Tim and Lisa, up close and endearingly personal

I don't know what Tim Snyder was like before Lisa's Booby Trap. But I know first-hand a little bit about the man he is right now, and if he's changed (which the Daily Racing Form says he hasn't), I'd be hard-pressed to believe it.

My first trip to Saratoga Race Course as a credentialed blogger was simply brilliant, except for my luck at the betting windows (though I did hit a trifecta and a pricey exacta on Sunday). But by far the highlight of the weekend didn't require credentials at all; only fate.

In Saratoga, I crossed paths with a Twitter friend, Constance Matia. (And regret not catching up with others, including Teresa Genaro of Brooklyn Backstretch and Mike Jarboe from the Albany Times Union.)

Following a splendid day at the track -- and a heart-stopping renewal of the Travers Stakes, won by Afleet Express by the narrowest of margins over Fly Down -- Connie and I decided to make our way to Siro's, the primo post-race hangout and eatery in Saratoga Springs, just outside the racetrack's fence at 168 Lincoln Ave. We didn't have dinner reservations, and weren't planning on spending a lot of time or money, but a band was on-stage out back, there was no cover for the party, and the place couldn't have been more packed. It looked like a good time, and it was.

After a few hours, around 11 p.m., we decided it was time to go. As I waited for Connie by the back gate of Siro's, a diminutive man walked toward me, carrying a pair of foam takeout-dinner containers.

It was Tim Snyder.

I contemplated whether to just let the man walk with his late-night meal or leftovers. I sorely wanted to meet him and his horse, but maybe this wasn't the time. Yet, as he neared, I couldn't resist.

"You're Tim Snyder!" I said, unable to resist the fan-boy greeting. "I can't believe this."

The hard-luck horseman who has suddenly made good looked me over through squinted eyes.

"How do you know my name's Snyder?"

"Dude, I've seen you on TV," I replied. "You own Lisa's Booby Trap, and she's awesome."

Snyder's demeanor softened.

"You think I've got a great horse?" he asked. I answered affirmatively and enthusiastically.

"Good," Snyder said. "Then would you mind goin' over there with me and tellin' that to this chick at the bar? She don't believe me when I say I got a great horse."

Favor eagerly granted.

Without time to wait for, nor means to alert, Connie, I followed Snyder back to the vicinity of Siro's raw bar, where a young female employee noticed the trainer returning.

"Here," Snyder said, pointing in my direction, "listen to this fella."

Grinning, I told a smirking Siro's girl, "This man owns a great horse. She's big, she's beautiful, and she's really frickin' fast."

In hopes of reinforcing the validity of my opinion, I handed the girl one of my business cards; "Golden Gale Stables: Breeding, Racing, Pedigree, Bloodstock Advising."

The interaction was sufficient to correct the young lady's opinion of Snyder and his horse, and Tim was satisfied.

"C'mon," he said, "lemme buy ya a drink."

We collected Connie on our way and bellied -- well, I bellied, Snyder "chested" -- up to the bar. After some jovial, colorful discussion, the horseman casually asked, "So, you wanna go and meet her?"

Did we? Did we!

Siro's is just two doors down from the Saratoga stakes barn, a white building as pretty as a house, where Lisa's Booby Trap resides in a stall and Snyder stays in a dorm room upstairs. As we entered the small paddock surrounded by stalls, Snyder stopped at the watchman's door and dropped off the takeout boxes -- a pair of lobsters, we learn.

"Lobster can wait, or he can eat 'em both," Snyder said, gesturing toward the guard. We walked inside.

There, Snyder opened the gate and let Connie spend a great length of time in the stall with his horse. I'd wanted to walk to my vehicle for my camera bag, but Connie didn't want to delay Snyder nor her date with Lisa. So, regrettably, what became a 90-minute stay at the barn is captured in memories, not photographs.

