HOLLYWOOD PARK : Real Mr. Nickerson Alive and Well

The real Mr. Nickerson is alive and well and training at Hollywood Park.

Victor J. (Lefty) Nickerson was watching the telecast of the Breeders’ Cup on Oct. 27 along with millions of other racing fans when his namesake, the 4-year-old colt Mr. Nickerson, suffered a ruptured aorta and went down during the running of the Sprint. The damage was fatal.

“My daughter lives on Long Island,” Nickerson said at his Hollywood Park barn this week. “Would you believe, she got a phone call from some nut the next day, asking if I had a heart attack at the track? What would I be doing running in a race at Belmont Park?”

A lot of Nickerson’s friends in the East might be wondering what he’s doing training horses in California. For more than 30 years, Nickerson was an institution on the New York racing scene.

His horses won such prestigious events as the Marlboro Cup, Alabama Stakes, Coaching Club American Oaks, Hialeah Turf Cup and Whitney. He trained the likes of Big Spruce, Magazine, High Tribute, Reinvested, Staunchness and Globe for such clients as Maxwell Gluck, Walter Haefner, Nelson Bunker Hunt and Louis Wolfson.

But Nickerson grew tired of the New York grind. So, at 59, he packed up his tack boxes in the fall of 1988 and headed west.

It was a homecoming, of sorts, for Nickerson had worked the California circuit in his vagabond youth. He barely recognized the San Fernando Valley, where he once hauled horses to the old Ryana Ranch. But he remembered the same oil drilling rigs still pumping away barely 100 yards from his Hollywood stable.

In the two years since Nickerson resettled in Los Angeles, he has enjoyed only moderate success. He trains for quality breeders--primarily Haefner and Martin Wygod--but he has yet to break through with a top stakes horse. One of the best in his current stable is Sonata Slew, a daughter of Nodouble who threw a shoe in her comeback race last Saturday and finished 11th.

Despite Nickerson’s low local profile, his friends, including top trainers Ron McAnally and Richard Mandella, consider the Boston native one of the best horsemen in the game. And even if they can’t send many clients his way, they love to have “Lefty” around if only for his bone-dry sense of humor.

The buttoned-down Nickerson wit makes Bob Newhart sound like Soupy Sales. Don’t try to read his impenetrable expression if you want to know whether he’s joking.

Once Nickerson was asked if he was attending the prestigious Jockey Club Ball, always a good political move for a New York trainer. “What?” Nickerson replied. “And miss ‘Mork and Mindy!’ ”

Mandella, while working for Nickerson in the early 1970s, wondered aloud about vacation time for him and his wife. Lefty never missed a beat.

“Vacation? Sure. Why not take her to the Thousand Islands? Spend a month on each one.”

About a year after Nickerson arrived, McAnally was asked if he thought his fellow trainer was in California to stay.

“He must be,” McAnally answered. “The other day Lefty told me he bought a refrigerator.”

The McAnally-Nickerson friendship is into its sixth decade. Nickerson, of course, was the man who turned John Henry over to McAnally in late 1979. They shared the training of the well-traveled gelding for the 1980 season, when John Henry won the first of his four turf championships. After that, McAnally took full control, but he continued to split his considerable John Henry winnings with Nickerson.

The two men met while working as grooms for trainer Stanley Lipiec at Narragansett Park in Rhode Island. Together, they cared for a filly named Miss Disco, who later became the dam of Bold Ruler.

“A few years later, I was sitting next to Mr. Fitz at some dinner in New York,” said Nickerson, referring to James Fitzsimmons, the legendary trainer of Bold Ruler, Nashua and Gallant Fox. “He turned to me and said, ‘What do you do, young man?”’

For once, Nickerson did not have a wisecrack. “A trainer, Mr. Fitz. I’m a trainer.”

Nickerson, a man who likes chess and is constantly reading a book on racing lore, is hard to fluster. But his equanimity was put to a stern test recently when Haefner decided to send his Belmont Stakes winner, Go and Go, to California for competition. Nickerson trains 15 horses for Haefner at Hollywood, but when Go and Go got off the plane, he went straight to the barn of Wayne Lukas.

Nickerson shrugged it off and went about his business. He was back at his sardonic best when asked recently why Go and Go went where he went.

“I’m just not a good enough trainer,” he said.

Mandella doesn’t buy it.

“In my two years with Lefty, I never worked harder or had more fun,” said Mandella, who could finish as high as sixth in the national standings this year.

“Nobody taught me more than Lefty. And not just about training horses, either.” I learned a lot about life from him, too.”

Nickerson, on hearing Mandella’s comments, simply arched an eyebrow. “Gratitude is nice,” he said. “But when is he going to send me money?”

Horse Racing Notes

Go and Go is scheduled to make his West Coast debut Saturday in the Native Diver Handicap at Hollywood Park. The Irish colt finished last in the Breeders’ Cup Classic in his most recent start. “For a colt who’s traveled as much as he has this year, he’s held his flesh very well,” trainer Jeff Lukas said. Go and Go worked a half-mile in 49 2/5 Wednesday morning.

Dr. Jim Hill, the New York veterinarian who was part of the Seattle Slew crew, bred the colt Mr. Nickerson and gave him his name. “Jim’s son worked for me for a while,” Nickerson explained.

Eddie Gregson reported that Petite Ile came out of her 12th-place finish in last Sunday’s Japan Cup in good shape and would return to California later this week. “She didn’t ship all that well and she coughed for a couple of days right after she got to Tokyo,” the trainer said. ‘Still, she actually made the lead briefly at about the quarter pole. She’ll get a little break and then she’ll campaign next year.”