American Pharoah

by Joe Drape

  Garcia whispered to the colt. He whistled. He smooched to American Pharoah. Nothing. He wrestled with him and jerked on the reins. It made his behavior worse. He just wanted American Pharoah in the gate and the race to be over. When the gates finally opened, American Pharoah simply ran off on his own, leaving Garcia to hang on as the colt went head-to-head with a colt named Om on the rail and Scorpious in between them. He certainly was fast—the half-mile went in 45 seconds. While Om continued to fly, Scorpious backed up. Garcia tried desperately to keep American Pharoah moving forward and got within a head. Baffert was praying his colt was out of gas: He knew they were going too fast, and an extended effort might cook him and set his training back weeks. He got his wish as three horses rolled by American Pharoah and the colt finished a soundly beaten fifth—nine and a quarter lengths behind Om.

  Jill Baffert nudged her husband.

  “That’s one of your best two-year-olds?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “It’s going to be a long summer,” she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BLINKERS ON; BLINKERS OFF

  August 2014, Del Mar Thoroughbred Club

  Bob Baffert was certain that he could get American Pharoah back on track, but he was worried about how he was going to fare if the colt was not as capable as he thought of winning the Kentucky Derby and taking a run at a Triple Crown. He was too old to become a completely changed man, but he wanted a fresh start on what he knew was his third and final act. Much had happened over the dozen years since his last good horse. He had gotten divorced from his wife, Sherry, and married Jill Moss, a Louisville morning television anchor twenty years his junior. They had a son, Bode, who was now nine and named after the Olympic skier Bode Miller, a family friend. Then there were the three stents in the left side of his heart, courtesy of a lousy diet, stress, and a fraught trip to the Mideast.

  We all come to our own mortality our own way, in our own time. Baffert took his first steps toward his on March 26, 2012, in a hotel room in Dubai. He had arrived the day before feeling awful. He was tired, sick to his stomach, and wrung out from a long flight from Los Angeles. He made himself check on his horses—The Factor was running in the $2 million Golden Shaheen and Game On Dude was running the $10 million Dubai World Cup, the richest race in the world. Upon his return to the hotel, he canceled dinner reservations out and ate at the hotel with Jill and Bode. He awoke in the middle of the night and felt even worse. Jill got her laptop out and started Googling his symptoms and turned ashen when she thought she discovered what was going on: “You’re having a heart attack,” she told him.

  Fortunately, Dubai is among the most modern of Arab Emirates, and its ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, probably spends more money than anyone in the world on Thoroughbreds and was a friend of the Bafferts. They called for an ambulance and Sheikh Mo, as he’s known, sent his cardiologist. In future tellings, the cardiologist would be known as “Dr. Armani” because he was the best dressed doctor Baffert had ever seen, and his first question upon seeing Sheikh Mo was, “How do you say ‘this guy is fucked’ in your language?” Baffert, however, was truly terrified. The angioplasty revealed two clogged arteries, including one completely blocked. The “widow maker” is what Jill had read on her computer about her husband’s symptoms, and now they were hearing it from doctors. He started babbling to Jill a stream-of-thought last will. What to keep. What to sell. What seasons he had to what horses. To call his owners and reassure them their horses would be fine. Jill wasn’t listening. While Baffert was being wheeled into surgery in a hospital far from home, hearing the concerned chatter of doctors in a language he didn’t understand, he got angry.

  “Is this really how it’s going to end?” he asked himself.

  So in went the stents, and hours later a groggy Baffert awoke to Jill and Dr. Armani at his side. The well-dressed doctor told Baffert how fortunate he was. If he had waited another hour, another five minutes, he might now be dead.

