Personal Trainer

On Kentucky Derby day, when trainer John Servis had a prior commitment at Churchill Downs, a small black-and-gray-striped cat wandered into his barn at Philadelphia Park. The help there named the tabby Derby.

“John doesn’t like cats,” said Maureen Donnelly, Servis’ assistant. “But he let us keep this one.”

Servis, 45, is less than a week away from racing history, as his Smarty Jones prepares to run in Saturday’s Belmont Stakes and perhaps sweep the Triple Crown, but occasionally he shrugs off the big picture, pausing long enough to be fascinated by minutiae. The day after Smarty Jones reprised his Kentucky Derby win with a victory in the Preakness, Servis recalled meeting a stranger at Pimlico. The other man had a souvenir program from the 1934 Derby.

“I looked down the list of horses,” Servis said, “and there it was: Quasimodo. A horse named Quasimodo ran in that Derby. I thought, ‘Isn’t that something?’ But things like this have been happening all along the way.”

When Smarty Jones, still unraced, reared in the starting gate during training hours at Philadelphia Park last July, he smashed his head against a steel bar. His face was so distorted that staff members who treated him at a New Jersey clinic nicknamed him “Quasimodo,” after Victor Hugo’s gnarled hunchback.

More recently, Servis told the story about the missing Sacred Heart medal. Pat Chapman, who races Smarty Jones with her husband Roy, had given Servis the medal, to be placed under the colt’s saddle in the Kentucky Derby. Smarty Jones ran with the medal in the Derby and the Preakness, but after the Preakness, in the thrill of victory, the saddle was taken off in the winner’s circle, and the medal dropped to the ground, unnoticed.

A friend of Servis’, not knowing what it was, picked up the medal and showed it to the trainer later.

“I thought I had lost it,” Servis said. “I was very fortunate to get it back. I stick it in my pants pocket every day before the Belmont.”

Servis has become a rich man because of one horse -- his 10% share of Smarty Jones’ earnings is $741,315 -- and sure the money matters, but he also seems to be enjoying himself, as much as a trainer can, despite the rigors of a first Triple Crown campaign. Even-handed Servis is in stark contrast to the irritable Barclay Tagg, who groused his way through last year’s Triple Crown with Funny Cide. Tagg chased reporters and photographers from his barn, carping that they were driving up his workers’ compensation insurance premiums, and seemed to dread every waking minute. Immediately after Funny Cide’s third-place finish in the Belmont, Tagg definitely had the drawn look of a man who had just missed out on the $5-million Triple Crown bonus.

Servis, of course, has already won one $5-million bonus with his horse, who made Oaklawn Park’s insurers pay up after he won two races at the Arkansas track and also won the Kentucky Derby.

“The pressure race for me was the Arkansas Derby,” Servis said. “We had to win that one to build up enough earnings to make it to the Kentucky Derby. Since then, we’ve sat back and enjoyed the ride. The big accomplishment was just to get to the Kentucky Derby.”

It was during the Arkansas campaign when Servis made a significant equipment change that has made Smarty Jones a more tractable colt during his morning exercises. To keep Smarty’s head down and allow him to better focus on the work at hand, Servis outfitted him with German martingale reins that gave his 170-pound exercise rider, Peter Van Trump, more control.

It was also in Arkansas, in late January, when Servis and Roy Chapman had a discussion about who would ride Smarty Jones. The horse had run three times, winning easily with Stewart Elliott aboard, but Elliott was virtually unheard of outside Philadelphia Park, had ridden in few big races and never had a mount in the Kentucky Derby.

“Do you feel comfortable with [Elliott] riding in a Derby with 20 horses?” Chapman asked.

“Absolutely,” Servis said.

“Then it’s a done deal,” Chapman said.

Elliott has ridden Smarty Jones brilliantly as the colt has extended his undefeated streak to eight races. No one is prouder of what Servis has accomplished than Joe Servis, the trainer’s father. The elder Servis won about 1,000 races when he rode, mostly at tracks in Maryland and West Virginia. Hardly a big-race rider, Servis retired from the saddle in 1958 after breaking a leg in a starting-gate accident. Joe Servis worked 11 years for the Jockeys’ Guild before he became a racing steward on the mid-Atlantic circuit, where he still occasionally fills in as a substitute.

Joe Servis has two other children in racing -- daughter Laurie, who’s married to Eddie Plesa, a Florida trainer; and Jason Servis, John’s brother, who trains in New York. The day Smarty Jones won the Preakness, a $1-million race, Plesa and Jason Servis also saddled winners.

“Somebody suggested that the three of them split up the pots,” Joe Servis said, laughing. He and his wife, Dee, whom he courted one summer when he was riding at Saratoga, never pushed the rest of the family into racing, but they’re happy with the way it has turned out.

“We said to the kids early on, whatever you decide to do, we’ll be behind you 100%,” Servis said. “My wealth is my children. They all have a terrific work ethic.”

The first word John Servis uttered, his father said, was “horse.”

