Scalper and Frances in the Sky

I got a kick out of seeing that there were four 2-year-old first-out winners in June of '96 at Churchill Downs, and the last two, Frances in the Sky and Scalper, were by Sky Classic and Silver Hawk. These were sprint races on the dirt that they won, mind you. Frances in the Sky and Scalper only made eight career starts between them, so they didn't really get a chance to show if they could have been stars going longer and on turf. Scalper particularly leaves me wondering what might have been: it was over 19 months after his maiden win that he ran again, but he did well, running 2nd in an allowance on the dirt, and then winning the same kind of race the next time at Keeneland, at a mile and a sixteenth. Particularly in those days, horses just did not return the same after layoffs of that long, but Scalper was still pretty good, and he hadn't even been tried on the turf (his return race was actually rained off the turf). Scalper's dam was young, so he actually had a decent half sister running just last year named Midway Holiday. Scalper's dam, Gatap, was a half sister to a Silver Hawk named Zoonaqua, who won dirt graded stakes (Oak Leaf and Sorrento) at 2. So maybe the female family did trend very strongly towards 2-year-old dirt form, and Scalper would have been a good horse had he not gotten hurt, but not necessarily a freak on the turf. Maybe the Silver Hawk was overridden.