American Pharoah Read online

  “It’s a sacred race,” he often said.

  He was right. It was the race that defined horse racing in America. It brought more than 150,000 to Churchill Downs, attracted millions more to watch on television, and pushed more money through the betting windows than any other single American race. It was the one day that mattered most in American horse racing, followed by the Belmont Stakes when a Triple Crown was on the line and the Preakness, which decided if the Derby winner was going to arrive in New York with a chance for immortality. Baffert knew better than most that it was the Triple Crown races or bust if you ever wanted to get the best horses and be considered among the greatest trainers in history. Winning the Derby, the Preakness, and almost the Belmont Stakes with Silver Charm had transformed him from a former quarter horse trainer into a guy rich men (and, yes, they are predominately men) wanted to meet, wanted to follow around at horse sales where they let him spend several million dollars of their money. He almost swept the series again the following year with Real Quiet. He was famous. Baffert was the most recognizable horse trainer in the world. He had an awful lot to do with it. He courted the media like a long-ignored politician and charmed them with his stream-of-consciousness musings. Sometimes what he said was funny, other times inappropriate, but all of it made him popular among casual fans of a majestic sport trying to regain its foothold on a larger audience.

  On the backsides and in the owners’ boxes of American racetracks, however, Baffert stirred resentment and suspicion. Horse racing is an insular world inhabited by hyper-competitive rich people possessing massive egos who want the limelight for themselves. In 2002, when he brought War Emblem to New York for his third attempt to win the Triple Crown, the trainer’s popularity was waning. Baffert had bought War Emblem three weeks before the Kentucky Derby on behalf of Prince Ahmed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. With the tragedy of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center still fresh, the thought of a colt owned by a Saudi prince and conditioned by a flaky former quarter-horse trainer taking down horse racing’s most sacred feat was too much to bear. As one of Baffert’s friends, Julian (Buck) Wheat, said, the thought of it was “blasphemy” among old line owners and breeders.

  “You’re walking on hallowed grounds and to have some jack leg quarter-horse trainer win the Derby and now on the doorstep of history, well, that isn’t done,” said Wheat, the longtime director of horseman’s relations at Churchill Downs.

  Baffert was forty-nine at the time and understood his precarious place within the industry. He tried to filter his remarks and temper his combativeness, but he resented those who whispered behind his back about his credentials and black bag magic. His father, Bill, had introduced him to horses growing up on a farm in Nogales, Arizona, a town of 20,000 near the Mexican border. The Chief, as his father was known, plowed a dirt track into a hay field and that was where ten-year-old Bob started each morning before school on top of a horse. Bill Baffert had built his ranch from scratch and raised his six kids there. They had cattle and young Bob sold the eggs of the chickens he raised for extra money. Bill was chairman of the county board of supervisors. His mother, Ellie, was a teacher at the local elementary school, where she eventually became the principal and a friendly but strict influence on a generation of Nogales children.

  The Bafferts were by no definition racetrackers, but the Chief bought some cheap quarter horses and trained them to race in unsanctioned races at an airstrip at a neighboring ranch or at local bush tracks like the Santa Cruz County Fair and Rodeo Association in Sonoita. Racing quarter horses is a pastime in the Southwest, much like building race cars in your garage or playing softball beer leagues is in other parts of the country.

  Baffert got proficient enough to become a second-rate jockey (by his own admission) and won his fair share of match races and cheap purses at third-rate tracks. His hobby terrified the Chief and his mother, Ellie. She forbade him to race while Bill either looked the other way or prayed hard nothing would happen when he was at the races with his son.

  Baffert went to the University of Arizona, where he graduated with a degree in animal sciences and a minor from its racetrack management program. He then took out a trainer’s license and did his time running for peanuts at remote tracks, such as Rillito Park near Tuscon. He never took a job as an assistant trainer, so anything he learned at the racetrack was through trial and error, mostly error. Baffert’s focus and ambition made up for his lack of experience, and his first big break came in Arizona after some local trainers got caught doping horses and asked him to run their stables until they returned from suspension. It helped that Baffert was a glib, fun-loving kid, and they liked and trusted him. When he had more and better horses, he started winning more and better races. What bothered him the most about the fire he was taking from owners and other trainers was the disrespect it showed for his discipline and horsemanship.

