Injury to John Henry May Put an End to 10-Year-Old’s Career

The bad news for Ron McAnally is that John Henry won’t run Sunday at Hollywood Park.

Worse news for the trainer, and all of racing, is that the 10-year-old gelding’s career is probably over.

McAnally has seen John Henry recover from serious injuries three times before, but the trainer seemed to hold little hope for the future Thursday morning when he announced that the two-time horse of the year will miss Sunday’s $100,000 Vernon Underwood Handicap.

Although John Henry galloped 1 3/8 miles Thursday with no visible problems, he has been bothered for a week with a filling in the deep flexor tendon just below the knee of the right foreleg. The deep flexor is an inner tendon that runs from the knee to below the ankle.

Unable to reach John Henry’s owners, New Yorkers Sam and Dorothy Rubin, who were flying home Thursday from a vacation in France, McAnally made the decision to scratch from the Underwood after contacting Sam Rubin’s daughter.

“The filling hasn’t gone away,” McAnally said. “I didn’t want to take the chance of running him. I’m hopeful that it’s not that serious, but it does look serious.

“Perhaps age is finally catching up with him. Maybe his tendons and ligaments are not as strong as they used to be. If this injury is what I think it is, it means it’s the end.”

McAnally said he will take John Henry out of training and move him with his other horses to Del Mar, where the season opens Wednesday.

“We’ll treat him with ice and anti-inflammatory medication for a couple of weeks, to see if we can get the heat and filling out,” McAnally said. “Then it’ll be up to Dr. (Jack) Robbins to decide whether he can go ahead or whether it’s all over.”

Robbins, a veterinarian who has been treating John Henry since the horse came from New York to McAnally’s barn in the fall of 1979, was attending a horse sale in Lexington, Ky., Thursday when the trainer made the announcement not to run Sunday.

Jose Mercado, John Henry’s groom, noticed the filling in the horse’s leg after he worked a mile on the grass in 1:36 1/5 July 11. Robbins examined the horse the next day.

“I don’t like it,” Robbins told McAnally. “There’s a lot of sensitivity there.”

Two days later, Robbins looked at John Henry again and noted some improvement. But the filling has never subsided.

“When a tendon goes, it goes all at once,” McAnally said. “And I just don’t want to take that chance, considering all he’s done for racing.”

The Underwood, named after Hollywood Park’s recently retired board chairman, had been purposely added to the track’s schedule as a spot for John Henry’s return to the races. Unraced since his win in the Ballantine’s Scotch Classic at the Meadowlands last October, Sunday’s start was to be a prep for John Henry’s August appearance in the Arlington Park Million, a race he has won twice in three tries.

Hollywood Park had heavily promoted John Henry’s scheduled appearance Sunday and Marje Everett, the track’s chief operating officer, was expecting a crowd of about 60,000, which would be about 15,000 more than usual.

“This horse is the last of the drawing cards,” Everett said. “Spend a Buck (winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby) might get a few extra people out, but nobody can pack them in like John Henry.”

With 39 wins--29 of them in stakes--in 83 lifetime starts, John Henry has earned almost $6.6 million, all but about $50,000 of it for the Rubins, who bought the all-time money winner for $25,000 when he was an ornery, untrainable, much-traveled 2-year-old in 1978.

John Henry was voted Horse of the Year in ’81 and ’84 and has won seven Eclipse Awards, a total surpassed only by another great gelding, Forego, who won eight.

Everett told McAnally Thursday that if John Henry is retired, he would be welcome to spend the rest of his days at Hollywood Park. Rubin once said that he would retire John Henry to the farm of a friend, Joe Taub, in New Jersey.

Last November, Rubin, who has owned only a few other horses during the John Henry years, was planning to pay a supplementary fee of $400,000 so that his smallish gelding could run in the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Turf Stakes at Hollywood. Two days after Rubin had made the nonrefundable first payment of $133,000, John Henry was declared out of the race because of a strained ligament in his left foreleg. After resuming training at Santa Anita early this year, John Henry suffered a minor injury to the same leg.

“That leg looks good,” McAnally said Thursday. “Maybe this latest injury could have been caused by his putting too much weight on the right side, but you don’t know for sure.”

After missing the Breeders’ Cup, McAnally doubted that John Henry would even make it back into training.

“But he corrected that problem,” the trainer said. “There were two other times I didn’t think he’d make it back. When we took him to Japan (in November, 1982), he got colic (stomach sickness) and laid down in his stall with all four feet in the air.

“Early the next year, he pulled a hip muscle in his right hind and limped back to his stall. For 24 hours, he didn’t move, but then the next day he was standing up again.”

The latest injury has McAnally more skeptical than ever about recovery.

He said: “Nobody is more depressed than me and the boys who have worked with him all these years (Mercado, assistant trainer Eduardo Inda and exercise rider Lewie Cenicola). Tendons are tough. I’d rather have a fracture. Anything but a tendon.”

In recent years, McAnally and Rubin have both had horrible dreams of something tragic happening to John Henry during a race. They’ve kept him running because he’s remained competitive--last year he won major races in California, New York and Chicago, something a 9-year-old horse had never accomplished.

“I’ve said many a prayer that nothing bad happens,” McAnally said. “Maybe, if he doesn’t come back from this, it’s a blessing in disguise. Maybe it’s a way of having those prayers answered.”

McAnally will be in Lexington early next week, on behalf of clients, at Keeneland’s expensive yearling sales. At the barn at Hollywood Thursday, Cenicola said to him: “Hey, Ronnie--go back there and buy three more John Henrys, will ya?’

Fat chance. In the first place, they don’t sell geldings at Keeneland. In the second place, they don’t sell horses like John Henry anywhere.

Top 10 Career Money Earners

Horse Starts 1st 2nd 3rd Earnings *John Henry, 1975 83 39 15 9 6,597,947 *Spend a Buck, 1982 13 9 2 2 2,998,509 Slew o’ Gold, 1980 21 12 5 1 3,533,534 All Along (f), 1979 21 9 4 2 3,015,764 Spectacular Bid, 1976 30 26 2 1 2,781,607 Trinycarol (f), 1979 29 18 3 1 2,647,141 Affirmed, 1975 29 22 5 1 2,393,818 *Wild Again, 1980 24 8 4 4 2,088,109 Majesty’s Prince, 1979 43 12 10 10 2,075,200 Kelso, 1957 63 39 12 2 1,977,896

*Still in training, (f) Female Source: The Daily Racing Form