American Pharoah

by Joe Drape

  Horseplayers are a hardy lot. They have to be, as they have watched a beloved and once royal sport be diminished mainly by its own undoing. In the 1950s, horse racing’s short-sighted overlords refused to make races available to television because they were afraid that it would cut into the attendance of the 35,000 to 40,000 people who routinely showed up to the big tracks in New York, California, and Florida. Once the only legal gambling game in town, horse racing lost much of its audience to state lotteries and casinos that popped up in states from coast to coast. There have been, and continue to be, doping scandals. The big money in breeding has turned horses into commodities, which in turn has weakened the breed. With no centralized power or league office, states operate how they want, which meant squeezing the lemon dry by offering year-round races at third-rate tracks with sore horses trained by incompetent and callous horsemen.

  For the five weeks of the Triple Crown, though, they get to forget all of that and temporarily become a mainstream sport and hold a place in the national consciousness. There quite simply is nothing better for the sport, or more fun for people who follow it year-round, than a Belmont Stakes with a Triple Crown on the line.

  “The sport without a star is not a sport,” said Ahmed Zayat.

  Within seconds after American Pharoah had crossed the finish line in Baltimore, the same question was raised by dedicated horseplayers as well as those who had never attended a race in their life: “Is American Pharoah the horse to finally complete one of the most difficult feats in sports?”

  The answer? No one had a clue, and the times they thought they did, a horse lost by a bob (Real Quiet in 1998) or was compromised by a questionable ride and got run down in the stretch (Smarty Jones in 2004). Just as most horse owners try to abide by the golden rule of always accepting a better-than-fair price when it’s offered for a colt or filly, most horseplayers try, but mostly fail, to honor their own version: that nobody knows nothing.

  However, American Pharoah did fit a winning profile. He was the reigning two-year-old champion, as were six of the last seven Triple Crown champs. Like Affirmed, Seattle Slew, Secretariat, Citation, Count Fleet, and Whirlaway, American Pharoah had demonstrated brilliance early in his career, first in the Del Mar Futurity and then in the FrontRunner. He continued to build on that foundation, winning all four of his races as a three-year-old for a record of six victories in seven starts and more than $3.7 million in purses.

  American Pharoah had a similar running style to many of the greats before him. In the Derby and Preakness, he showed that he liked to be on or near the front early in the race, possessed a high cruising speed, and had a grittiness that wore down his rivals in the late going. Affirmed, Seattle Slew, and, most memorably, Secretariat took control of the Belmont Stakes from the gate and never gave an inch as each passed the Test of the Champion, as the grueling mile and a half is known. American Pharoah certainly showed that dimension in the Preakness, albeit in the kind of wet conditions at which he had proved adept earlier in Arkansas.

  What were his intangibles? He definitely passed the name test; American Pharoah (even misspelled) sounds regal and powerful enough to stand alongside Triple Crown champions like Sir Barton and Gallant Fox, Omaha and War Admiral. You couldn’t really say that about Smarty Jones, Big Brown, or I’ll Have Another.

  American Pharoah also had a distinctive personality and a sharp mind. At least, Baffert believed the colt did.

  “The thing is about him, he is the sweetest horse of this caliber that I’ve ever been around,” said Baffert. “I mean, you feed him carrots, and he’s like a pet. Usually they’re like athletes. They want to get it on. But he’s just the sweetest horse. He’s spoiled to death.”

  Affirmed, Seattle Slew, and Secretariat were all based in New York and trained at Belmont Park, so they were familiar with its sandy surface and expansive turns. American Pharoah had been based in California for most of his career, but Baffert always made Churchill Downs his base during the Triple Crown. American Pharoah returned to barn 33 on the Monday following the Preakness and Baffert had decided not to come to New York until the week of the Belmont. He took heat for it, most prominently from Billy Turner, the trainer of Seattle Slew. Why not give American Pharoah some time to get used to Belmont Park, especially when as many as eight rivals awaited him—including the Preakness runner-up, Tale of Verve—along with a very good group of New York horses? Among them was the fourth-place Kentucky Derby finisher, Frosted, and three horses from the powerful Todd Pletcher barn: the Florida Derby champ Materiality, who was sixth in the Derby; the Blue Grass Stakes victor, Carpe Diem, who finished tenth in Kentucky; and Madefromlucky, the winner of the Peter Pan Stakes at Belmont.