  Mr. Z was among the first people to get a hold of him after surgery. Did his trainer need anything? Should he send a plane? The owner had already endeared himself to the Baffert family. He kept trying to name a horse after Bode as he did for his own kids, but Bob was intensely superstitious and thought it would be bad luck and ordered him not to do so. When Mr. Z sent him a son of Belmont Stakes winner Empire Maker, the colt had a name Zayat no longer wanted because he had been named for a long-departed racing manager. Offhandedly, Baffert said that around the barn they would just call the colt Bodemeister, his son’s nickname, until he got a real one. Not long after, papers from the Jockey Club arrived that officially declared the colt Bodemeister. Baffert was forgiving of Zayat’s sleight of hand; the colt had won two of his first three races, including the Grade 2 San Felipe Stakes. He was potentially his Derby horse.

  Baffert was released from the hospital in time for the Dubai races a week later. He was a shadow of himself and neither The Factor, who finished sixth, nor Game On Dude, who was ninth, ran very well. Much later, when cameras were rolling and tape recorders turned on, and Baffert was in stand-up mode, that evening at the track in Dubai would be turned into another laugh line.

  “Hey, I know you guys are disappointed,” Baffert said he told his owners, “but I’m just happy I was here to see your horses run bad.”

  Maybe Baffert should have seen it coming. He had high cholesterol but did not consistently take the statins that were prescribed to him. He preferred chicken fried steaks to broiled chicken, fried eggs to egg whites, and the treadmill and elliptical machines in his home were used as clothes racks rather than as a way to walk off pounds, stress, or to strengthen his heart. There also was a history of heart disease on his mother’s side of the family.

  Fortunately it was easy for Baffert to get a handle on his diet and spend at least forty-five minutes a day on the treadmill. He lost twenty pounds and his cholesterol came down. As a self-professed control freak in an occupation that requires seven-days-a-week-around-the-clock attention, truly slowing down for Baffert was like trying to throttle back American Pharoah in his racing debut. Ever since they were married in 2002, Jill Baffert had been fighting a mostly losing battle of getting her husband to live in the moment. Over the years, much had been made about Baffert’s penchant for sleeping late and not arriving at his barn before dawn as most of his peers did. He encouraged his slacker image. Jill Baffert knew better.

  “Everybody thinks he just blows in here late,” she said, “but he’s consumed twenty-four-seven with his horses. He’s at the barns all morning, the track in the afternoon, and if we’re home the races are always on the satellite and the phone is always ringing. He needed to find some peace with his place in the world.”

  With good horses especially, Jill understood her husband was always looking forward, planning for the next couple of races, coming up with contingency plans so if a horse spiked a fever and missed one day or a week of training, there were other options. They never went on a honeymoon or did anything else where horses were not involved.

  “We would never take a vacation because we could go somewhere physically, but Bob’s mind would never go,” she said. “He would always be at work.”

  Jill was a South Carolina native who looked like the television personality she once was: blond, warm, and quick to offer a smile. Besides being his wife, Jill was Baffert’s top lieutenant, the barn’s communication advisor, and his staunchest defender. Jill told him when he was being an asshole, and she went after rival trainers and owners who she thought were treating her husband poorly. She was the first to tell him that he was out of line with his criticism of Gary Stevens’s ride of Point Given at the Haskell and told him to apologize.

  Jill also was quick to light into anyone she thought was doing the Bafferts dirty. In the days before the 2012 Pacific Classic, she got into a profanity-laden shouting match with Mark Verge, then the CEO of Santa Anita Park, after he and some other investors bought a contender named Richard’s Kid and moved h
im out of her husband’s barn. Verge was the best friend of trainer Doug O’Neill, an upstart who was challenging Baffert’s position as the West Coast’s top trainer, and he was as loquacious and often as inappropriate as Baffert was when he burst in on the scene.

  After the heart attack, Jill stepped up her efforts to slow her husband down and make him take care of himself. She didn’t care if he watched race replays on the treadmill as long as he put his miles in. She pushed him to scale back his operation and delegate more responsibilities to a staff that mostly had been with him for decades. He kept a string of 70 horses now rather than the 120 he once had. His top assistant, Jimmy Barnes, did most of the traveling with the barn’s big horses. He was the one now who went to New York or Kentucky for a big race weeks early and put the contenders through their paces until Baffert arrived a day or two before post time. Jill scheduled the vacations now herself and made her husband go on them. She got him to skip an afternoon or two at the racetrack to spend more time with Bode.

