The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 51

i THE TAMPA TRIBUNE Wednesday, April 19, 1978 Section Bob Greene I. Ringo: Only Four Persons Understand Hill mx c-isttigtEwP CHICAGO The man sitting across the dinner table said, "I can never make you understand. There's only four of us who will ever understand exactly how it was, and that's John, Paul, George and myself." The man, whose name is Ringo Starr, said, "You can talk about it and talk about it until the cows come home. I don't know why it happened to us. Well, actually I do know, or I think I know.

I think I was born for it to happen to me. How else can you explain it? There were four of us in the band, and then there was a fifth person, and that fifth person was just a kind of a magic, you know? Magic. "And now some sort of myth has developed around us. A lot of the "I've been around Arab racing four years now, and I've never seen an Arab break down. I mean clear down where they can't be put back together again." horse trainer Nancy Kirkpatrick Photos by John Bard Nancy Kirkpatrick poses with Arabian horse people who talk about us are kids, they weren't even born when we were still together.

I don't know. Ringo Starr I don't know." Every time I talk about it His companion asked him: What about all of the money offers for the four of them to do one more show together? There had been an item in the newspaper the other day reporting that one promoter was See GREENE, Page 2D Woman Tells Of New Type Of Horse Racing is turn The Tribune Grill X. Wftt AJob For Daniel Boone Members of the Northwest Hillsborough River Basin Board have been told to "hire an Indian guide" to lead them to their monthly meeting set for Thursday, The gathering is set for the Odessa home of Myron G. Gibbons, and each board member's notice contained a map to the location, which is depicted as a straw hut on stilts. Access roads are described as "too far," "dirt and bumps," and "hire indian guide here." Lake Pretty, which is next to the Gibbons home, is marked with a large alligator, while the map also advises: "If you get lost or break down call Lake Pretty 920-2170." 1i ej- i llWeTS By MARTY MARTH For someone as lightweight and small-boned as Nancy Kirkpatrick, manageable horses like the Arabian can take some of the hard work out of being a trainer.

But brains, if not brawn, also work in her favor. Kirkpatrick, a professional horse trainer, has been in Tampa this past week working out 10 Arabs on the Florida Downs racetrack. Today she'll trailer them to the Florida State Fairgrounds, east of Tampa, for the upcoming Arabian Horse Spectacular, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A doctor's daughter from Pennsylvania, Kirkpatrick told how she came to be here. "Like most girls, I took up riding, in my case, at the age of five.

But I really got into the training end of it when I was a senior in college. I took a summer job training quarter horses. It didn't take me long to fall in love with the horse racing life." Owners now pay Kirkpatrick to take their horses to the races and train them for the track. It's a nomadic life, calling for travel from coast to coast all year, highlighted by 12-hour days of feeding, mucking stalls, exercising the older horses and breaking in the younger ones. Six of the 3-year-olds in her care will be among the hundreds of outstanding Arabs participating in the events.

"Arab racing is a relatively new sport," explained 26-year-old Kirkpatrick. "We have no real circuit as in thoroughbred racing." At the moment, only a few states such as California, Texas, Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, feature Arab racing, with the last three boasting pari-mutuel arrangements by running an Arab event following the day's thoroughbred races. Florida Downs, which has staged quarter-horse races in the past, this year inaugurated Arabian races the last two weeks of the season. Six races were scheduled in the program with purses totaling $5,000. The number of entries was modest, and Kirkpatrick had horses in the money in four of the races.

Horse people tend to wear blinders when it comes to breeds and thoroughbred fanciers subtly snub the Arab racing movement. "Thoroughbred people made comments," Kirkpatrick said, "but once they saw them (Arabians) run they calmed down a bit. "The only area in which we Arab people compete with thoroughbred trainers and owners and here's a problem is for stall space at the racetrack." At Florida Downs, for example, which last week completed its most successful season, Kirkpatrick rented 10 stalls for her Arabs. The majority of the horses in her care are owned by Sa-Arabet Arabian Farms in Loudon, where she is trainer. Weather-Wise Investigators Hillsborough County Sheriff Malcolm Beard raised a ruckus last month when federal revenue sharing investigators showed up unannounced to investigate discrimination charges filed by fired Deputy Marsha Moyers.