“When he was about 2 years old, he’d point and say, ‘Horse, horse, horse.’ Now I’ve got a grandson, and all he says is, ‘New car, new car, new car.’ ”

Growing up in Charlestown, W.Va., John Servis wrestled and played baseball and was known as a fierce competitor. At 16, he slid hard into second base, trying to take out an infielder, and wrecked one of his legs. He was hospitalized for three weeks and wore a hip-to-ankle cast for six months. For a graduation gift, he got a horse. Somebody told him the animal couldn’t run -- the scouting report was correct -- and Servis sold him for $500, taking the money to invest in better stock.

One summer, Servis’ father got him a job at trainer Frank Gall’s farm in West Virginia. The hours were long, and the work tedious. Servis mucked stalls and cut weeds, handling chores that had no appeal for anyone else.

“They were pretty hard on me,” Servis said. “I didn’t know whether they were trying to drive me out of the business or what.”

A fling at college didn’t take. Servis went to work for Scotty Schulhofer, a future Hall of Fame trainer. Schulhofer had Mac Diarmida, a champion turf horse, at the time, and stabled near his Belmont Park barn in the 1970s was trainer Billy Turner, who was molding Seattle Slew into a Triple Crown champion.

“I watched Billy every day,” Servis said. “He never got enough credit for what he did with that horse.”

Servis worked as a jockey’s agent and became an assistant to trainer Mark Reid at Philadelphia Park before forming a stable of his own. It was Reid, after trainer Bob Camac was killed by his stepson in 2001, who recommended Servis to the Chapmans. Despondent over the death of Camac, the Chapmans were trying to leave racing, but George Isaacs, manager of the Florida farm where Smarty Jones was broken as a yearling, told them that they might consider running the colt before they bailed out. Isaacs, it turned out, raved so much about the unraced colt that Servis, while liking the looks of the horse, thought that he’d have trouble living up to the ballyhoo.

“The last thing you want to do is get overly excited about a horse,” Servis said. “You get too excited, and the horse doesn’t do well, then you’ve got no fallback position.”

One day Servis called Isaacs and told him to temper his optimism.

“Can you back off some?” Servis said. “You’re killing me.”

Recovering from his accident, Smarty Jones got to the races at Philadelphia Park on Nov. 9. He won by almost eight lengths, and Roy Chapman was ready for the big time. Servis talked the owner into keeping the colt in Philadelphia for one more race.

Two weeks after his debut, Smarty Jones won a $56,000 stake for Pennsylvania-breds by 15 lengths and Chapman said: “You can’t tell me now that this isn’t a real good horse.”

Smarty Jones went to New York on Jan. 3 and won the Count Fleet Stakes by five lengths. Servis pitched the Arkansas route to the Kentucky Derby -- “a path of least resistance” -- and Chapman approved. Neither man knew then about Oaklawn Park’s $5-million bonus, which was offered to promote its 100th anniversary.

John and Sherry Servis, who have been married for 23 years, have sons aged 16 and 13. Sherry was on the same high school cheerleading squad with John’s sister, who introduced them.

Sherry Servis is the stable’s business manager, does the payroll and during the willy-nilly days of the Triple Crown has been booking her husband’s one-on-one interviews with the media. “I’m watching John live his dream,” she said.

Before the Kentucky Derby, Smarty Jones had never raced on Lasix, nor had he shown any sign of stress-induced bleeding, but Servis prescribed a light dosage of the anti-bleeding diuretic at Churchill Downs. He had remembered that Demons Begone, the favorite in the 1987 Derby, had run without Lasix and been unable to finish the race because he bled so badly.

“It was just a precaution,” Servis said. “I just didn’t want to leave that one excuse out there.”

Servis pays attention, but he can be a seat-of-the-pants trainer as well as a horseman of habit. After the Arkansas Derby, he moved Smarty Jones to Keeneland to prepare him for the Kentucky Derby, but when the colt seemed to be struggling over the Keeneland surface, he shipped him to Churchill Downs. Before the Preakness, he didn’t bring Smarty Jones to Pimlico until three days before the race, and this week, despite pressure from Belmont Park officials, Servis probably won’t send the horse to New York until Wednesday.

“I’ve had good luck coming in right on top of a race,” Servis said. “I shipped Jostle [in 2000] to Saratoga the night before the race, and people said I was crazy. But she won the Alabama up there.”

Jostle was the best horse Servis ever had before Smarty Jones, and a filly, according to the trainer’s father, who kept him from quitting as a burned-out horseman. At Belmont Park, Jostle also won the Coaching Club American Oaks, at the same 1 1/2 miles that Smarty Jones must conquer Saturday.

“He might have left the game,” Joe Servis said. “At least I got the feeling that he was thinking about doing that. But Jostle hyped his enthusiasm, and now Smarty Jones is doing the same thing.”

John Servis might have low-keyed the Chapmans, and he might have given Smarty Jones the softest path to the Kentucky Derby, but after the Arkansas Derby he knew what heights were potentially ahead. One day in Louisville, talking with a reporter he trusted, Servis said he’d level if the tape recorder was turned off.

That’s when Servis said: “In three races, they’re going to be talking about a colt who’s very, very special.”