  That part wasn’t hard at all for Baffert. He adored his son, and he and Jill took Bode with them everywhere. Baffert worked on his Pinewood Derby car with him for the Boy Scouts, got to school events and games early, and stayed late. Bode was in the paddock before the race and the winner’s circle afterward. Baffert exposed him to every aspect of being a horse trainer and often told him not to follow in his old man’s footsteps. Baffert knew he was getting an opportunity to learn from his mistakes. To claw his way to the top of first the quarter horse and then the Thoroughbred industry had meant late nights, early mornings, and long trips away.

  By his own admission, he had been a largely absentee father for his sons Taylor, Canyon, and Forest and his daughter Savannah. He would listen to them tell him about basketball and baseball games that he had missed and his stomach would churn and he would feel awful, but he also knew how hard he had worked to get to the top level. Between those missed connections and the divorce from Sherry, there was some tension with the older kids.

  “There are a lot of trainers out there who are happily married and have time to spend with their children, but most of them cannot compete at the level we’re competing at,” he said. “To stay at the top, you cannot let up for a second.”

  Baffert was trying to do his best to let up enough to be a good father as well as remain healthy. He had lost his mother, Ellie, in 2011, and the Chief the following year. He was a grown man and still missed them deeply. It had been a wake-up call to become more present in all of his children’s lives.

  “Lost my first hero and mentor today. There’s a new cowboy in Heaven,” Baffert tweeted on the day Bill died. “R.I.P. Chief. I miss you already.”

  Another decision he had made recently to preserve his physical and mental health was to stop participating in or reading social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Seeing what others are saying about you in real time and anonymously is not a good thing for a control freak, especially one who could be as thin-skinned as Baffert. Among turf writers and mainstream sports reporters, the trainer had enjoyed mostly favorable coverage as he ascended in the sport. In fact, in 2009, Baffert was voted into the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame by a landslide on his first year of eligibility. Most everyone liked him. He was always available and possessed a motor mouth that spit out as many non sequiturs as jokes but always filled up a notebook. Even when he wasn’t “on,” Baffert was a pleasant guy to be around and tried to engage you on a human level. There were some difficult conversations over the years involving the overuse of drugs in the sport and the lack of consistent rules, regulations, or transparency that had pushed horse racing closer to boxing when it came to the perception of lawlessness. Times were changing and the general public was more concerned about how horses were treated away from the racetrack and what kind of harm was being done to them on it. It took the death of the filly Eight Belles, who had to be euthanized on the track after breaking both her front ankles after finishing second in the 2008 Kentucky Derby, to get the attention of everyone from Congress to animal rights activists. Though no drugs or anything else untoward showed up in Eight Belles’s autopsy, Rick Dutrow, the trainer of the winning Big Brown, made them a focus when he admitted that he treated his colt with the steroid Winstrol.

  Dutrow was not alone and everyone on the racetrack and around the sport knew so. Just as Major League baseball had its steroid era, so did horse racing, and at a Congressional hearing later that year, owners such as Jess Jackson acknowledged that Curlin, twice Horse of the Year, had been given steroids for some of his campaign. Steroids were subsequently outlawed but the pursuit of finding an edge through chemistry to win races continues to be woven in the fabric of horse racing. Baffert didn’t like talking about it, nor anyone writing about it, especially the incidents where he was sanctioned for drug violations. He refused to make his veterinarian records public when asked and rebuffed the tough questions by saying that they were only intended to hurt the sport.

