Trainer Retires His Demons

On an early summer day in 1985, trainer Phil Marino was at the home of a jockey in Vinton, La. In front of him was a line of cocaine, part of a drug-and-vodka habit that was costing more than $2,000 a week.

Someone in the room mentioned that he had heard that John Henry, the horse that Marino once trained, was being retired.

“I pushed it [the cocaine] away,” Marino said recently. “I didn’t use the next day, either, and I’ve been sober ever since.”

John Henry, horse of the year in 1981 and 1984, made $6.5 million for his owners, Sam and Dorothy Rubin of New York. He was instrumental in Ron McAnally’s winning the trainer-of-the-year Eclipse Award in 1981 and had more than a small role in McAnally’s being inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame six years ago. But for Phil Marino, John Henry was an albatross, a haunting reminder of his own failure with the horse. Every time John Henry won a race for McAnally and the Rubins, Marino would retreat deeper into a chemical escape that wrecked his life.

“As that horse won race after race, I took so much flack from people that I thought were my friends,” Marino said. “I couldn’t handle it. I used drugs and drink as a veil to hide from it. I became a real lowlife. I found the bottom of the barrel.”

Sober for nine years, Marino, 47, has put together a second marriage, worked as a saddlesmith, earned a degree from Kentucky and last year took on the kind of job that might have eventually been his years ago, if not for the humiliating experience with John Henry. For three groups of owners, he’s the trainer of 40 horses at Hialeah. Many of them are 2-year-olds not mature enough to run yet, but Marino won three races and had six other in-the-money finishers at the recently completed Gulfstream Park meeting in Florida, and he’ll be moving his stable to Monmouth Park in New Jersey this summer.

Twenty-seven of Marino’s horses are owned by George and Sandi Kleemann, Chicagoans who hired Marino as their stable trainer last year.

“We had known Phil as a saddlesmith around the Chicago tracks and always liked him,” Sandi Kleemann said. “Two of the other trainers we had been using didn’t want to give up other clients to train for us exclusively, so we gave Phil the job of running the whole operation. He’s got a magnetism, an enthusiasm, that we liked. We’ve been involved in horses since 1981, and last year with Phil was the best we’ve done. His goal is to get a horse to the Breeders’ Cup, and that’s our goal too. Phil has put his life back together all on his own. He’s a hope and an inspiration for a lot of talented people around the racetrack who are throwing their lives away.”

Marino first saw John Henry at Keeneland in the spring of 1977. Harold Snowden Jr. owned the cheaply bred, unattractive son of Ole Bob Bowers and Once Double. Snowden had bought him in January for $2,200, at an auction for unraced 2-year-olds, and was trying to unload him.

“He was just terrible,” Snowden said in an interview several years ago. “He stripped his stall. Tore the feed tub from the wall, put his foot in the water bucket, tore up the webbing in front. He figured that was his domain, and he was the boss in there.”

Snowden had John Henry gelded, and after he broke the horse, a deal to sell him for $7,500 fell through because a veterinarian didn’t like the turn of his knees. The next buyer in line was Colleen Madere, a Louisiana woman who used Marino as her trainer.

Madere wanted Marino to gallop John Henry before she would buy him. “He was the fastest horse I ever sat on,” said Marino, whose riding career had been short-lived because of a weight problem. “He ran low to the ground, and he just exploded.”

Madere and her partner, Dortha Lingo, bought John Henry for $10,000. A week later, on May 20, 1977, he ran in his first race and beat maidens going a half-mile at Jefferson Downs in New Orleans. He won again for Marino in August, and in September he won the first of his 31 stakes races, taking the Lafayette Futurity at Evangeline Downs.

For Marino, everything was downhill from there. From the fall of 1977 through March of 1978, in nine discouraging starts at the Fair Grounds, John Henry’s best finishes were a pair of thirds, and most of the time he would outrun only a horse or two. One day, running for a $25,000 claiming price with no takers, he went off at 19-1 and ran 10th, beaten by 20 lengths.

He had also brought his nasty temperament South. “Squirrel” was the nickname Marino gave him.

“He’d bite you, kick you, paw you,” Marino said. “He’d tear those rubber feed tubs off the wall. He went through so many of those tubs that we finally had to feed him on the ground, in an aluminum tub that he couldn’t do any damage to. But I still loved that horse. With it all, he had a personality. We’d give him a soccer ball that he had fun with. He’d put it in his knees, in his mouth. When he got tired of it, it’d go half-way down the shed row.”

Marino told John Henry’s owners that the Fair Grounds racing strip was their horse’s undoing.

“It was deep and cuppy there, and he just couldn’t get into it,” Marino said. “He had a big foot for a horse, a size 7. He’d come back from his races and he wasn’t even blowing. Because of the track, he wasn’t running hard enough to wear himself out.”

John Henry had won only three of his first 16 starts, and the plan early in 1978 was to ship him to Oaklawn Park, where Marino thought the running surface would be more favorable. He had an 18-wheeler ready to transport several horses to Arkansas, but at 5:30 a.m., Dortha Lingo called and said that John Henry wasn’t going. She and her partner made another deal with Snowden, who agreed to take John Henry back in exchange for a couple of unraced 2-year-olds.

In an oft-told tale, Sam Rubin came along a couple of weeks later, with $25,000 in his fists. Snowden had sold the horse three times in a little more than a year, and this time he wasn’t going to get him back.

By the time Marino had watched on television as John Henry won the first running of the Arlington Million, in 1981, his drug habit was out of control. A first wife, a son and a house were all gone. Marino trained little, hung out at various racetrack backstretches a lot. Besides snort cocaine, the one other thing he could do well was play racehorse rummy, a popular card game, and that went a long way toward fueling his addiction.

“Whatever I did, I was just going through the motions,” Marino said.

Every insensitive gibe crushed him. One morning, on the barn-area speaker system, came the announcement: “Phil Marino, Phil Marino, please call John Henry.” A potential client eyed up a disheveled Marino one day and said: “You couldn’t even win with John Henry. How are you going to win with my $10,000 claimers?”

In 1985, the Rubins and McAnally retired John Henry and inadvertently got the monkey off a Louisiana horseman’s back. Now, Marino participates in “Just Say No To Drugs” and D.A.R.E, and speaks against drugs in school classrooms. At least once a year, he visits John Henry, now a 21-year-old who lives at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington.

“I beat [my drug problem] on a one-on-one basis, but I was down for a long time and it was a humbling experience,” Marino said. “Two or three times a week, I’ll think about using again. But I just say no.”