  Baffert thought about it but stuck to his plan. He knew that a thousand things could happen in the three weeks before the race, most of them bad. He chose to keep the horse at Churchill for his own sanity and that of his team. It was quieter, easier to get around, and far away from the New York media.

  “It’s going to be tough enough,” he said. “I know everybody right now is sharpening their knives, getting ready. I’m staying within my comfort zone.”

  Jimmy Barnes and his wife, Dana, had been on the road with American Pharoah since March. The couple, along with Eduardo Luna and Jorge Alvarez, knew the colt better than anyone and had tended to his every need. In Louisville, the Barnes family members had everything that they needed: a suite in the Residence Inn near the track, a nearby fluff-and-fold Laundromat, and two rooms with a television in each so Dana did not have to watch Jimmy’s endless loop of American Picker and Pawn Stars.

  Jimmy, fifty-five, had been with Baffert since 1999 and Dana, fifty-one, had been exercising horses for him since 1997. He was intense and detail driven when it came to the horses and thought nothing about being with them from 3:30 a.m. until sundown. Baffert called him his drone because he could put his hands on every one of the trainers’ high-priced stock and perform any task or procedure associated with training a horse. His colleagues on the West Coast called him “half horse.” He was well paid by Baffert to be the backbone of the barn.

  Jimmy Barnes had been out on his own and decided that he was not cut out for keeping track of payroll, feed, and tack bills. He was not built, either, for the schmoozing necessary to bring in the top-class Thoroughbreds to his barn.

  “I really like to deal with these kinds of horses,” he said. “It’s less stress.”

  Dana was far more laid-back but a racetracker nonetheless. They had been married for thirty years and had raised two daughters, despite the fact that the workaholic Jimmy had taken no days off and Dana only one a week. Dana grew up in rural Norco, California, a town where horses were so important that “the McDonald’s has a hitching post” and she rode her pony like most kids ride their bikes. Dana had been the main exercise rider on Silver Charm, Real Quiet, and War Emblem. She was Dortmund’s exercise rider as well.

  Back in January, Jimmy had told Dana that American Pharoah was going to win the Triple Crown. Now he was calling Baffert in California, telling him the Belmont Stakes was a lock. The Derby had gotten the colt fit, and the Preakness was a maintenance workout. In fact, American Pharoah had gained nine pounds since winning in Baltimore.

  “We’re all right, man,” he kept telling Baffert. “This horse is fresh. The race took nothing out of him.”

  Alvarez agreed. He once was a jockey in Tijuana but came north and became the top exercise rider for Bobby Frankel, the late Hall of Fame trainer. He had been on American Pharoah’s back for the past year for everything from light jogs to strong gallops. Alvarez had been with Baffert seven years and had ridden many of his top horses, including Pioneerof the Nile. American Pharoah had reminded him of his father, except much stronger. When American Pharoah was a two-year-old, Alvarez had to wrestle with him most mornings because he wanted to go too fast. Now he had to pay even closer attention to American Pharoah. He was stronger than ever.

  “His long strides cover so much ground and he’
s always feeling good, so you have to make sure you don’t let him go too fast,” he said. “When they cover that much ground that easily, you know they’re special.”

  Baffert and Garcia flew into Louisville on May 31, the day before American Pharoah was set for his final breeze before shipping to New York. He usually did not sleep well before the night of an important workout, but with Barnes calling every day, crowing about how well American Pharoah was doing, he was at ease. He decided instead to worry about the Belmont and picked the actual start of the race to obsess over. It was an old habit and familiar enough to Bode Baffert that when the two were talking about how the New York and NBC announcer might call the race, Bode chirped up: “All I know is I hope he says, ‘And they’re off in the Belmont, and American Pharoah breaks beautifully.’”

  Baffert smiled, proud as well as embarrassed.

  “That’s good,” he said. “We want to hear that.”

  The previous week, Baffert and Garcia had flown in together to test the legs of the colt for the first time after the Preakness. When American Pharoah was finished with his three-quarters-of-a-mile gallop, the trainer’s breath was taken away.

