You’re welcome!

Combining the fan attendance for Big Brown’s Monmouth Stakes and Curlin’s Woodward is an interesting angle, because it’s a tale of two managements.

MP obviously didn’t have their heart in it.

(But even a legitimate effort on their part wasn’t likely to succeed. Demoralized and dissipated, their managers have just had it, the peacetime equivalents of the original army officers who, one by one, were relieved of their commands by Lincoln prior to and in the third year of the American Civil War.)

NYRA - also hardly anyone’s idea of a top-rank outfit - actually did spend big bucks on ads for the race.

But their good intentions were thwarted by their own relatively ad hoc scheduling.

Curlin ran during the sixth & final week of racing at Saratoga.

That’s when attendance - each year, like clockwork - drops right off the cliff.

On to the Breeders’ Cup!

Thanks for the on-the-ground, color commentary. A nice complement to race results. Interesting that our two current mega-stars could only draw approximately 20K fans at Saratoga and Monmouth, respectively, in most recent appearances. No matter how you cut it, not a good harbinger of things to come

Arrived at @ 12:15 pm; the anticipated mob wasn’t there.

17,047 fans did eventually show up (mostly after Race Six).

While that does rank as a great day for Monmouth, compared to an average September weekend gate - & the total handle of just under six million bucks was impressive - it was hardly a replay of Haskell Day.

Thank God! Monmouth didn’t bother to hire extra workers for their concession stands, etc. Everything about the facility uniformly reeked of half-hearted effort & who cares.

Typical: The idiotically-conceived, pygmy-sized sign at the front gate that announced that “Big Brown Is Back!” “Big Brown,” in black, was visible. But the illegible, pale yellow lettering used for “Is Back” was obliterated by the sunlight.

We came for a day, & stayed for what felt like a year. Turf fields prior to the Monmouth Stakes were wiped out with scratches (due to the previous day’s rain, an unwelcome reminder of the 2007 Breeders’-Cup-at-Monmouth fiasco). And most of the originally-intended-for-dirt race fields were anemic in size, to boot.

But no one thought it would be a good idea to speed up the pace & get the horses in the meaningless races into the gates as soon as possible. Race 3 had a six-horse field; Race 4 had five; & Race 7 also had five runners. BORING.

Race Six was named the Domalewski Derby. Really.

Eventually, there were about 2,000 fans thronged throughout the paddock area, awaiting the pre-race saddling of Big Brown. So were 4,000 gnats! In 100+ trips to Monmouth, this has never been seen. An immediate retreat to our seats ensued.

The talents of Big Brown’s opponents - with the exception of Proudinsky - had been grossly exaggerated, as it turned out. But nothing can detract from the stellar show he put on. By all rights, at the top of the stretch, at least four of the turf specialists should have gone right on by The Dirtmeister.

No such thing occurred. And when he persisted & would not be bested, the aura of good feeling & gratification among the fans was overwhelmingly contagious.

It was, as the saying goes, all about the horse - so much so that even this old long-shot addicted curmudgeon got into the spirit, forgot about his losing bets & the Belmont Sakes disgrace, & appreciatively applauded the winning favorite.

You could not have ended a Monmouth season on a more unusually rare or better note.

Thanks for this–quickest, most complete report I found on the ‘net’–no TVG, etc. here.