We've all sure experienced a lot of different emotions in the last 43 days or so. But few of us have felt the feeling that comes with emotionally attaching yourself to a team or an individual participant during a sporting event. So, rooting. We haven't gotten to root.
Well, for a day, anyway, we all now have someone to root for: The horse born on an Easter Sunday with big ears, the one they call "Bunny."
The progeny of Mahvelous Dahling and a sire named Bellamy Road, her proper name is Resurrection Road. She's owned by two St. Louisans, a father and a son. The jockey's silks look like the St. Louis flag. She races Thursday.
"I like to say we didn't check the first box for being racehorse owners and breeders _ that box would be being wealthy," said Mike Schlobohm, 66. "So it's a story of some pretty ordinary guys living a horse-racing dream."
For 50 years, Mike has loved the ponies. He spent many 1970s nights at Fairmount Park, parlaying bets and partying with Busch beer. He recalls the famed jockey, Dave Gall.
Professionally, Mike worked in telecommunications for decades, until he decided to go into "the only business that might be worse for trying to make money than in the horse racing business." He opened a frame shop.
One day, upon retirement, he and a friend drove across River Road in Grafton and smoked some cigars. At a cafe, they met a woman with a Fairmount Park jacket. Holly Steinmeyer. She was affiliated with the track. Mike's son, Dusty, was interested in working in the horse world, so Holly got in contact with Dusty.
This wouldn't be the first Holly that changed Dusty's life.
It was in the final months of 2012. Holly connected Dusty to Sun Valley Mares. The Sun Valley folks were looking for partners. Well, they were looking for money. But, Mike and Dusty Schlobohm (pronounced "slow bomb") were looking to get their feet wet. So, Merry Christmas. The Schlobohms bought 5% of five 2-year-old race horses.
"We were hooked," Mike said. "One weekend, we drove up to Toronto to watch one of these horses race and drove back in the same weekend. So that was the kind of idiocy that drove us."
In the end, the five horses had a combined zero wins.
"One of the horses, they retired her. She was 0 for 15," Mike said.
Her name was Mahvelous Dahling. She was not mahvelous.
"She'd run second once and third twice," Mike said. "(The Sun Valley folks) were going to give her away. And the brilliant horse people that we were, we said, 'Oh, we'll take her.' It's not really wise to pick a horse with modest breeding and no track record and expect to breed her and do anything with her. But at the moment, it sounded like a really fun idea!"
So, they got the other 95% of Mahvelous Dahling, "for the price of zero dollars," Dusty said. "They were going to give her away anyways. We just had to pay the freight of transporting the horse ... . So now, 100% of the bills were on us."
Their plan was to breed a foal _ one that was faster than her mother was.
"We looked at what sires were doing from a speed-rating basis to their progeny," Mike said. "There are a lot of ways you measure a sire's effectiveness. But what does it do for a mediocre mare's progeny?
"So we built spreadsheets and charted all the results of all these horses' progeny. And we didn't have a lot of money to spend on a sire, that's the other caveat. You know, you can spend $300,000 on stud fees. Well, ours was $4,000. We had a budget."
They chose Bellamy Road. The horse was actually the favorite entering the 2005 Kentucky Derby. Finished seventh, though. Again, they had a budget.
And on March 27, 2016 _ Easter Sunday _ Mahvelous Dahling gave birth for the only time.
Mike and Dusty went through an estimated 500 names for her. Huge St. Louis sports fans, the Schlobohms considered Go Crazy, Folks. Mike sent a letter to Joe Buck, "asking if he thought his dad would mind," but Mike said he didn't hear back. With the holiday of the birth, and "Road" in the sire's name, they decided on Resurrection Road. Playing along with the Easter theme, and Resurrection Road's big, tall ears, the barn kids started calling her "Bunny."
The Schlobohms sent Resurrection Road to Mercury Equine Center in Lexington, Ky. They liked the place. Also, they could afford the place. The trainer, Eric Reed, had more than 8,000 starts under his belt. Man o' War, Mike said, trained on that ground a century before. In recent years, Reed had been recovering from a fire that killed 23 of his horses and decimated much of his business. This new addition, Resurrection Road, was part of Reed's road to rejuvenation.
In October of 2018, Resurrection Road was 2. They decided she was ready to race. They entered a maiden claiming race at Keeneland, in Lexington, "just an absolutely spectacular racetrack," Mike said. "She's in the No. 1 hole, so she's right underneath the bell. She breaks out and does a hard left _ I thought she was going to jump over the rail. The second race, she breaks badly, too. The third race, she rears up in the starting gate, and leaves the jockey in the gate.
"So now it's like: 'Holy (bleep), what do we got here? Is she crazy?' The trainer kept telling us, 'Oh, she does great in the gate in training, she walks right in, she's not nervous.' And now she's this psycho horse! Well, it took that third race for everybody to figure out what it was. It was the bell. She was afraid of the bell. And since then, we put plugs in her ears to deaden the sound and it's fixed the problem mostly. Her starts aren't beautiful, but they're much better."
In her first race of 2019, she finished third.
In her second race of 2019, she finished third.
In the third race of 2019, she finished first.
"She wins, which was just _ it's hard to explain," Mike said. "It was just an exhilarating feeling of accomplishment."
It was just five days after Patrick Maroon scored the Game 7, double-overtime goal to advance the Blues to the Western Conference finals. Mike and Dusty are huge Blues fans. They share season tickets.
So, their horse won her first race on May 12.
And their hockey team won the Stanley Cup on June 12.
"Two things you can only dream about happened in a matter of a month," said Dusty, 33. "It was a special time."
"Bunny" raced five more times in 2019, which included one second-place finish and two thirds. At that final race, a third-place finish at Keeneland, Mike and his wife, Jodie, were the last to leave the seating area. They just sat there, savoring every second and this breathtaking track, while Mike puffed on a thick cigar.
In 2020, Resurrection Road so far has run just once. She won. It was at a track near Cleveland on March 2. Dusty watched on his laptop in a hotel room in Vietnam at 4 a.m. He was on vacation with his girlfriend. Her name _ Holly Kinney. Fourteen days later, she became his fiancee. Dusty proposed marriage on an island at Komodo National Park in Indonesia.
The couple soon came home, because of the coronavirus threat. They practiced social distancing. Mike and Jodie didn't even let them in the door.
Jodie had a fever. For 11 days. She got tested, but it wasn't severe enough to go overnight to a hospital. Sure enough, just when she began to feel better, she got the results that confirmed that she had tested positive for the coronavirus.
And so, Mike is also on "house arrest," as he said. But he couldn't go to Thursday's race anyway. Oaklawn, in Hot Springs, Ark., isn't allowing anyone on the premises who isn't involved with the actual training or riding. So, Mike and Jodie will watch jockey Joe Rocco, in those St. Louis silks, from their home in Maryland Heights. Dusty and his fiancee Holly will watch from their home just outside of Soulard.
Thursday is the biggest race of Resurrection Road's career. The purse in the allowance event is $61,000. It's the eighth race at Oaklawn, 4:38 p.m. Her morning-line odds are 6-1.
"As a handicapper looking at this race," Mike said, "she could run first to last. I mean, it's that hard of a race."
Perhaps St. Louis will now be rooting for "Bunny."
