Here Comes New Breed of Trainer

Horse trainers as a class used to be the most secretive bunch on the planet. They made atomic spies look gregarious. The guy next door usually had no idea what they did for a living--rob banks, maybe. Or work for the CIA.

Why do you think racehorses work out at or near dawn? Because they can’t sleep? Naw. They work out at dawn in near darkness because horse trainers like to work them in poor light. In total darkness if possible. They didn’t want the clockers to get any idea how fast their horses could go. Their whole life was spent trying to smuggle a 2-1 shot in a race and get 20-1 on him. Lip tattoos came into being to counteract practices of gypsy trainers who were not above trying to pass a Man O’ War off as an $8,000 claimer. I won’t say that trainers lived under assumed names--but, sometimes, their horses did.

And one of the sad stories of the track concerned the time a trainer did talk too much. The trainer, named Georgie Odom, needed money and he decided to chance slipping a stakes horse, Top Row, into a cheap claiming race to make some quick cash and hope nobody put in a claim for him. It was fairly safe that Depression year at Narragansett Park because nobody had much money. But the night before, in a card game in his hotel room, Odom let slip the information about his sure thing so his poker-playing buddies could make a buck at the windows. But one of them was Bert Baroni, a Reno barber, who did more than bet him. He claimed him. He even won the Santa Anita Handicap with him. And in those days, the Santa Anita ‘Cap was the first $100,000 race. You could buy Rhode Island for that.

Georgie Odom had paid for violating the code of silence that had been practiced by horsemen long before the Mafia thought it up.

Times have changed. I went out to the track the other day to interview the trainer, Dave Bernstein.

Bernstein is a new breed of horse trainer. He has a horse, The Wicked North by name, who might be the best one on America’s tracks today, but he’s not trying to hide his form, work him out in the dark, shop for a price for him or otherwise hide his form. He doesn’t want to. He wants the whole world to know how good he is, even if he goes off at 1-2. Bernstein doesn’t care.

Dave doesn’t hide his occupation from the neighbors. You don’t have to meet him under Shed Row at the crack of dawn. You can meet him at a trackside box in the afternoon. And he hands you--of all things for a trainer--a calling card! Listing not only his home phone number but his number at the track and a paging number. You’d think he was a doctor. Or selling insurance. Plain Ben Jones and Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons must be having fainting spells someplace.

Horse trainers no longer have unlisted lives. And, Stephen Foster to the contrary, they don’t learn their business at camptown races. They don’t all come from Missouri. Dave comes from Los Angeles, which is not exactly Jesse James country.

Even though he wasn’t born in a tack room in Joplin, Dave has always loved horses--even in the days when the only ones he had were stuffed animals.

His dad, a respectable businessman, couldn’t understand why Dave didn’t just lust for a mag-wheeled Camaro or a two-wheeled desert bike like the rest of his generation here. Dad thought horse racing was an occupation for a guy with his own deck or dice, but son Dave was sneaking into racetracks when he was too young to make a bet.

He not only hung around the homestretch, he hung around the backstretch. He briefly weighed a career in veterinary medicine but hankered to condition horses more than medicate them.

It has been said you learn more training bad horses than you do good ones. If true, Dave Bernstein had a master’s degree. He had enough bad horses. He even “stabled” some of them in empty lots near his home till he could wangle prized stable spaces at the tracks.

With The Wicked North, he hopes to win more than races. He hopes to win horse of the year with him at the Eclipse Awards. To that end, he will go into this Saturday’s prestigious Hollywood Gold Cup at Hollywood Park as the high weight and favorite.

Gold Cup champions have made horse of the year eight times beginning with the legendary Seabiscuit, about whom movies were made, and continuing through Swaps, Affirmed, Ferdinand and Round Table, a veritable Who’s Who of Racing.

Bernstein wants the world to know all about The Wicked North. His life used to be a pretty well-kept secret. Where good horses used to go for millions at auction, The Wicked North cost a measly $10,000, or a little more than a saddle pony when Bernstein picked him out for owner Phil Hersh. “I liked him in the ring because he was a big athletic-looking colt,” Bernstein recalls.

But The Wicked North really blew his cover when the great rider, Kent Desormeaux, got aboard him one morning at Del Mar. Desormeaux, who once won 598 races in a single year, knew a good horse when got on one, and he came back from his ride whistling.

A big (17 hands), powerful (1,200 pounds) son of Northern Dancer, The Wicked North could be joining an elite of the track, i.e., horses who have won the Santa Anita Handicap and the Hollywood Gold Cup in the same year. Horses such as Round Table, Affirmed, Greinton.

He finished first in last year’s Santa Anita Handicap. But the record book shows he finished fourth.

What happened was, he impeded the progress of a Wayne Lukas horse called My Rakalu at the three-sixteenths pole. The rules of the game called for him to be placed behind Myrakalu, who finished fourth. The Wicked North won the race by a length and a half over Stuka and Bien Bien, but they got the money. When he was dropped to fourth, the difference was more than lengths, it was money. First prize was $550,000. Fourth was $75,000. A half-million dollar mistake.

That too is the horse trainer’s life. Just when you’re reaching for the pot, you turn over a deuce on the last card.

Bernstein and Hersh never lost faith in the colt. After he traveled to Arkansas earlier this year to sweep the Oaklawn handicap, then returned to Hollywood Park to win the Californian, someone asked Hersh if this was the best horse he ever had. Hersh replied sternly “He’s the best horse anyone ever had!”

Horsemen have certainly changed. Ben Jones probably wouldn’t have wanted an Eclipse Award. It would ruin the odds. His horse might even go off at even money. You might as well work him out in broad daylight.