Maimonides and the Monkey

Maimonides was officially retired this week and plans were announced for him to stand at Vinery in Florida. I was at Saratoga the day the $4.6 million colt broke his maiden in impressive fashion in his first start.
He raced one more time and got hurt. After giving him a chance to come back, Mr. Zayat decided to retire him. In my opinion, this is another case of a precocious, fast, but frail thoroughbred being put in a position to pass on his frailty to another generation. This will just perpetuate the decline of the breed.

This makes me think of The Green Monkey who stands at Hartley/DeRenzo Thoroughbreds in Florida. These guys were the pinhookers that sold him at auction and apparently felt so guilty about taking all of that Coolmore money that they agreed to stand the biggest bust ever at their farm. I was also in attendance for his first start at Belmont Park.
In retrospect, maybe I'm the bad luck charm. Maybe I should just stay away from big-buck debuts in the future.

I'm reading Jim Squires' book, Headless Horsemen, and he has a good quote about The Green Monkey, "...The Green Monkey, who will go down in history as the prototype of the modern thoroughbred "sale horse" - a commodity that became for the racing industry what the subprime mortgage derivative was for Wall Street - a kind of overvalued product that sucked the money out of the market until it was gasping for survival."

Perhaps thoroughbred auctions can now be considered a leading economic indicator. I should dust off my Economics degree and look into that.