  “That’s beautiful, man,” he told Garcia through the two-way. “Beautiful.”

  This final workout was designed merely to maintain the colt’s fitness, but it was clear as soon as Garcia and American Pharoah broke off from the five-and-a-half-furlong pole that he was in the type of shape that you don’t normally see from a horse at this point in the Triple Crown. He went a half mile in 48.60, before Garcia eased up and galloped him out three-quarters in 1:13 and a mile in 1:39.60. This time, it was the jockey’s turn to express his admiration.

  “Patrón, he is ready,” said Garcia, breathing harder than American Pharoah. “Man, what a horse.”

  It was then that Baffert admitted to himself that he really, really wanted American Pharoah to win the Belmont. Fate didn’t owe him a Triple Crown as he once thought. It owed this horse.

  “Everybody remembers Secretariat, but few remember who trained him,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you another horse Steve Cauthen rode, but I remember Affirmed. This is all about American Pharoah, not me. I think so highly of him, he’s such a good horse, he really deserves it.”

  Over the course of the spring, Ahmed Zayat had been as gracious an owner of a superhorse as he could be. He and his family had been generous with their time, giving of it equally to small town newspapers and the network morning shows. He had kept his mercurial temper in check and did his best to deflect the attention from him to American Pharoah and his quest to become a Triple Crown champion. It is tough to live in the spotlight for five weeks, and not many owners of Triple Crown contenders have survived unscathed.

  The previous year, California Chrome’s owners, Perry Martin and Steve Coburn, had a charming tale to tell about the colt they had bred for less than $10,000 and how they named their stable DAP Racing, for dumbass partners, and featured a green donkey on their purple racing silks because that is what most thought they were when they projected greatness on the colt. Long before Coburn, a cowboy-hat-wearing machinist, fell apart after the Belmont, the public was starting to sour on the duo, largely because Martin, a brilliant but reclusive engineer and physicist, made his disdain for the media attention known and acted as if he really had employed mind over matter to build a better racehorse rather than gotten extraordinarily lucky as most believed.

  In 2012, the colt I’ll Have Another brought his owner, J. Paul Reddam, unwanted attention to his mortgage lending business and loan company, CashCall, which offered high-risk, high-interest loans to people who needed cash fast to settle bills, pay for home repairs, or take a vacation. California governor Jerry Brown had compared the way Reddam’s business operated to loan sharking.

  In 2008, Big Brown’s majority owner International Equine Acquisitions Holdings said it was raising $100 million for a hedge fund to buy, sell, and breed horses, collecting management and performance fees. Michael Iavarone was the face of the IEAH stable, and as the Triple Crown chase progressed, revelations surfaced about how he had misrepresented himself as a high-profile Wall Street executive when in fact he had worked for penny stock firms. He had also been suspended for Security and Exchange Commission violations. The stable has been long out of business and in February 2015, James Tagliaferri, an investment advisor and the money behind IEAH, was sentenced to six years in prison for defrauding clients out of $120 million by funneling money to the stable via thinly traded companies in exchange for secret kickbacks.

  So in a sport where saints were in short supply, no one should have been too surprised when Howard Rubinsky resurfaced in Ahmed Zayat’s life or at the lawsuit that he filed in a New Jersey federal court alleging Zayat had failed to pay a $2 million debt that he ran up betting via a website in Costa Rica. While American Pharoah had been winning six of his seven races and making his way to New York, Zayat had been contesting a federal lawsuit brought by a felon who had pled guilty in 2008 for his role in an illegal bookmaking operation with Zayat’s two former protégés, Michael and Jeffrey Jelinsky.

  “Howie,” as Rubinsky was known to professional gamblers in Nevada as well as offshore, was working as a shill, or sales associate, for various offshore sportsbooks, bringing bettors to the site in exchange for a commission on their volume of bets and a percentage of their losses. His former protégés and sometime horse advisors, the Jelinsky brothers, had introduced him to Zayat at a breakfast in 2002 at Zayat’s home in New Jersey. At first the arrangement worked well—too well, according to Rubinsky. Zayat won so much—$2.8 million—at one website in Costa Rica that the site stopped taking his bets. Then Rubinsky said he had opened a $3 million line of credit for Zayat at Tradewinds Sportsbook. The lawsuit alleged that Zayat, after winning a lot of money, walked away from his debt after an extended cold streak. A year later, in 2004, Zayat went on a payment plan that reduced the debt to $1.7 million, but then he stopped paying altogether, according to papers filed over the last fourteen months.

