Page 146 - Speedhorse August 2018

Colossus of Racing: All American Futurity
by Jerry Antonucci, turf writer & handicapper for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a freelance writer
photos by
Walton Wiggins Jr. & Laura Howard
Ruidoso Downs in 1968.
LOOKING BACK - AN EXCERPT FROM OCTOBER 1979 ISSUE
It was Americana where horsemen returned to the basics of “my horse is faster than your horse, and here’s my money to back up my mouth.”
Ruidoso Downs parking lot with an occasional Lincoln sprinkled in throughout the sea of hoods, tires and antennas. Stetson hats and Tony Lama boots are well represented. Cigarettes are out, cigars and chewing tobacco are in.
Ruidoso is probably the only city in the world that has its curbside road signs written in a Texas drawl. Painted in red on a yellow background are the words “NO PARK’N.”
But why is Ruidoso, 140 miles north of El Paso, Texas, where the moneyed people of the Southwest spend their summers?
It all started in the early 1940’s, when Texans, Oklahomans and New Mexicans found Ruidoso’s cool climate an ideal retreat from the burning summer sun.
Ruidoso was a wide-open gambling town with gravel streets, roulette wheels, dice tables and saloons on every corner. John Wayne could have been mayor.
144 SPEEDHORSE, August 2018
Ruidoso is a sleepy, mountain resort com- Cadillac is the “official” automobile of the
munity that caters to skiing buffs during
the winter and comes alive in the summer when Ruidoso Downs, the “Home of the World’s Richest Horse Race,” offers an incredible $1.28 million purse in the All American Quarter Horse Futurity every Labor Day.
It also is the private playground for the rich and the super-rich, whose elite members fly their own airplanes into the tiny hamlet from the wide- open spaces of Oklahoma and the vast flatlands of Texas.
Located in the lush Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico at an elevation of 7,000 feet, Ruidoso, which translated means “noisy” in Spanish, is sur- rounded on three sides by the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. The terrain is covered with thriving pine trees, the sky is crystal clear blue, the air has a taste of clean, and the color everywhere is rich green. But it isn’t as green or plentiful as the American greenbacks that flow into the town of only 8,000.