By Dylan Butler
A horse racing fan for almost 50 years, Eric Dattner skipped out on last year’s Belmont Stakes. Tickets, good tickets, aren’t as easy to find anymore.
Instead, Dattner and his wife Jean of 41 years sat in their modest three-bedroom home across the street from the Douglaston Golf Course and watched Sarava ruin War Emblem’s Triple Crown bid on television.
The retired mechanical engineer, though, had no problem finding tickets for Saturday’s 135th running of the Belmont Stakes, and he and 20 of his closest family members and friends will watch from an owner’s box as Dattner’s horse, Funny Cide, attempts to win the Triple Crown.
His neighbors, in their cookie-cutter houses on 247th Street, have no idea they live next to an owner of a horse attempting to make racing history.
“It’s certainly something nobody could have imagined, including me,” Dattner said of attempting to win the Triple Crown for the first time in 25 years. “I keep saying to myself every few hours, ‘That horse won the Kentucky Derby, It’s hard to believe.”
Dattner is one of 10 owners of the New York-bred chestnut gelding which calls Belmont Park home. And of the group, Dattner, who is a 10 percent owner, is the only member of the Sackatoga Stables’ partnership to hail from New York City.
Led by Jack Knowlton, the managing partner, the group includes six high school buddies from the small western New York town of Sackets Harbor who have become the media darlings.
“They make a great story, six guys from a little town. That’s fine with me and Jack deserves it,” Dattner said. “He does all the work, he keeps the books, makes sure we get seats when we want them. He works hard at organizing.”
Dattner fell in love with horse racing the first time he went to the track, when he and three friends at Queens College scraped up about $10 and headed to the old Jamaica Race Track, now the Rochdale Houses, in April 1954.
“We were betting place and show and collecting $2.60, $2.40, we might have broken even,” Dattner said. “But I was really captured by the excitement and the color, and I decided that someday I would own a horse.”
Seventeen years later, Dattner, a graduate of Forest Hills High School, entered into a partnership and owned his first horse, Rub Out, a New York-bred in a time when breeding in New York was not fashionable.
A year later the horse died in a barn fire, and that partnership ended not long after.
Thirty years later he was introduced to Knowlton through trainer Barcley Tagg, and they soon teamed up to buy a filly named Diamond Flight and another, Wed In Dixie, at a sale in Saratoga Springs by Fasig-Tipton.
It was there that Dattner first saw Funny Cide.
“At the time, Funny Cide went through that sale for $22,000,” Dattner said. “And none of us from Sackatoga had an inkling that this was a horse who was destined for greatness.”
Funny Cide was purchased by Tony Everard, who sent him to Another Episode Farm near Ocala, Fla., the same place Sakatoga Stables sent their yearling, Wed In Dixie, to get broken.
“When Barcley Tagg would periodically pay a visit to this training center to see how his yearlings were progressing, he noticed Funny Cide,” Dattner said. “Sometime between August and December Funny Cide had blossomed enough to attract attention.”
Sakatoga Stables purchased Funny Cide for $85,000, with Dattner’s initial investment at just $8,500. Heading into the Belmont Stakes, Funny Cide has earned nearly $1.9 million.
“I wouldn’t use the word invest; one doesn’t invest in a horse,” he said. “One puts money up for entertainment, if you would. I’ve been doing this for a long time, much longer than many of the Sakatoga people, and I’ve learned it is not an investment.”
In his debut, Funny Cide won by 14 lengths in a 6-furlong maiden-special-weight race at Belmont on Sept. 8, 2002.
The 3-year-old, whose sire is Kentucky-bred Distorted Humor, then won its first two New York-bred stakes races — the B.F. Bongard and Sleepy Hollow — also at Belmont, improving his record to a perfect 3-for-3 at his home track.
After a disappointing fifth-place finish at the Holy Bull Stakes in Gulfstream Park in January, Funny Cide finished third in the Louisiana Derby and then placed second in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct on April 12.
“(Tagg) told me in the quiet of the afternoon as he was grazing the horse, he said, ‘There are two New York-bred stakes coming up and if we can win these next two stakes, I’d like to put him away for three months and then try the Derby trail,’” Dattner said of Funny Cide’s debut. “He really had an inkling with this horse and the Wood was really the affirmation of those beliefs.”
Ridden by jockey Jose Santos, Funny Cide then became the first New York-bred to capture the Kentucky Derby by upsetting Empire Maker and dominated the field at the Preakness two weeks later.
He will attempt to be the fourth New York-bred horse to win the Belmont Stakes, the first since Forester in 1882.
But Dattner said he has little to do with Funny Cide’s remarkable run.
“We the owners, believe me, do nothing. We just enjoy the ride,” he said. “I just can’t say enough about the trainer and his assistant (Robin Smullen), really. The credit is theirs, they picked the horse, they developed the horse.”
Reach Associate Sports Editor Dylan Butler by e-mail at TimesLedger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 143.
