John Shirreffs - a great ambassador for the sport of horseracing | Trainer Magazine | European Trainer Article Index

Oct 14

Oct 14 John Shirreffs - a great ambassador for the sport of horseracing

ASTEADY stream of admirers maneuvers their way to the backstretch, hopeful for a glimpse at “the big horse.” Her accommodating trainer greets them all with a friendly smile. John Shirreffs wears the mantle of Zenyatta’s keeper graciously; there’s no grandstanding in this shedrow. Onlookers gather by the sawhorses that double as a saddlerack – high-withered Zenyatta’s tall-tree saddle is on there somewhere – and names of racing’s acclaimed greats float through the air, because a horse like Zenyatta brings that out in people. But two days before the Grade 1 Clement Hirsch Stakes, in which Shirreffs trainees Life is Sweet and Zenyatta will run as an uncoupled entry, he doesn’t concern himself with such talk. Getting to know the trainer during this very stressful time promised to be a crash course in Shirreffs-ology, an opportunity to observe the man when the world is on his shoulders. John Shirreffs: Raw and Uncensored. Instead, the world is sitting squarely on Atlas’ shoulders, and Shirreffs, well, he’s lounging in a hammock in his barn at Del Mar Racetrack. Steve Willard, champion Zenyatta’s exercise rider, provides the obvious caption: “We’re a very laid back barn here.” Nerves are kept to a minimum as the Hirsch, and five-year-old Zenyatta’s unbeaten record, looms. “You know how streaks are. They do end.” Shirreffs laughs. “It would be sad, but it happens.” As for the pressure, “I try not to think about it,” he says. “I learned a little trick a long time ago. I give myself a job: I’m putting the saddle on. So I never think about the race, I just think about putting the saddle on. I know it sounds silly, but…” As a boy of ten or 11, Kansas-born Shirreffs, who grew up on the East Coast, spent weekends in a Long Island livery stable owned by Irish brothers, “Uncle” Eddie and “Uncle” Hughie Gormley. He and other children mucked stalls in exchange for lunch. Rainy days cleaning tack around a pot-bellied stove while men, some from the track, played cards, drank tea and swapped stories, was just the kind of environment to draw in a young boy. “It was fun, a great atmosphere,” he says. The “uncles” gave Shirreffs riding lessons, and before long he was giving lessons himself, riding next to inexperienced city folk and teaching them how to post by moving them up and down with a hand on their elbow. Later, after the wannabe surfer had completed a stint in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and migrated to the board-friendly waves of California, he began working at a cattle spread after a cowboy named Jim Matthews offered him a job to teach an Appaloosa to jump for room, board and the princely sum of five dollars a week. One day, Shirreffs was riding to another farm and his horse became stuck in a mud bog up to his knees and hocks. “I’d never been there so I didn’t know that the ground was like,” he says. “Being from New York, how the hell would I know what ground looks like anyway?!” As he guided the horse out of the muck, Henry Freitas, manager of Loma Rica Ranch, promptly asked him to break his yearlings. Presumably, Freitas hadn’t seen Shirreffs ride the horse into the mud, or, if he had, says Shirreffs, “Well, he might have thought, ‘That’s my kind of person, not too smart!’” T HUS began John Shirreffs’ involvement with Thoroughbreds, when the dreams of a drifting surfer were preempted by a love of and talent for horses, and Freitas became his mentor. “He had the patience to teach me about racehorses. One of the stories that I like about Henry was when we were busy during breaking season and it was getting a little late, and I wasn’t sure if we had time to get all the sets out, so I said, ‘Henry, we’d better hurry up or we might not make the last set.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘John, we’re not going to rush this set. These horses are going to get this job done. Then we’ll go on to the next one.’ That always had a big impact on me. He was very right. We have to do each individual job correctly to do a good job.” Marty Wygod, for whom Shirreffs conditioned Grade 1 winner After Market and currently has 2009 Grade 1 winner Life is Sweet – coming into the Hirsch off a third in the Hollywood Gold Cup against males – stops by on Friday morning to watch his four-year-old filly school in the paddock and jog over the Polytrack. Before Isabel Bourez gets a leg up, Shirreffs stretches Life is Sweet’s limbs and tells her owner, “She loves this!” From a few feet away, Wygod shoots back, “I think you love it.” Shirreffs, says Wygod, “identifies with the horses. He understands their specific characteristics and he goes to a great degree of individualizing his training with them. He lives for it. I mean, the barn is his home. It’s a love and a passion for him, and it’s nice to see. He loves what he does to a degree that you can see it – he just loves it.” This morning, Shirreffs alternates