Snyder did run up to his room and lug back a stack of envelopes, stuffed with pictures of his life before and after Lisa's Booby Trap. His father was a jockey; his mother gave birth to Tim in the first aid room at Scarborough Downs.

But mostly the stop at the stakes barn was a Lisa's Booby Trap lovefest. The filly is remarkable, nuzzling those who enter her stall like she was just some little girl's 4-H pony, and occasionally walking over to the guy outside the enclosure (figuring it was full enough inside) to stick her big, beautiful head with its blind left eye over the gate to be patted. Her relaxed, pleasant demeanor belies the fierce competitor she becomes on a racetrack. And it isn't her only curious feature or trait.

The story of the filly who is half-blind, with one flat front foot and a club-foot on the other side, has been well-documented. But Snyder wanted us to see just how oddly Lisa is built, at least by the conformational standards of a great racehorse. Connie and I knelt outside the stall at Snyder's request, to get a good, low angle at each of Lisa's front feet as he lifted them, and to see how her shoulders aren't proportioned the same; one is more densely muscled. A huge, white spot in Lisa's left eye is evidence of her blindness.

Snyder said the horse also has a ravenous appetite, eating at volumes far beyond any horse he's ever trained or fed.

But whatever Tim Snyder is doing, he's doing it just right. Even in the dim light of the stall's bulb, the filly's coat glistened, her muscles rippled. Lisa's Booby Trap might have been scratched from the Coaching Club American Oaks, but taken-in on the whole, she has the look and exudes the confidence of a Grade 1 horse.

"Aw, she ain't even had a bath today," Snyder said, brushing aside a compliment.

When Connie asked if Lisa was likely to kick, Snyder replied with a demonstration.

"I'll show ya how she kicks," he said.

Grabbing the filly's tail in both hands, Snyder lifted his left foot high and playfully booted her in the butt. Lisa nickered and trotted circles in the stall, Snyder maintaining his grip on her tail and following behind, periodically raising his foot to kick at her again. When the little game ended and he dropped the horse's tail, Lisa's Booby Trap turned to nuzzle her owner, resting her gorgeous head upon his shoulder.

It was obvious why Tim Snyder hasn't sold, and will likely never sell, this animal, even at a reported offer of $500,000.

They're as in love as human and horse can be.

Lisa's Booby Trap is entered for today, the 5/2 favorite in the Riskaverse Stakes at the Spa, which will be her first effort on the turf. Her sire, Drewman, was 2-for-2 on the lawn, but that doesn't matter much to Snyder. Whatever her pedigree suggests -- short or long, dirt or grass -- he's convinced the 4-for-4 filly quite simply can do anything.

I'm hoping more than ever to see her prove him right.

When the dream is worth more than the dollars

Within the hour, a filly with an emotional back-story will be front and center at Saratoga, in the toughest test of her young racing life.

Few horses who've stacked up a three-race win-streak at Finger Lakes to start their careers would get so much attention. But few horses have a story like Lisa's Booby Trap, not to mention an owner/trainer in Tim Snyder whose handling of the horse has spurred debate, at least in the Twitterverse.

Snyder's been a race-tracker since his birth in the first aid room at Scarborough Downs, where his mother went into labor after his jockey dad won a race. He met the love of his life -- late wife Lisa -- on the back side at Finger Lakes in 1993, after a runaway horse Snyder was riding ran her over. Snyder got the horse under control, then hurried back to see if the girl was OK.

Lisa died of cancer on Christmas Eve a few years ago, and a devastated Snyder took three years away from racing, the only world he's ever known. Snyder finally went back to work for a longtime friend, trainer John Tebbutt. The barn was wintering in Florida when a guy who owed Snyder a favor offered him a horse for $4,500 -- $2,000 down and the rest "on the cuff."

Snyder named his new charge in honor of his late wife, who'd "sworn up and down" she would someday come back as a horse.

But the filly hardly appeared to be a bargain. She's blind in her left eye. She has a flat right front foot and and a left front that's a bit of a "club." And she initially refused to change leads at a gallop.