  “I broke them, rode them, wrapped them, and slept with them since I was a boy,” he said.

  Not long after their trip to Las Vegas, Mike Pegram gave Baffert $300,000 and told him to buy some Thoroughbreds for him. In 1975, Pegram bought his first McDonald’s with 100 percent financing from a banker in his hometown of Princeton, Indiana. He understood what made the trainer special—and potentially great. The first time Baffert tried to claim a horse—or buy one that was running in a race—he forgot to write its name down on the slip and lost the chance to buy it. He tried again with the help of Bob Baedeker, who at the time published a tip sheet his family sold at the racetrack and promised winners. Baedeker found a horse called Presidents Summit, so Baffert claimed him. The first morning he took him out to train at Santa Anita Park, he did not have an exercise rider. At the snack bar, Baffert recognized Gary Stevens, one of the best jockeys in the nation, and asked him if he would ride him. He did not know that Stevens had an agent and that it was a breach of racetrack etiquette to not ask him first. Stevens agreed, but when he asked Baffert how he would like to train him, Baffert was stumped. He had never trained a Thoroughbred and did not know what to do—but he learned. He also remembered those who had believed in him.

  When Baffert came up with his first good horse, he gave Pegram a piece of him free of charge: Thirty Slews won the $1 million Breeders’ Cup Sprint in 1992. He picked out Real Quiet for him on the cheap—$17,000—and the colt ran off to more than $3.2 million in purses. The champion filly Silverbulletday cost $155,000 and earned more than $2.8 million in purses.

  “First of all, I liked the guy,” said Pegram. “Second, he had ambition and a tremendous eye for spotting a talented horse. No one else needs to like the guy, but you have to respect his horsemanship. Next to selling hamburgers, giving the money to Bob was the smartest investment I ever made.”

  Baffert’s flair for self-promotion, however, was wearing on people as well. He put the Preakness trophy on his head as he has done after each of his victories in Baltimore and donned a psychedelic Austin Powers get-up for a television segment. He coauthored an autobiography and talked about everything from his use of hallucinogenic drugs as a bell-bottomed teenager to the one-year suspension California horse racing officials gave him for a positive drug test on one of his horses while he was a college student and part-time trainer. He wrote that he did it—partly out of ignorance, partly out of desperation to win. Baffert too often spoke before he thought and insulted his fellow trainers and the jockeys that he hired. At a press conference, he suggested that Jenine Sahadi, an accomplished female trainer, needed help from her husband or jockey. She told him he lacked class, left the podium, and then beat him with her colt, The Deputy, in the 2000 Santa Anita Derby. In the winner’s circle of the Haskell Invitational, he told Hall of Fame rider Gary Stevens, a friend, that his poor ride had nearly gotten Point Given beat. Stevens yelled back at him and both stormed out of the winner’s circle.

  He even goaded Bob Lewis, one of his most loyal owners, into an embarrassing public episode. Two years after Silver Charm, Lewis returned to the Belmont with a se
cond chance at capturing the Triple Crown with Charismatic, a colt trained by his first string trainer, D. Wayne Lukas. When Baffert decided to enter the filly Silverbulletday in the Belmont, Lukas thought Baffert was trying to steal the spotlight and the two trainers traded increasingly dismissive statements about the merits of each other’s horses. Lewis got angry and publicly offered Baffert and Pegram a $200,000 bet that Charismatic would finish ahead of the filly. Eventually, the bet was rescinded and apologies exchanged. Nobody benefitted: Charismatic sustained a career-ending injury in the stretch and finished third and Silverbulletday was overmatched and finished a well-beaten seventh.

  Baffert got into another bitter public dispute with one of his wealthiest owners, Aaron Jones, an Oregon timber baron. It was bad enough that Jones pulled his horses from Baffert’s stable, but he insulted the trainer when he refused to deliver a promised breeding season for Forestry, a colt Baffert ran to four stakes victories. When horses go to stallion duty, breeding seasons are often given to trainers as a sort of tip that subsequently can become a lucrative annuity. Lukas, for example, received a Storm Cat season that he sold each year. In his prime, Storm Cat commanded $500,000 a breeding. Instead of giving Forestry’s season directly to Baffert, Jones put it in the name of Baffert’s wife, Sherry, who he was divorcing at the time, and his four children.

  Baffert considered it a slap at his integrity.

