No greyhound track in the country runs odder distances than does Southland, located in West Memphis, Arkansas. West Memphis is on the left side of the Mississippi River, directly across from Memphis, Tennessee, and one of the track’s distances, the 703 yard marathon, is known as the River Course. It is on this course that Kiowa Apple Lyde recently broke the track record during the Night of Stars race, but there may have been even more excitement at Southland on May 18th when he hooked up with another speedster over the shorter Razorback Course, which is the only distance at Southland that is run elsewhere in the nation.
While the Southland marathon is only 703 yards, or about 67 yards shorter than a true 7/16ths, the standard marathon yardage in America, the Razorback route is a normal 3/8ths of a mile, measuring out at 660 yards. It is over this course that Apple Lyde, fresh off his remarkable marathon run, took on a AA field that included the gifted My Sugar Drive, a brindle female out of the fabulous Cayman Went. Kiowa Apple Lyde’s daddy is WW Apple Jax, and ironically enough, Apple Jax and Cayman Went were bitter foes on the Tampa-St. Pete circuit a few years back, a rivalry that now appears to be taken up by these two offspring.
My Sugar Drive has been teasing the Southland faithful with her own attempts at track records, coming close to Okie Lynda’s 36.28 mark over the 3/8ths with a 36.38 last month. Okie Lynda was as get as they come anywhere, so to be approaching anything that she was able to accomplish takes some doing. In the May 18th match-up, Sugar Drive broke out of the seven hole and Apple Lyde from the two box. Apple Lyde cleared in second place along the rail behind the early foot of the one dog, WTD Evonna, while Sugar Drive recovered from a mediocre break to settle into third as they headed around the curtain turn and down the backstretch.
Now you are not going to catch a greyhound as fast as Kiowa Apple Lyde unless he runs into some sort of trouble, such as being blocked while attempting to pass the dog in front of him. This was Sugar Drive’s only hope, but it failed to materialize when Apple Lyde ran smartly underneath Evonna going into the far turn and pulled steadily away. To make matters worse, when Sugar Drive tried to get by the fading pacesetter, she was offstrided a bit when Evonna moved towards the rail just as Sugar was passing. The result was Sugar Drive being unable to regain her stride in time to run any better than fourth, and Kiowa Apple Lyde winning by six lengths in 36.88. What his father rarely got done against Cayman Went, Apple Lyde got done against Apple Jax’s nemesis’s daughter. These two will certainly meet again in the future at Southland.
The Southland marathon isn’t the only odd-duck distance the facility runs its greyhounds over. The sprint at the Arkansas dog track is not the usual 550 yard 5/16ths of a mile that most other tracks employ, but a challenging 583 yards that separates the contenders from the pretenders, especially down the stretch. Two of Southland’s top sprinters could not be more different, the monster closer Greys Real Deal and the swift youngster, Kiowa Well Water. Both had their considerable talents on display over the weekend, winning their respective races.
Greys Real Deal is aptly named, as he has been the real thing since his Southland debut in August of 2006. This 80 pound red male has made it to the turn on top just twice in his 40 times to post since then, but he has won 18 times, with 7 seconds and 7 thirds, meaning that he can close like the wind. In his last outing, he was hopelessly mired in seventh place at the turn, but turned on the jets down the backstretch and turned a 10 length deficit into a 5 length win before the other dogs knew what had happened to them. Real Deal owns the quickest sprint time of the season at Southland; his 31.69 on April 14th was just short of the 31.60 record for the distance held by Big Monday, set just last year. The January 2005 son of Dodgem By Design and Greys Maybelline should be able to handle the extra distance of running a 3/8ths with ease, and if he ever is moved to that yardage, Sugar Drive and Apple Lyde will have another fast foe to contend with.
Kiowa Well Water is one of the youngest greyhounds running currently in the entire country, never mind just at Southland. The 71 pound brindle male out of Coldwater Guv and Kiowa Arubaangie was born on November 8th, 2005, making him just eighteen months of age. In his dozen starts at Southland, Well Water has been on the lead right behind Rusty the mechanical bunny in ten of them. He has held on to win eight of these, including his last time out. Greys Real Deal blew by him a couple starts ago, and this is another pairing that will unfold over the coming weeks at the West Memphis oval that bears watching.
