Hollywood deals in dreams as a base currency, either on the silver screen or the sidewalks that are pounded by thousands of actors looking for the big break.

Over at Hollywood Park racecourse the dollar is king but, for once, sentiment may just hold sway over the sawbuck on Saturday.

It is a facet of the human condition that, even when someone has been ill for some time, the news of their death still has a shock effect. The American racing community received its jolt to the solar plexus earlier this month with the news that Bobby Frankel had finally succumbed to his long battle with leukemia.

The prospect of life after death is one of those debates that can only be concluded by the ones who find themselves on the other side of the River Styx but Frankel achieved something close to it at Hollywood last week.

It was Wednesday, two days after his death, but the entries still listed Life By R R as being trained by Frankel. When a jockey like Alex Solis, who can count his major victories in the dozens, is pumping his fist after winning a lowly $25,000 claiming race on an ordinary mid-week card it gives some idea of the esteem in which Frankel was held.      

Frankel’s story of the young man who started out on the streets of Brooklyn and made it all the way to the Californian dream would probably make a decent film itself. He first got into racing as a gambler and one day, in the early 1960s, he started off with $40, got on a roll that everyone who has ever struck a bet dreams of, and came home with $20,000. Years later he would recall: “I put the money on my mother’s bed. She thought I had robbed a bank.”

It was appropriate that the final winner in his name should have come in a claimer for a man whose early reputation was made as the “King of the Claimers” by developing such former platers as Baitman, Pataha Prince, Barometer and Lakeside Trail into stakes winners. He won at least one Grade One race every year from 1988 through to this year when Champs Elysees won Pattison Canadian International at Woodbine last month.

Training older horses was a hallmark of Frankel’s career which may explain why he had such relatively little success in the Triple Crown races (Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont) which are restricted to three-year-olds, although he did saddle Empire Maker to win the Belmont Stakes in 2003. Frankel was the Eclipse Award-winning trainer five times (1993 and 2000-2003), he won 11 Eclipse Awards with 10 horses and in 2003 he won a staggering 25 Grade One races, a world record for one season.

The Kentucky Derby may have eluded him but Frankel won the Kentucky Oaks twice, and had six Breeders’ Cup wins, most recently in last year’s Filly and Mare Sprint with Ventura.

Ventura is a typical Frankel horse. Owned by one of Frankel’s long-standing owners, Prince Khalid Abdullah, the mare had shown some form in two seasons trained in Britain by Amanda Perrett. Ventura was then shipped States-side for 2008 and has become one of the top mares in the country, having not finished out of the first three in 11 starts and winning three Grade One races. She will be making her final start in the Grade One $300,000 Matriarch Stakes, over a mile on the turf course at Hollywood.

Most recently Ventura finished second in the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint, on the Pro-Ride surface at Santa Anita last month, but some of her best races have come on turf, especially over the mile. Ventura won the Woodbine Mile earlier this year, was beaten by a nose in the Kilroe Mile at Santa Anita, and last year won the Just A Game at Belmont Park.

Frankel’s long-time assistant Humberto Ascanio has taken over the licence at the trainer’s California base but is still following the methods of Frankel, who was still talking about plans for his horses up to the day that he died.

“Life’s funny,” Frankel once said in reflective mood. “Sometimes things just happen, and they change your life completely. I wasn’t born into this. I just followed my instincts and ended up where I am.”

If Ventura ends up in the winner’s enclosure it will be many people’s idea of the perfect Hollywood ending.

Paul Wheeler