Garren Goes From Owner to Trainer of Horses

For 23 years, Gil Puentes trained horses for Murray Garren. It was more than just a business relationship. The trainer from Cuba and the Russian-born real-estate man from Brooklyn were good friends.

They were such good friends that last November, five minutes before the running of the Remsen Stakes at Aqueduct, Garren noticed a discrepancy in the weight being carried by Stone White, a 2-year-old gelding owned by Aida Puentes, Gil’s wife.

Stone White was in the Remsen with 113 pounds. Garren, sitting in Aqueduct’s dining room, looked at the track program, and it immediately hit him that, based on the conditions of the race, the horse should have been carrying 116 pounds. Gil Puentes apparently had made the mistake the day the horse was entered.

There wasn’t time to reach Puentes, because the 11-horse Remsen field was heading for the starting gate. So Garren ran to the phone and called the racing secretary’s office to tell of the error.

Much of what happened after that is a matter of interpretation and depends on who’s telling the details. What definitely happened is that Stone White ran the race with 113 pounds on his back, won by three lengths and was disqualified by the stewards the next day, a decision that cost Aida and Gil Puentes the $170,000 purse.

But at least Murray Garren tried to help his friends. A month ago, Garren could lend no help. Gil Puentes, who had been told he had pneumonia, was in a New York hospital, and now doctors were telling him he had cancer. The disease killed him at 59.

A month before Puentes died, however, Garren went to visit him. “He wasn’t going to get any better, and I was going to ask him about taking over the stable, training the horses,” Garren said. “The man had been my trainer for 23 years, so it would have been hard for me to get anybody else.”

Puentes looked at Garren and said: “Do what you have to do. And best of luck to you if you do it.”

By the time Puentes died, Garren, the 64-year-old real-estate man and horse owner, had his trainer’s license. He passed the written test one day and the barn test the next. Watching Puentes work all those years had served Garren well.

“The hardest part was the part about horses’ anatomy,” Garren said. “There were three pages of questions from the withers to the hoof.”

So now Garren is at Saratoga, training seven of his horses and three for Aida Puentes. The horses are in barn 68, at a section of the backstretch called “Oklahoma,” which in effect is the low-rent district. While such trainers as Woody Stephens, Allen Jerkens and Wayne Lukas have low-numbered barns near the running track itself, many of the claiming outfits are stabled in “Oklahoma,” which is across Union Avenue and about a $5 cab ride from the main track.

Claiming horses was usually the game for Puentes and Garren. They claimed the gelding Peat Moss for $35,000 in 1980, and, in the same year, Peat Moss won the Kelso Handicap, Garren’s first New York stakes win and his first victory in a $100,000 race.

The next year, Peat Moss won the Kelso again and nearly upset John Henry in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. John Henry, another cheap horse who had also run in the claiming ranks, won by a neck and needed the victory to earn his first of two horse-of-the-year titles.

“That race made me happy and sorry at the same time,” Garren said. “Sam Rubin (the owner of John Henry) is a friend of mine, and the race was more important to his horse than it was to mine. But I think we should have won the race on interference. My horse was flying on the rail and got intimidated by John Henry near the wire.

“John Henry didn’t beat Peat Moss, Bill Shoemaker (John Henry’s rider) beat him. Anybody but Shoemaker would have lost the race. And at any other track, John Henry’s number would have come down. Just about every jockey in the jocks’ room said we’d get it (the win).”

Peat Moss enabled the Puentes-Garren stable to earn more than $1.8 million in 1981.

Puentes also made some other solid claims for Garren. Early Lass, who cost $14,500, won the E. Palmer Heagerty at Bowie in 1971, the only filly ever to win that stake. Four Bases, claimed for $70,000 in 1983, won stakes races in New York and Florida and is still running as a 6-year-old.

“Four Bases was one of three revenge claims we made off (trainer) Pancho Martin,” Garren said. “Martin was Gil’s first cousin, Gil worked for him as an assistant for eight years. But Pancho had a horse-vanning business, and there were some disagreements and he quit talking to Gil and me. So we claimed three of his horses.”

In last Sunday’s Bernard Baruch Handicap here, Four Bases ran last under Jose Santos.

“I’ll run him back in the Seneca Handicap (at Saratoga, Aug. 22),” Garren said. “I guarantee you he’ll have a different jockey.”

Spoken like a veteran trainer.