately and by the end of the summer was showing good enough form that a friend of Ross’ asked if he might borrow Billy with the idea using him as a hunter in the Baltimore area.

Billy Kelly took to the field with relish, but that proved his undoing as a hunter. So eager to be up with the first flight that he did not take kindly to restraint, he became too hard a puller for the Baltimore friend to manage and was returned to the Ross stable after the fall foxhunting season was over. The excursion into foxhunting had done Billy good, though; he seemed invigorated with a fresh interest in life, and the gelding was put into light training with the idea that, if he did well enough, he could race with the stable’s second string in Canada. He returned to flat racing in September 1923, winning a small handicap at Blue Bonnets and finishing second and third in two more starts. But he pulled up in obvious distress after the third and last start, and Ross immediately retired him again, this time for good. He left racing having won thirty-nine of sixty-nine starts for earnings of $99,782, trailing only champion handicapper Mad Hatter and Sir Barton as the leading money winners of his crop.

Billy was sent to Ross’ Canadian farm and this time seemed to settle in peacefully. He was not to enjoy a long retirement, however. One summer morning in 1926, he was found lifeless in his stall. An autopsy revealed an enlarged heart, perhaps due to the tremendous stresses Billy’s heart and lungs had endured during the sponging episode five years earlier. He was buried on the farm, in a plot overlooking the St. Lawrence River, and is now all but forgotten. To those who knew him or saw him race however, he was a gallant and generous campaigner whose brilliance was dimmed all too soon.

© 2005 by Avalyn Hunter