"I had my doubts," Snyder admitted. "I thought I got took."

"She was a bit gawky, but a good-looking filly," Tebbutt said. "But when we took her to the training track, it wasn't encouraging. She couldn't outrun a fat man ..."

Snyder decided the filly wasn't changing leads because she'd hit her own ankle when she tried. He "made some adjustments," including switching a back shoe to the front, and the difference in her action and attitude were astounding.

Tebbutt said that in her first timed work after the changes, "she was a different horse."

"When I saw my stopwatch," he recalled, "I thought she missed a pole. ... And she did it so effortlessly."

The first three races for Lisa's Booby Trap were much the same -- virtually effortless victories among clearly overmatched company. She didn't just win by daylight, with a 17 3/4-length maiden score, it was like she finished by lunchtime, while the also-rans were straggling home in time for supper.

Offers of up to $500,000 rolled in for the fleet filly. But Snyder wasn't selling. After all, it's only money.

"Whaddya gonna do?" he asks on camera, to nobody and to everybody. "I love the business. I love the horse."

So Snyder decided to step her up in class -- way up, with an entry in the recent Coaching Club American Oaks-G1 at Saratoga -- and that's where the Twitter debate began. While I'd keep the horse, just has Snyder has, pals of mine online were flabbergasted that he wouldn't take the money and run.

"It's like winning the lottery and not cashing the ticket," said one.

Or like getting the first three questions right on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and believing you can go all the way and cash the million, I replied.

I was surprised at the ... well, I can't call it "hostility," but ardent opinion ... that Tim Snyder was out of his mind not to accept a six-figure offer for a horse who (as this game sometimes goes) might never win again, nor even race another step. And they thought he was a fool for throwing her to the Grade 1 wolves, like Devil May Care.

But I shouldn't be shocked. That's the nature of this game.

Horse racing attracts equal parts dreamers and cynics, sometimes in the same person. And probably nobody on the outside understands us at all.

The gambler inside us is always looking for ways to beat the favorite, even sentimental ones. And I get that it's hard to understand how a guy who has been living in the dorms at the track would refuse a half-million bucks for a $4,500 horse.

But many of us have walked into the grandstand on a race-day thinking, "If I can just hit this trifecta in Race 1, I'll be able to fund that Pick-6 ticket the way I really wanna play it, not on the cheap."

If you hit that early "tri," the smartest play might be to shove the payout in your wallet and leave the track before Race 2. But who does that?

You let it ride.

Tim Snyder decided to let it ride. With over $33,000 banked already, the filly named for his beloved, late wife has more than paid him back. In his heart and mind, she owes him nothing. And if he can keep her running like she has been, she might earn him more than $500,000 anyway. Hey, it could happen.

Snyder ultimately scratched Lisa's Booby Trap from the CCA Oaks, citing track conditions, but I wonder whether he didn't just heed the critics and decide to give her a lesser "next" challenge. She's entered in today's Loudonville Stakes, still a big step up in class -- she's 12/1 on the morning line and by far the longest odds -- but a more reasonable task.

Whether horseman or horseplayer, we're all in this game for the same reason. As Jackson Knowlton said after he and his "little guy" partners in Sackatoga Stables won the Kentucky Derby with Funny Cide, it's all about "a dollar and a dream." None of us would be here -- toiling on the backstretch or gambling on the front side, up on a horse's back, or up in an owner's box -- if we weren't occasionally a dreamer. The risks of horse racing, financially and emotionally, are too great unless you're striving for far greater rewards, however improbable.

For some of us, the dollars are the dream.

But Tim Snyder has his dream horse. And you can keep your money.

(Watch TVG's feature on the pairing.)

Update: Big congrats to Tim Snyder and Lisa's Booby Trap, off-the-pace, six-length winner of the Loudonville in 1:09 3/5, in what was mostly a hand-ride. (Video via Thoroughbred Times.)