McNamara: A perfect day at Saratoga to honor late turf writer Ziegel

SARATOGA SPRINGS - Vic Ziegel didn't sound good. One morning during Derby week in the Churchill Downs press box, the Daily News columnist kept coughing. I thought it was a bad cold or a bronchial infection. I had no idea he'd been battling lung cancer for months.

That horrific illness would have kept most 72-year-olds home in bed feeling sorry for themselves, but not Vic. He retired last fall after covering the Breeders' Cup in California but worked out a deal with the News to cover the 2010 Triple Crown and Breeders' Cup, and cancer would not keep him from staying the distance. He went anyway to Louisville, Baltimore and Belmont Park, getting progressively weaker but never losing his unique touch.

In the spring, Vic called Jerry Bossert, the News' racing writer and handicapper. "He said, 'I've got a few stories to tell you,' " Bossert said Friday. "He'd had a third of one lung removed in December. Then he said, 'I hope you don't mind, but you're going to have to drive me around during the Triple Crown, because I can't drive anymore.' "

Vic was a low-key contrarian full of pithy sayings. He always had an offbeat, amusing take on racing, one of his three favorite sports, along with baseball and boxing. During Belmont week, he was very pale and having trouble walking, pretty much confined to shuffling his feet, but you wouldn't have known that from his copy.

This year's Belmont Stakes was rather uninspiring, lacking Derby winner Super Saver and Preakness hero Lookin At Lucky, and the plodding Drosselmeyer ended up the last horse standing after an extremely sluggish mile and a half.

"His winning time was 2:31.57," Ziegel wrote. "Secretariat, who won his Belmont in 2:24, would have beaten him by, oh, 40 lengths. Drosselmeyer must never be told."

After the Belmont, Vic's cancer became more aggressive, and he died July 23. On Friday, they honored the old-school guy from the Bronx at his beloved Saratoga, where the first race was named the "Vic Ziegel Memorial." His widow, Roberta, their daughter, Katy Ziegel, and Vic's sister, Shelly Goldfeder, greeted many of his former colleagues in the winner's circle on a perfect summer afternoon.

"This is a glorious day, very nice," a smiling Roberta Ziegel said. "I'm totally thrilled. Vic loved it here. I had never been to a racetrack before I met Vic, and we came here all the time. He made sure Katy went to camp in the Adirondacks during August so we could come to Saratoga before we brought her home.

"He loved horse racing. Sometimes years ago, after being at Saratoga in the afternoon, he and his friends would drive to Green Mountain in Vermont for the night racing."

Vic collected racetracks as well as media pins. She said that in 1975, he made it to his 50th track, Santa Fe Downs, a quarter horse outpost in New Mexico. "He had a friend named Robert working there, and Robert kept asking Vic to visit," Roberta said. "Vic said he'd come all that way only if they named a race for him, and that's what they did, so 35 years ago, we went there."

Ziegel knew that being able to earn his living as a sportswriter was a stroke of luck. He took his work seriously, but not himself. As he liked to say of racing, "If a man could pick winners, he wouldn't have to write this stuff."

News of his death spread through the press box early in the afternoon on a rainy opening day at Saratoga. When race-caller Tom Durkin led the crowd in the traditional "And they're off at Saratoga," perhaps Vic's spirit was observing from the roof. If such things are possible, he wouldn't have been anywhere else.

"Vic talked a lot about Saratoga," Roberta said. "He built it up. He really loved it. It's like being at the best wedding that anyone could go to. He would have loved today. It would be what he called 'dancing around the kitchen.'

"He would be knocked out to have a race named for him. I just know this."