Rosy Future on His Side of the Track

Horatio Alger Jr. was a writer of the American Dream. He might have invented it.

His stories were always upbeat. Inspirational. Their titles were always “Luck and Pluck,” “Bound to Rise.” The heroes were always Ragged Dick, Ronald Goodheart, Peter Pluck, Dick Daring. They were usually orphans who rose above their surroundings. They were newsboys, bootblacks, errand boys who by hard work and high morals rose to the top through a morass of misfortune overcome by goodness of heart and strength of character. It was a time when it was still possible to believe in such things.

The heroes often got their big break by saving a damsel in distress from a team of runaway horses, and she often turned out to be the daughter of the town’s biggest banker. Or they saved a child from drowning and his father turned out to be Daddy Warbucks.

But they were stories of another era. They were predictable, heart-warming, and they always had a happy ending and a whole generation grew up reading and believing them. But we thought it was another time. Only in America but no more.

But then, there is Ron McAnally. Horatio Alger would have loved Ron McAnally.

Ron never saved anyone from drowning or stopped a span of runaway horses. But he had the kind of Dickensian childhood of the penny dreadful novels.

McAnally is one of the great horse trainers of all time. His horses have won hundreds of millions. He has won three Eclipse Awards. He is in the horsemen’s Hall of Fame. There is nothing about a thoroughbred racehorse he doesn’t know, probably better than anyone else. He doesn’t need a clock to tell him when a great horse goes by. He can almost smell them, tell them by the almond shape to their eyes, the fluid motion of their stride, even the way they return his gaze.

But back in the Depression ‘30s, McAnally had as lost a childhood as any Alger hero ever.

Mom died of tuberculosis. She was 23 years old. She had five children. Ron was the second-oldest of three brothers and two sisters.

The father, out of work in those hard-times days in Kentucky, put the family in an orphanage--an “orphan asylum,” it was called in those benighted days.

Ron stayed there 10 years. Adoption was not really an option. Father never really got it going and he, too, died young (49).

The family stayed together, but it was hard. Ron still does not talk about it easily but it was, after all, an institution. Children adapt, but they do not understand. Common belief is, they’ve done something wrong.

Discipline was harsh but, as Ron recalls it, fair. You got beaten with a birch branch for misbehavior. They said the first six months Ron used to sit in the window looking for his mother. He was almost catatonic with despair. But later, as the oldest boy, he became the patriarch of the family. “They came to me with problems.”

An uncle came to the rescue when Ron was 15. Reggie Cornell was a horse trainer of note who had the legendary Silky Sullivan in his stable, the most spectacular come-from-behind horse in history. It was nothing for him to trail by 40 lengths or fractions of miles only to overtake with a late rush. Ron thinks he knows why. “When we trained him he was so much faster than the other 2-year-olds, we used to give them a head start in the works. Silky got the idea that was what he was supposed to do--let the others go by and then catch up to them and pass.”

Ron walked hots, he rubbed down horses, he went for coffee, he slept on straw. When he went in the Air Force, it was like a vacation.

He went to college (Cincinnati) to study electrical engineering, but it was boring compared to afternoons of stretch duels in the sun. He returned to the track.

Although life had been hard and rules rigid at the orphanage, Ron is far from bitter; he is almost appreciative. “There is too little discipline in the world today. I discovered there is almost pleasure in hard work.”

He was a workaholic around the track. McAnally’s days were 16 hours. The young boy who had run the dishwashing chores for 200 orphans found caring for a few horses a day a stroll in the park.

You become a good trainer with bad horses. Anyone can win with Man O’ War. Ron had to learn going to the post with the riffraff of the track, horses he’d just claimed for $3,500 and was trying to get them to help pay the rent, not win Eclipse Awards.

One day, he was sitting in a box at the Oak Tree meeting when he got a call from a man who introduced himself as Sam Rubin, a bicycle dealer from Brooklyn. “He said he had this nice kind of horse nominated for a race out there and (trainer) Lefty Nickerson had recommended me.”

And that’s how Ron McAnally got custody of one of the most famous runners in track history--John Henry.

John Henry was an indifferently bred gelding, cantankerous and willful. “He had this big jug head, he wasn’t conformed classically but he had this way of looking at you that said ‘You’re faded!’ “McAnally recalls.

John Henry arrived at LAX at 4 in the morning and, at 5 that night he ran second in the Carleton F. Burke Handicap.

McAnally related to John Henry at once because they both overcame deprived backgrounds. “He was a pro,” Ron McAnally recalls,” the most professional horse I ever had. You never had to tell him what to do, where to go on a racetrack. He knew . He’d outrun you and outsmart you.” If he were a ballplayer, he’d be DiMaggio.

He began in claimers but he was to win 26 races for McAnally including the Santa Anita Handicap (twice) the Belmont Jockey Club Gold Cup, the Arlington Million, San Juan Capistrano, Sunset Handicap--and $2,336,650.

If there’s a gap in the McAnally resume, it is the area of his own home state, Kentucky. Where once he lived as a ragged orphan, Ron would like to return one day as the toast of the Blue Grass--win the Kentucky Derby.

It is maddeningly elusive for California trainers. Even the great Charlie Whittingham did not win it until he was 74. And McAnally has sent good to outstanding runners back to try. None even got in the money.

But he has two precocious sophomores for the Del Mar Futurity (which has produced two Kentucky Derby winners) next Wednesday--Mr. Purple and On Target, both unbeaten, both clockbreakers.

But both are well-bred. Both come from the right side of the tracks.

Maybe Ron looks out there and would like to see, so to speak, someone who had to make his bed every morning, rake the leaves, bring in the firewood, run the dishwasher, sweep the floor, get to bed every night at 10 and get caned if he gets caught fighting over the hash in the mess hall. Someone who didn’t arrive by chauffeur. Someone who, you might say, would get off a plane at 4 a.m. and finish second by 5 p.m.

Someone who asked no quarter from life but took the hand he was dealt and built it into a royal flush. Someone who, like Ron, was 50-1 on the morning line but spends all his time in a winners’ circle today.