  As 2002 began, even Baffert was tiring of his own drama. He had completed his divorce and planned a new marriage, but now was struggling to find a Derby horse. One by one, the most promising three-year-olds in his barn were either injured or proved to be not good enough. Baffert resigned himself to missing his first trip to the famous race on the first Saturday in May since 1996. Then he watched War Emblem romp in the Illinois Derby on television. The Prince, a member of the royal family, saw it on television from Saudi Arabia too. The trainer started working the phones and discovered the colt had been for sale since December. War Emblem won twice as a two-year-old but showed that he had chips in both front ankles and a knee—information that was discovered by a potential buyer. It didn’t matter to Baffert or the prince: They wanted another shot at the Derby. In a matter of days, Salman owned 90 percent of the colt for $900,000 and War Emblem was in Baffert’s barn.

  He led every step of the way on the first Saturday of May to win at odds of 20 to 1, giving Baffert his third Derby victory. War Emblem prevailed impressively in the Preakness, and when his jockey, Victor Espinoza, popped a baseball cap promoting an Internet betting service onto his head in the winner’s circle after the Preakness, Baffert snatched it from his head and threw it into the crowd at Pimlico Race Course. He told him that this was no time to think about picking up some endorsement cash.

  “These are the classics, man,” Baffert said. “This is not about you or me; it’s about a horse making history. It’s sacred. Most people don’t remember the trainer or jockey or owner of Secretariat or Affirmed. I have to look most of them up. This is about the horse.”

  As soon as the gates popped open for the 134th Belmont Stakes, it was clear that neither owner, trainer, jockey, nor colt would wind up anywhere near the winner’s circle. War Emblem nearly scraped his knees after stumbling at the start as Espinoza’s head curled over the colt’s ears and from there the mile-and-a-half trip that was supposed to end in the record books only got worse. Jockey and colt bounced off Magic Weisner on their outside and then angled toward the rail with a hurried dash between horses into the first turn, the skittish sprint up the backstretch to assert the dominance shown in the Derby and the Preakness. Finally there was exhaustion and retreat around the far turn as one, two, three, and finally seven horses blew by War Emblem. What had been a throaty roar from a record crowd of 103,222 gave way to muffled murmurs as Sarava, a 70-to-1 shot, ran down Medaglia d’Oro to become the biggest long shot to win the Belmont. War Emblem was beaten by more than nineteen lengths.

  “It was lost at the start,” Baffert said. “If I was on the walkie-talkie, I would have told Victor to pull him up. I didn’t want him to go a mile and a half like that.”

  If someone would have told Baffert as he was driving out of the parking lot that night that it would be twelve years until another truly exceptional colt graced his barn, he would not have believed them. Over the past five years, he had won three Derbies, four Preaknesses, and a Belmont—or more than half of the American Classics. His barn was full of million-dollar colts and he had owners like Bob Lewis and Prince Salman willing to buy him more. The fates turn cruelly and quickly in horse racing, though. Six weeks after War Emblem stumbled at Belmont, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, just forty-three, died, supposedly of a heart attack suffered sometime after abdominal surgery in Riyadh. A year later, several news organizations named bin Salman as one of several financiers—along with two other princes—of al-Qaeda. All three had died within a week of one another: one in a car accident, another was found dead in the desert and authorities said he had died of “thirst.” In 2006, Bob Lewis was gone as well at the age of eighty-one after first his kidney, then his heart failed. Mike Pegram was still a client, but he scaled back his operation as he entered into the casino business in Nevada.

  It wasn’t like Baffert had completely disappeared. He remained among the top ten nationally in earnings in all but two of those years and won seven Breeders’ Cup races over that span. Baffert, however, did not have a horse hit the board again in any of the Triple Crown races until 2009, when Pioneerof the Nile finished second in the Derby. The following year, the Pegram-owned Lookin At Lucky won the Preakness, skipped the Belmont Stakes, captured the Haskell, and was voted Outstanding Three-Year-Old Colt and was given an Eclipse Award. No one was crying for Baffert. He was fifth on the all-time earnings list among trainers with more than $210 million in purses, and he had a feeling the Triple Crown blues were about to lift, mostly because of the colt standing before him now, American Pharoah, and the owner who gave him to him, Ahmed Zayat.

