There's Curlin, and 11 spoilers

There is little left to say about Curlin and today's Breeders' Cup Classic.

He is the rock star and this is his stage. Attendance at Santa Anita's picturesque race track could reach as high as 45,000, and lots of those will be Curlin groupies.

They stretched this year's Breeders' Cup to two days, 14 races and $25.5 million in purses.

But all of that will take a back seat to the grand finale. At about 3:45 p.m. at Santa Anita's picturesque race track, they will load Curlin and 11 more of the world's best horses into a gate at the west end of the main straightaway.

In the world of horse racing, all will stop. Some of the sports world in general will too.

Curlin won this $5-million Classic race last year, in the muck and mud at Monmouth Park. This is not New Jersey. There won't be any of that at Santa Anita.

But there will be plenty of competition, and the self-labeled savvy betters will be shrugging off the Curlin hype and looking elsewhere, assuming that nothing can be as good as Curlin sounds.

Still, hard to ignore is Curlin's $10,246,800 in winnings, most ever in North America, plus designation as horse of the year last year and credentials to be that again this year.

Even his majority owner, 78-year-old Jess Jackson, Kendall-Jackson Winery founder, who has excelled as a lawyer and businessman to the point of now being one of the richest men in the world, is awe-struck.

"Curlin is my hero," Jackson says.

Maybe even a bit of a groupie himself, if events of Oct. 13 are any indication.

Curlin was scheduled to work on Santa Anita's new synthetic surface that day, between the fourth and fifth races of a Columbus Day card. Trainer Steve Asmussen, currently the leading trainer in the country, was uneasy with the surface and had put Curlin on a plane and shipped him to California within hours of his second straight victory in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Sept. 27.

Now, this was to be the final test, a gallop with stablemate Hawaii Cells.

Jackson trusts Asmussen completely, but he said he just had to be there, to see for himself. So he got on his plane in Santa Rosa and headed for Ontario Airport. Asmussen, knowing he had a small window of time between races to do this, paced in the barns, knowing his owner was running late.

"We left Ontario at 1:50 and made it here just after 2:15," Jackson told the press. "We passed a few black-and-whites going about 85, but our driver was a former policeman, so we were OK."