fuck yeah queen z

Lately, Ann has been working on a plan. It makes Jerry shiver when she brings it up, which I suspect is because Ann has a habit of getting her way. I accidentally — and, given my love of instigation, delightedly — stumbled onto it.

Why not move Zenyatta to their house?

“Let’s not go there,” Jerry says.

“We’ve got lots of lawn there,” Ann says. “She could really like grazing.”

“It is even legal?” I ask.

“It is in Bel-Air because Nicolas Cage has a horse across the street in his garage, actually,” she says.

“We don’t have that much room,” Jerry says. “The ground is uneven.”

“She loves to graze,” Ann says. “There’s lots of grazing there.”

“She is 1,200 pounds,” Jerry says.

“There are all the old horse trails around,” Ann says. “That’s how people used to ride their horses from Bel-Air to Beverly Hills. The old Bel-Air, the old L.A. Our property has two of the old horse trails.”

“But there’s a fence in the middle of one of them,” Jerry says.

Ann turns to me.

“This is as far as it’s gotten,” she says.

“This is as far as it’s gotten,” Jerry says. “The discussion stage. I have a feeling reason will prevail.”

They sit and talk for a while, looking at the photos of the latest race, but I can’t get past the earlier conversation. I was sitting there and I’m telling you, Ann Moss was serious.

Wanna know how much Zenyatta means?

The owners have actually discussed moving her to their house.

Most days the old racetrack stands like a museum piece, its grandstand a 61-year-old battleship-sized, pale-green monument to a bygone era, surrounded by endless acres of empty asphalt, adjacent to a neon casino where the desperate and the dreamers shuffle from sunlight into darkness. Inside Hollywood Park, small crowds rattle around in the grandstand and the only real noise comes from the airplanes taking off at nearby LAX. Seabiscuit and Swaps once ran here. Bill Shoemaker and Laffit Pincay took a leg up. Movie stars watched in splendor. Those days are gone, written into a grand history that fades with each passing year.

But on the first Saturday in October, Hollywood Park has risen from the dead because today Zenyatta runs. Valet parking attendants scurry about with fists full of dollars. Long lines form at the turnstiles, and employees consult one another in a giddy improv, trying to service the outsized crowd of 25,837—the likes of which they seldom see. Little girls hold their mothers’ hands and carry pink signs praising a 6-year-old queen who has never lost. It is 2010 but feels like 1948. Many horses run fast, but precious few can travel through time.

Late in the afternoon, under a falling autumn sun, Zenyatta walks onto the track and performs her prerace ritual, her pawing at the ground the equine equivalent of LeBron’s flinging talc into the air. Most people can scarcely tell a thoroughbred from a carnival pony, but Zenyatta’s greatness fairly bursts from the skin beneath her coat. She towers over her four opponents, who look as if they could be her foals. Her chest is dense with muscles. When fans cry for her to look their way, she turns briefly and then dances for them. Her jockey, Mike Smith, says that at this moment Zenyatta is “almost humanlike.” This is her stage. ~ Tim Layden