  The notorious Mr. Z, as he was aften called, had fired him a few years earlier and stiffed him on his training bill during his bankruptcy and a couple times since. They were starting to have some luck together, though. The McKathans had raved about the colt as soon as he hit their farm, and next to him, he believed the brothers had some of the best eyes for horseflesh in the business. Even though Baffert was a no-show that morning for the colt’s breeze, he knew the horse was coming to his barn. He was Zayat Stables’ first-string trainer, and even though he had been wandering in the Triple Crown desert for a spell, his record still spoke for itself.

  As the colt walked in circles around the paddock, Baffert started to tingle. American Pharoah had been with him for five months and had not missed a single day of training, which was unusual for a young horse. Most were accident prone or spiked fevers or caught colds as they moved from the country to the city, from the serenity of farm life to the hustle of the racetrack. American Pharoah had turned in eleven timed workouts, or breezes, each time reluctantly bouncing off the track as if he were a barely winded NBA star being benched after warm-ups. Baffert was notoriously demanding of his horses, even his two-year-olds. He worked them hard, fast, and consistently because he could. He was the A-Team trainer for his owners, and if he didn’t believe the horse was sound or talented enough, they were banished from his barn and designated to the B Team. He suffered his share of casualties on the Triple Crown road, another knock leveled against him by his critics. Baffert’s whole program was designed to identify Triple Crown horses, build their fitness so they’d be able to endure the grueling series, and, hopefully, make some history. Lord knew that three times he had come this close to doing just that.

  American Pharoah’s last work at Los Alamitos at the end of June was a scary-fast five furlongs in 1:00.60—two-year-olds should not be that fleet and Baffert knew accomplished trainers shouldn’t be letting them go that fast. So Baffert gave him three weeks of galloping before letting him loose at Del Mar for another five-eighths of a mi
le. American Pharoah went even faster—1:00.20. What was most remarkable was that the colt did it breaking from a starting gate for the first time in his life. Baffert had recognized a bit of his old man, Pioneerof the Nile, in the colt. Both had a big, long stride with a springing motion as if they were running on a trampoline. American Pharoah already had shown far more acceleration. Every time Baffert worked him, he went back and took a look at the pedigree. He believed the turn of foot was traced to Pioneerof the Nile’s sire, Empire Maker, and his dam, Star of Goshen.

  “It comes from his mother,” he decided. “She was a freaky filly, really, really fast.”

  The paddock was getting crowded as owners, rival trainers, clockers, touts, and media types—racetrackers all—wanted to get a look at the colt that Baffert was so high on. American Pharoah was no secret among this community. Everyone was talking about the colt in Southern California, about his speed and efficiency of motion, about how the great Baffert had already proclaimed him the best two-year-old to ever come through his barn.

  “The easy part is training a horse; the hard part is finding a good one,” he said. “I know how to do it. There’s no maybe in me. I either see it or I don’t.”

  Baffert saw it in American Pharoah. Now everyone else wanted to see it for themselves. That, however, turned into a problem. The colt appeared to be spooked by the noise, bothered by all the commotion. He fought the groom on the other end of the shank. Baffert could tell he was agitated. American Pharoah worked up a sweat. Suddenly, Martin Garcia appeared at Baffert’s side. He was Baffert’s first call jockey and had the mount on American Pharoah. Garcia didn’t like what he was seeing, either. He got a leg up from Baffert on a clearly stressed out American Pharoah and didn’t recognize the colt. In the morning breezes, Garcia was used to hopping on a Ferrari, not the broken down pickup truck down to its last coils he was on now. As American Pharoah joined the eight other horses in the race for the post parade, the colt was unnerved by the crowd, his rivals, and their riders. He skittered sideways, high-stepped, reared, and kicked. He tried to run off from the outrider. Still, American Pharoah remained the favorite on the tote board at the prohibitive odds of 2 to 5. Maybe this was part of the best-two-year-old-Baffert-had-ever-trained’s act? After all, this was the first time at the racetrack in the afternoon for American Pharoah. He would pull it together, wouldn’t he? When Baffert saw the antics continue during the warm-up, he hoped Garcia could calm the colt down. It wasn’t happening. Garcia had no control over American Pharoah. He felt like the parent standing outside of school trying to coax an inconsolable child through its doors as everyone else looked on feeling sorry for him.