Thanks to trainer Mike Campbell’s calculated claim there may be a father and son winner’s circle reunion picture after Saturday’s Grade III Arlington-Washington Futurity.
Jesse Campbell is returning from Woodbine, where he has excelled for the last four years, to ride one-time $50,000 claimer Private Prospect for his father and owner George Mellon in the $125,000 7-furlong race on Arlington International Racecourse’s Polytrack.
“I have claimed three horses who have won stakes, and I’m always on the lookout for horses that have the necessary elements to become stakes winners,” Mike Campbell said. “That means one who is by a decent sire and dam whose past performances would indicate unusual ability.”
Keeping close tabs on young horses at this spring’s high class meeting at Keeneland — which at the time also had a Polytrack — he saw that trainer Keith Desormeaux “had a lot of expensive and well-maintained horses that were running close up but weren’t winning.”
“I put myself in Keith’s spot,” Campbell said. “Owners want to win races. I anticipated he would do what I would in that situation — take a horse a little under the radar and put him in a lucrative spot.”
When Private Prospect showed up at Arlington to make his career debut June 26 in a $50,000 maiden claiming race, Campbell concluded he was on a mission to get Desormeaux a victory. The colt had a successful sire, Discreet Cat, and the broodmare, Private Deputy, had won her three races at varying distances at tracks in Maryland and New York where racing is very competitive.
The trainer persuaded Mellon to invest the $50,000 and they made the claim. And, as Campbell had anticipated, Private Prospect bade farewell to Desormeaux by winning his first start.
Since changing hands Private Prospect has won both of his races and both were stakes run in Iowa — the $75,000 Prairie Gold and the $100,000 Prairie Meadows Juvenile. He is the only stakes winner in the Futurity’s eight-horse field and among his opponents are two of the horses he defeated in the Juvenile.
In the Futurity, the trainer will introduce Private Terms to his son, Jesse, who is coming back to the track where he won the first race of his career on July 20, 1995 aboard Apostle Island, a horse his father trained and his grandfather bred.
During the next 14 years the Lake Zurich High School graduate went on to become one of the top riders on the Chicago circuit. He earned a jockey championship at Hawthorne Race Course and won graded stakes races there, at Arlington and at out-of-state tracks.
Then in 2010, discouraged by steadily declining purses, Campbell stopped riding the Chicago circuit and made Woodbine his new home track. Success followed.
The Toronto Sun called him “one of Woodbine’s brightest stars” following his victory last summer in Canada’s most coveted race, the Queen’s Plate, on 18-1 long shot Midnight Aria.
“He’d still be here if we had something equal to the $500,000 a day in purses that they have in Woodbine because of slot machines,” his father said.
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The Futurity’s sister race, the $100,000 Arlington-Washington Lassie for 2-year-old fillies, also will be run on Saturday. Happy To Go, who invaded Woodbine to run third and fifth in $125,000 stakes races after winning her debut at Arlington for local trainer Armando de la Cerda, heads the seven-horse field. All of the other contestants recorded their first victory last time out.