  When Zayat refused to pay, Rubinsky said that his commissions were withheld and that he had personally lost $1.65 million plus interest, according to the documents.

  Rubinsky filed the breach-of-contract suit quietly in March 2014 in a District Court in New Jersey, he said, because he only wanted to get paid—not embarrass Zayat. He had been trying to collect the debt for more than a decade—at one point even consulting with a group of Rabbis and suggesting to Zayat they let them arbitrate a settlement.

  In a November 19, 2014, deposition, Rubinsky said at one point that Zayat had offered to pay him $1 million if he told the sportsbook that he had died in a car accident. On another occasion, he told Rubinsky that during the investigation of the Jelinsky brothers, a federal agent told him not to repay the debt. Documents showed that agents from the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Nevada Gaming Control Board had visited Zayat’s office in New Jersey on May 8, 2008.

  Zayat said that he neither placed any bets nor agreed to place bets through Rubinsky. In court papers and testimony, Zayat denied betting with Tradewinds or any other offshore sites and said that his debt did not exist.

  “I never asked Rubinsky to put up a line of credit for me anywhere, and I was never aware—and I am still not aware—that he ever did so,” Zayat wrote in a March 31, 2015, letter in support of his request for a summary judgment.

  Zayat acknowledged betting at times through the brothers and subsequently being “scammed” by them. He said he learned of the deception when the federal agents came to his office and played tapes of wiretaps of the two explaining how they had taken Zayat’s money. One brother was telling him to bet on horses that he knew were going to lose, and the other was taking Zayat’s bet and holding them himself instead of placing them with a legal Nevada sportsbook.

  “So I would lose because they were giving me the wrong horses,” he admitted.

  In 2008, Rubinsky said he again tried to collect the money from Zayat. There were trans
cripts of several text messages between the two men that indicated they had a warm relationship. Rubinsky addressed Zayat as Ephraim, his Jewish name. Zayat called Rubinsky “Howie” and asked that he pray for him. In another, Zayat appears to promise that he will settle the debt and seems to indicate it will come in monthly payments.

  In 2007 or early 2008, Rubinsky met with Zayat and said he was sick and had no money and that he had been cheated by the Jelinskys. He said he agreed to give Rubinsky $25,000 and then another $25,000 from the Zayat Foundation made payable to his sister, Donna Rubinsky.

  “I do not deny that I gave him that first check—I know that I was willing to help him and I may have given him two checks—but I can say unequivocally that I did not give Rubinsky any money as payment on any debt. I did not, and do not, owe Rubinsky any money. I agreed to give him money because he told me he was ill and broke,” Zayat’s statement reads.

  When Zayat went on the offensive, however, he drew more attention to himself and away from the horse. After suggesting that Rubinsky was trying to shake him down, he said the lawsuit was a fraud.

  “It’s a scam from A to Z. It’s total fiction. It’s a total lie,” he said.

  Within days, Rubinsky’s lawyer, Joseph Bainton, filed a $10 million libel suit against Zayat, claiming he had maliciously defamed him when he called the original lawsuit “extortion, a fraud and blackmail.” In the complaint, Bainton cited articles in New York’s Daily News, The Associated Press, and outlets as far away as the Daily Mail in London.

  “I don’t like being called a liar,” Bainton said. “I have earned a very good reputation as a lawyer. I don’t cotton to being called a criminal. I think it’s finally time for Zayat to be held in account for his conduct.”

  Zayat had plenty of defenders. Mary Ellen Modico was among his most fervent supporters, having seen a side of him that was not captured in court filings. She had never met him and had spoken to him only a couple of times, but she was going to be in the grandstand at Belmont Park with her husband, Kenneth, and was certain American Pharoah was going to make history. Her son Nick had been the captain of the 2008 state champion baseball team at John F. Kennedy Catholic High School in Somers, New York, a member of the National Honor Society, and a horseplayer like his parents.