Cal-bred News

Willman’s Attention Split at Sunshine Millions

ARCADIA, Calif. (Jan. 18, 2007) -- Mike Willman, the co-owner and co-breeder of McCann’s Mojave, won’t be on hand at Gulfstream Park when the 7-year-old bay horse competes in the $1 million Sunshine Millions Classic on Jan. 27.

As the director of publicity at Santa Anita Park, Willman will be at the Arcadia track overseeing the media coverage of the four Sunshine Millions events which will be run there.

His heart, though, will be 3,000 miles away at Gulfstream Park, where the four other Sunshine Millions events -- including the richest one, the 1 1/8-mile Classic -- will take place.

The $3.6 million series for California-breds and Florida-breds is being contested for the fifth time.

Among McCann’s Mojave’s likely opponents in the Classic are California Cup Classic champion Texcess and Florida-bred Sweetnorthernsaint, who was the Kentucky Derby favorite in 2006 and the runner-up in the Preakness.

Willman, who bred the son of Memo, who is out of the Nordic Prince mare Joni U Bar, with Alix Nikki Hunt, and owns the horse with Hunt, fears no Classic contestants.

“My horse is better than he’s ever been,” said Willman of McCann’s Mojave, who has won nine of 23 starts and earned $624,955.

He credits veteran Northern California trainer Steve Specht, to whom he turned over McCann’s Mojave in November, with giving the horse new life at an advanced equine age.

“The horse is training scary good,” Willman says. “For whatever reason, he’d gotten dull in his training down here. It didn’t seem to be anything physical. But Steve has gotten him happy again. The horse seems happy in his training and in his races.”

McCann’s Mojave won his last two starts of 2006 for Specht, a mile allowance affair at Bay Meadows and the 1 1/16-mile Union Square Stakes at Golden Gate Fields, both over sloppy strips.

The victory in the Union Square on opening day of the Golden Gate meet was McCann’s Mojave’s fifth in a stakes, the richest of which came in the $250,000 Cal Cup Classic at Oak Tree. His upset victory over Desert Boom and Cheroot in that 1 1/8-mile event came in his first attempt at handling a distance longer than 7 ½ furlongs.

The horse’s only graded stakes score came in the $200,000, 6 ½-furlong Potrero Grande Breeders’ Cup Handicap, a Grade II at Santa Anita on March 28, 2004, when he defeated fellow Cal-bred Unfurl the Flag by three-quarters of a length.

Five weeks later, he ran second in the Grade II $200,000, seven-furlong Churchill Downs Handicap, bowing to Todd Pletcher-trained Speightstown, who later in 2004 would capture the Breeders’ Cup Sprint and be voted an Eclipse Award as the best sprinter in North America.

The trip to Kentucky marked McCann’s Mojave’s only venture outside California until the 2007 Sunshine Millions Classic. He ran sixth behind Lava Man in last year’s race, when it was run at Santa Anita.

“Our hope is that he can race successfully this year and we can sell him as a stallion,” Willman says.

It’s something of a miracle that McCann’s Mojave is still alive, much less racing. The last foal of Joni U Bar, who died last year, he developed a serious bacterial infection shortly after birth. The horse is named for Cecil McCann, an octogenarian who tends to some property Willman owns in the Mojave Desert.
-- Larry Bortstein