Trainer Shows Horse Power

Donna McArthur, a 50-year-old wife and mother, is also a quarter horse trainer who has three of the 10 starters in Saturday’s Los Alamitos Million Futurity, the $1,173,605 race that is the richest horse race in California.

Two of McArthur’s entries are fillies and one of McArthur’s jockeys is Tami Purcell.

But this isn’t a story of women conquering a man’s world. Not at all. Not anymore and that’s the great thing.

McArthur lives in a hotel near the track from April until December because she likes the Los Alamitos track, likes the California racing, the California weather, the California training conditions even if she doesn’t like the long separations from her husband, James, who trains top-notch quarter horses back home in Texas. She seems almost surprised at the question of whether she ever has trouble being respected in this business of sweat and dirt, of long hours and long seasons and sometimes little appreciation.

“Not at all,” McArthur says on a sunny morning where an early-morning mist has left the track smelling strongly of horse and loam. The entrants for Saturday’s big race are mostly standing easily in their stalls, raising an eye toward anyone who walks by and looking hopefully for, oh, maybe an apple or a carrot or something.

People keep sticking their heads into the office where McArthur is sitting, nodding hello, quietly repeating a question. “It was pretty easy for me to get into this,” McArthur says. “My husband was a trainer.” McArthur says this easily. There is no embarrassment in using the help of a husband to enter a business. It is, after all, the way many men find their careers--with the help of a father or brother or uncle or grandfather.

“I never felt I wasn’t accepted,” McArthur says. “I think I was more readily accepted in the beginning than a jockey, like Tami, is. Basically, I think, if you have nice horses and do a good job, that’s all you need to do in this business to be accepted.”

Last season McArthur ended Blane Schvaneveldt’s 12-year reign as American Quarter Horse Assn. champion trainer by having her horses win both the $1.8-million All-American with Corona Cash and the Los Alamitos Million with This Snow Is Royal.

Besides having Fodice, Night Time Deelites and Iba Dasher in Saturday’s Million, McArthur also will have Corona Cash, with Purcell aboard, in Sunday’s season-closing race, the $350,000 Champion of Champions.

When McArthur speaks of her Saturday race entrants, it is in the way she might speak of her daughter. She explains that Fodice was named after a dog and that “she does have her quirks. She doesn’t like training and she has a temper. But she likes to be looked at and petted.” If that sounds a little like a spoiled prom queen, McArthur won’t disagree.

Night Time Deelites, McArthur says, is “quiet and easy going and shows no emotion. ‘Night’ is easy to train.” As McArthur talks, you begin to see a sweet-natured middle child, obedient and happy to be included.

Iba Dasher, another filly, “is very, very predictable,” according to McArthur. Iba Dasher didn’t qualify for the Million until the last weekend of trials, on a cold, rainy day that left the track sticky and heavy. It is the kind of track that McArthur comes to California to avoid and when Iba Dasher managed a win anyway, “that made me proud.” Spoken just like a proud parent.

It is that feeling for horses that McArthur so obviously has which makes her a great trainer to ride for, according to Purcell.

“Donna’s very compassionate,” Purcell says. “She treats each horse as an individual. I think anybody [who] fools with horses has some of that compassion, but I think it’s easier for women to express that compassion.”

Purcell also said that part of McArthur’s success as a trainer has to do with how McArthur treats people. Or at least jockeys. “Donna saw early in my years my potential and she really helped me grow with that potential,” Purcell said. “On Donna’s horses I feel completely and totally confident. She does not restrict my judgment. She makes my job so much easier because you don’t have to worry about what she might think.”

McArthur would blush at such compliments. McArthur takes no credit, after all. She gives it all to the horses.

It is time for McArthur to leave now. Her horses wait, the big races are nearly here and then a trip back to Texas for a few months with her husband and her daughter, Mindy. But it is not vacation. No way.

These horses have to be loaded into trailers and sent home for a rest. You don’t just walk away for a few months or weeks or even days. And McArthur is nowhere near being ready to quit this nomadic, difficult, exhilarating life.

“As long as I keep being given good horses and as long as good owners keep wanting me and as long as I still feel good, yeah, I’ll be back here in April,” McArthur says. Same as the men. Same as anyone who loves the early morning, the warm breath of a horse on her neck, the feel of the leather saddle, the smell of the earth.

Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com