Mr. Buff all business winning second straight Empire Classic Handicap Saturday to highlight Empire Showcase Day card at Belmont Park. NYRA Photo.
By Paul Halloran
It’s amazing how much value you can get for $1.
Chester and Mary Broman campaigned Friend or Foe, a son of Friends Lake who won the Empire Classic 10 years ago, but weren’t interested in keeping him as a stallion. They sold him for $1 to a woman in Virginia, with the only stipulation that she register him as a Thoroughbred stallion.
Broman sent three mares to breed to him and one of the three horses in his first crop was Mr. Buff, who one-upped his father by winning the Empire Classic for the second year in a row Saturday to close the rich Empire Showcase program at Belmont Park.
“When he switched to his outside lead at the top of the stretch, I knew it was over,” winning trainer John Kimmel said. “There was no way they were going to beat him.”
Mr. Buff, a 6-year-old gelding who already boasted a seven-figure bankroll, led every step of the 9-furlong stakes, keeping Sea Foam at bay in the early stages and leaving plenty in the tank to hold off Bankit. Mr. Buff increased his earnings to $1,210,786 from 15 wins in 40 starts, and Kimmel has no intention of calling it quits with the gelding.
“For sure,” he said when asked if Mr. Buff would run as a 7-year-old.
“He’s a gelding and he’s a happy horse,” said Kimmel, who has won the Empire Classic three times. “He loves the winter here. He’ll have them over a barrel (at Aqueduct).”
Kimmel had put Mr. Buff in the deep end by running in the Grade 2 Suburban and Grade 1 Whitney this past summer, but the return to state-bred company was just what the doctor ordered.
“He hadn’t come back to the form he showed last spring,” Kimmel said. “He was breezing very well, but whether he can do it in the afternoon can be trying on your nerves.”
The way it turned out Saturday, there was nothing to fret about. Mr. Buff set reasonable fractions of :23.50, :47.56 and 1:11.50 under Junior Alvarado, who had plenty of horse in the stretch.
“Junior let him out a notch and he looked like he was real comfortable,” Kimmel said.
Kimmel, who has a long and productive history with the Bromans, was pleased to win this race for them again.
“They have taken breeding in New York to another level,” he said.
Mr. Buff, who was foaled at the Broman’s Chestertown Farm in Chestertown, stands 17.2 hands.
He’s out of the graded stakes-placed Speightstown mare Speightful Affair, who was purchased by the Bromans purchased Speightful Affair for $80,000 at the 2013 Fasig-Tipton Kentucky winter mixed sale.
She was not in foal at the time and Mr. Buff was her second foal, after the winning Sir Whimsey gelding Organic Gemini for former owners Turtle Bird Stable.
Speightful Affair produced two full siblings to Mr. Buff in 2015 and 2018, the winning 5-year-old horse Cain Is Abel and unraced 2-year-old filly Miss Buff. She’s also the dam of the two-time winning 4-year-old Scat Daddy gelding Daddy Knows and a weanling colt by Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Accelerate born in late April.
