Column: Jerry Hollendorfer’s patience pays with Shared Belief

It starts every day, in the dark and quiet grimness of 3 a.m., for Jerry Hollendorfer.

And it has been ending, at least recently, in loud and joyous celebrations, late on weekend afternoons, in front of big crowds, in the winner’s circles of major horse racing tracks.

Hollendorfer trains thoroughbreds. He is in charge of more than 150 animals. In many ways, he is a dairy farmer with cows to milk. Their needs dictate.

But dairy farmers never have the end result of their labors on the level that Hollendorfer has had over the years, and is really having now with a 3-year-old gelding named Shared Belief.

Shared Belief was the Eclipse Award winner as the top 2-year-old male last year. When he won the CashCall Futurity at Hollywood Park in the track’s last major race before it closed its doors last December, it was pretty clear who was going to be the leading character in the annual Kentucky Derby game of pre-race hype.

Shared Belief.

It didn’t hurt that 40% of the horse was owned by media star Jim Rome. America dotes on its celebrities, and having one own one was going to be a nice story. Rome, a master interviewer, was also a pretty good interviewee.

And so the stage was set. Big headlines and frequent sound bites were a given.

But this was horse racing, where all the bad things that can happen usually do. Shared Belief came down with an abscess on his foot. At first it wasn’t serious. Then it was.

Fortunately for the connections of Shared Belief, the hardworking, methodical Hollendorfer was making the calls, setting the tone. Before long, the decision was made to focus on healing the horse, rather than rushing him into readiness for Triple Crown time.

Hollendorfer, 68, who began his training career 35 years ago in 1979, sent Shared Belief from Southern California back to Northern California and Golden Gate Fields.

“The track is softer, deeper there,” he says. “I thought he could work better and heal better there.”

Suffice it to say, few would have better knowledge of that than Hollendorfer, who won every training title at both Golden Gate and Bay Meadows from 1986 through 2008. That’s 32 straight at Golden Gate and 37 straight at Bay Meadows. It’s Joe DiMaggio-like.

Kentucky Derby fever is an untreatable disease. But Hollendorfer kept everybody’s temperature down in the spring.

“All the owners agreed,” Hollendorfer says. “Nobody got depressed. We would just have a good second half of the year.”

Helpful in that decision was that another 20% ownership was held by Hollendorfer, who more often than not has a financial piece of the horses he trains.

And so, California Chrome and Hollendorfer’s friend, trainer and former neighbor Art Sherman — “We used to live in the same four-plex in San Mateo,” Hollendorfer says — went off and dominated the Triple Crown season with victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness. With Chrome at full throttle, Shared Belief was just another Derby horse that didn’t get there.

Now, he’s back. The abscess is long-ago healed, mostly thanks to the dedication and special treatment of Hollendorfer’s main assistant trainer in his Northern California barn, his wife, Janet.

Saturday, on the second day of Santa Anita’s autumn meeting, Shared Belief will be the featured horse on a day of many featured horses. He will run in the Awesome Again Stakes, a $300,000 Grade I test. There will be four other top races, each a Grade I, on a day when winners of the big races will get an all-expenses-paid trip to the Oct. 31-Nov. 1 Breeders’ Cup extravaganza at Santa Anita.

The Awesome Again winner, and possibly a few of those finishing close behind, will be heading for the richest race outside of Dubai, the $5-million Breeders’ Cup Classic. Last year’s Awesome Again winner, Mucho Macho Man, won the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Shared Belief was bred and owned initially by Marty and Pam Wygod. Trained by Jed Josephson, he broke his maiden Oct. 19, 2013, winning by seven lengths at Golden Gate Fields. Then the Wygods sold him for $300,000 and Hollendorfer took over the training.

Shared Belief has won all six of his races and made $1,372,200. Most recently, he won the Pacific Classic at Del Mar by 2 3/4 lengths, and has won his six races by a total of 31 3/4 lengths.

Hollendorfer, inducted into racing’s Hall of Fame in 2011, is among a handful of trainers who have won 6,000 races, and he is now about 270 away from 7,000.

I want to get that 7,000,” he says. “I’m very grateful to be able to do what I do.”

He also says that he is not the retiring kind, even at age 68.

“Once you make it to the backstretch,” he says, “you tend to stay there.”

Hollendorfer’s main assistant at Santa Anita, where he has about 50 horses, is Dan Ward, who once worked for the late and legendary Bobby Frankel. Ward says that both Hollendorfer and Frankel had a good handle on all their horses, but that Hollendorfer gets at it even earlier than Frankel.

“We get here about 3,” Ward said, “and we can get things moving early that way. Nobody is better organized than Jerry.”

Nor more cautious.

When the Breeders’ Cup Classic is mentioned, Hollendorfer is quick to point out that the Awesome Again race comes first.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself there,” he says.

Too late, Jerry. With Shared Belief now a universal conviction in racing, and the best big-race rider in the world in Mike Smith on board, gamblers for Saturday’s big race are already there.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com