  In 2012, the New York Times published a series of stories that found that twenty-four horses a week died on American racetracks and that the industry continued to put animal and rider at risk. A computer analysis of data from more than 150,000 races, along with injury reports, drug test results, and interviews, showed an industry still mired in a culture of drugs and lax regulation and a fatal breakdown rate that remained far worse than in most racing jurisdictions of the world. There was plenty of blame to go around, but it was clear the new economics of racing were making an always-dangerous game even more so. Faced with a steep loss of customers, racetracks have increasingly added casino gambling to their operations, resulting in higher purses but also providing an incentive for trainers to race unfit horses. In 2012, at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, the number of dead and injured horses had risen sharply since a casino opened there the previous year. Laboratories are unable to detect the newest performance-enhancing drugs, while trainers experimented with anything that might give them an edge, including chemicals that bulk up pigs and cattle before slaughter, cobra venom, Viagra, blood-doping agents, stimulants, and cancer drugs.

  Legal therapeutic drugs—pain medicine in particular—pose the greatest risk to horse and rider. In England, where breakdown rates are half of what they are in the United States, horses may not race on any drugs and the rules are aggressively enforced. At higher levels, pain medicine can mask injury, rendering prerace examinations less effective. If a horse cannot feel an existing injury, it may run harder than it otherwise would, putting extra stress on the injury. As many as 90 percent of horses that break down had preexisting injuries, according to California researchers who studied necropsies of horses that died at the state’s racetracks. The spotlight on the sport became even more unflattering that spring when a colt named I’ll Have Another won the Kentucky Derby and then the Preakness Stakes. He was trained by Baffert’s West Coast rival, Doug O’Neill, who began the Triple Crown with more than a dozen drug violations in four states, among them three instances where one of his horses appeared to receive a “milkshake,” a concoction of baking soda, sugar, and electrolytes delivered through a tube down a horse’s nose to combat fatigue. In between the Preakness and I’ll Have Another’s bid to sweep the Triple Crown, O’Neill was suspended for forty-five days in California for exceeding the allowable limit for total carbon dioxide in one of his horses. Elevated carbon dioxide levels indicates a horse was given a “milkshake.” The suspension would start in July, after O’Neill saddled I’ll Have Another in the Belmont Stakes. New York regulators responded with strict security and surveillance measures on all trainers competing in the race, including housing their horses in secured barns beginning three days before the race. They had specific requirements for O’Neill solely. Neither he nor his veterinarian could treat the colt without a board investigator present. All treatments and feed had to be discussed and logged with the investigator. All vet records had to be turned over daily to regulators.

  The saga of O’Neill and I’ll Have Another
took one final and unpredictable turn: On the eve of the Belmont, the colt was scratched from the race because of a sore tendon in his left foreleg. It was a minor injury, the equine equivalent of a sprained ankle, but O’Neill and his owner concluded it would have compromised I’ll Have Another’s chances and decided against risking additional injury. He was retired immediately.

  “It’s far from tragic,” O’Neill said, “but it’s extremely disappointing.”

  Both New York State officials and O’Neill moved quickly to try to eliminate any suspicion surrounding the decision. The New York State Racing and Wagering Board said that all entrants in the Belmont Stakes were tested for prohibited substances and that all the tests came back negative. O’Neill blamed only bad luck.

  “It’s just a freakish thing,” he said.

  Between the public’s increased desire that horses be humanely cared for, drugs prohibited, and the ability of the Internet to shrink the world, Baffert and other high-profile trainers were under increased scrutiny. The backsides of racetracks are fiercely competitive and a rumor or real incident can ripple from groom to exercise rider to barn foreman to trainer to owner in the course of a morning. There is a great deal of jealousy, which is perhaps natural when you have anywhere from 50 to 150 trainers knocking heads against one another day in and day out. Familiarity breeds contempt and words get twisted and lies told. Up until a decade ago, each circuit—New York, Kentucky, and California—was its own small town and the damage didn’t travel much beyond the racetrack gates. Turf writers knew things as did gamblers and racetrackers, but they preferred to use it to their own advantage, like dropping a lot of money on a horse with an unpublished workout or betting against a sore prohibitive favorite. Now workout times are tweeted out moments after the final click of a stopwatch and suspicions can be raised in an instant from California to New York, and alliances are formed between people who may not even know each other’s real names.