Beard, calling the investigation harassment, said he knew why the Washington boys were in town. "Check the Rubbing down the horse Among them is Dimrak, a 10-year-oW which has accumulated $10,000 in purses racing throughout the country. There had been talk about matching Dimrak against a thoroughbred during the Arab Spectacular, but no one is particularly enthusiastic about a match race. "The risk of a horse breaking down in such a race is too great," Kirkpatrick said. That opinion is shared by many trainers, who view match races as courting disaster.

The most famous example was the Foolish Pleasure-Ruffian match in 1975. "Arabs don't, however, break down as much as thoroughbreds. In fact," she adds, "I've been around Arab racing four years now, and I've never seen an Arab break down. I mean clear down where they can't be put back together again." This hardy constitution, the Arab's classical beauty and its ability to carry weight are major reasons for the breed's popularity. Those, plus its disposition.

"AH of them are pleasant-natured and don't mind being handled," she said. Originally fostered by the Bedouin Arab tribes, the Arabian horse nowadays is bred nearly worldwide for virtually every conceivable role requiring horsepower. The races scheduled for Sunday include six-furlong races for 3-year-olds, a mile race for oWer horses and a special 2)4-mile cross-country fete. weather up there. You can tell when it's cold because that's when the investigators want to come to Florida," he said.

Washington officials, citing the Moyers case among others, informed Hillsborough County Leading an Arabian from its stall Worlds Craft Of CBS Says It's Best Of Both officials last week that the county was in "noncompliance" of federal anti-discrimination regulations. The Big Communication Pitch WDAE Radio talk show host John Eastman confounded a roomful of partying young people at Papa Joe's lounge Sunday night when he liberally peppered pitches for donations to a planned radio station with pitches for his new movie "Rooster." Eastman, a co-host at Sunday's benefit concert for WMNF, which its founders say will have subscribed members and no commercials, climbed on stage, and, amid other rambling comments, told the several hundred persons in the audience to "go see "Rooster' and donate to WMNF." Growing ever stronger in his rhetoric, Eastman at one point shouted into the microphone, "Everybody in this room shut up!" He also pointed out: "There's nobody in this room but us," and, "I work for the oldest radio station in the state, and they don't tell you the truth. The television stations don't tell you the truth." Eastman later said he never wandered from the subject of the radio station because: is about thinking and WMNF is about thinking I wasn't downing my own station, (but) commerciality interrupts" communication. And he told the audience to shut up "only so they could be communicated to (and) communication is a serious subject." Television pfi Ben Brown lft Last fall, the area's two women sportscasters Ann Carton (of WTVT-TV) and Gayle Sierens (WFLA-TV) were invited to try out for a new on-air sports slot with CBS. Although the details weren't certain at the time, the job was host of "Women in Sports," a new segment on "The CBS Sports Spectacular." Featuring women athletes both amateur and professional "Women in Sports" has become a five-minute slice of the 90-minute "Spectacular" whenever golf or other extended sports events don't reduce its Saturday time slot.

Sierens and Carlon interviewed for the job. They were encouraged by CBS's apparent enthusiasm but eventually lost out to a self-proclaimed "surf-bum" who skateboards through airports and wears sneakers and flip-flops on the air. She's Christine Craft, a 31 -year-old California native who has been in the business of television all of three years. mind, her background seemed to supply plenty of the potential. Her mother (also Christine Craft) appeared in several television theater productions in the '50s and then in network commercials for major companies like General Electric.

And her father was a high school football, basketball and track coach. If she had combined the talents of her parents at an early age, Christine Craft may have been some sort of TV phenomenon. But she was a real California girl from the beginning surfing, sun and "blond hair down to here," she says. And it was hard enough giving up beach days to get through the University of California at Santa Barbara with a B.A. in English in 1968.

She lived in Hawaii five separate times, she adds and ended up with a California teaching job that made her reassess her future. Teaching was definitely out What would be in, it turned out, was television. It See CHRISTCVE, Page 2D 4 Craft was in St. Petersburg last weekend to watch power boat driver Betty Cook race to a second place finish in the Swift Offshore Powerboat Classic and to interview the world champion for a "Women in Sports" segment of the "Spectacular." "It's the best of both worlds," Craft says about her job. "I like news reporting, and I like to be involved in sports.

Now I get to do both." Though she didn't start out with television in Christine Craft.