viewing points as he escorts each set to the track, but wherever he goes, shouts of “Good luck!” follow him. “Oh, thank you,” he answers quietly each time, sounding a little surprised. He walks with a swinging gait, the vestige of an injury suffered the day after last Thanksgiving, when his pony wheeled beneath him and cracked his pelvis. This is the media-elusive John Shirreffs. He shies from the limelight whenever possible, but he’s neither aloof nor unapproachable. When strangers come up to shake his hand, he listens politely and shows them pictures on his iPhone. These are the moments he loves the most, seeing first-hand how much enjoyment people get from his horses. To be so unaffected by and immune to fame and glory for oneself is rare, but with Shirreffs, it’s genuine. The man who stays out of the winner’s circle so that he can watch his owners’ and friends’ reactions says, “I just enjoy looking at everybody being happy.” Shirreffs began training a small stable in 1978, with his first stakes winner, Jade Ring, on the California fair circuit in 1980. Too modest for self-promotion – even now, with all his success, he will only say, “I’ve been lucky” – Shirreffs left the training ranks and became assistant first to Brian Mayberry, then Bill Spawr, until 1994, when he took over a private stable for Ed Nahem and Marshall Naify’s 505 Farms, overseeing the successful return of Bertrando from stud duty, until Naify died in 2000. David Ingordo, the Central Kentucky horseman who assists numerous highprofile clients with their bloodstock interests and who spotted Zenyatta as a yearling, introduced Shirreffs to Jerry and Ann Moss’ racing manager – his mother, Dottie – in 2000, suggesting that Shirreffs receive some of the Mosses string. He had met Shirreffs in 1992, when Ingordo’s boss Bobby Frankel loaned the then-teenager as a driver to Dr. Helmuth Von Bluecher for the Hollywood meet. Ingordo says, “There were two things that impressed me about him: one, he actually talked to me, when a lot of the other trainers wouldn’t because they thought I was just looking in their barn to find out what they were doing, knowing that I was working for Bobby. But John was always nice to me. “And number two, I was impressed with the care he gave to his horses. When you’re with a vet you look at all the horses that are having problems, so for 60 days straight I would go to his barn and I saw a lot of what was going on, and I was always impressed how he handled the problems and how he used the vet for diagnosis, not just to train his horses. He was making his own decisions and would even come up with things that the vets didn’t at times, and he would be right. The quality of his horsemanship is one of his hallmarks to this day.” Shirreffs was signed on as trainer for the Mosses. It was a good match all around; so good, in fact, that the trainer married Dottie Ingordo in 2003. Many of Shirreffs’ top horses – such as Grade 1 winners Zenyatta, Giacomo, Tiago, and Tarlow – have run in the green-andpink silks of the Mosses. Jerry Moss says, “Aside from John’s love of the game he has a real appreciation for a beautiful horse. He takes endless pictures and he studies them and studies the horses all the time. ‘Now, that foot hits the ground that way…’ It’s just fascinating to watch him and to listen to what he says. He’s got a sense of humor that works, which is terribly important to have in a game like this. And yet,” concludes Moss, “he’s incredibly honest about things, so he’s a pleasure to work with as well as a pleasure to be around.” Ingordo-Shirreffs describes her husband similarly. “He likes the time between twelve and three because it’s quiet. He’ll just sit outside a horse’s stall for hours and observe them, try to figure out something that can help them. ‘What can I do to help this horse? What can I change?’ That’s the difference.” By choice, 64-year-old Shirreffs trains a relatively small stable. “I don’t like to lose track,” he explains. “I’m a little bit of a control freak. I like to know. I enjoy the horses, I enjoy the interaction. I wouldn’t be successful as a management person.” He laughs slowly. “I’d be in the mail room!” Not a management person, perhaps, but Shirreffs, who periodically posts works and snippets of barn life on YouTube, is certainly an ambassador. “I like to do the videos because it shows the backside,” he says, “which is something a lot of the fans don’t get to see. A race takes two minutes, or a minute and a half, and there’s so much more that goes on before the race.” Helmet-cam footage and audio posted on the “jonshfs05” channel on YouTube of Mike Smith breezing Zenyatta provides a rush few people beyond jockeys Mike Smith, David Flores and daily exercise Steve Willard will ever experience first-hand. The irony of Rachel Alexandra not traveling to Santa Anita for the 2009 Breeders’ Cup because of the synthetic surface is that, like that filly’s co-owner Jess Jackson, Shirreffs doesn’t care for the artificial footing. He cites an exodus of racehorses away from California, where all racetracks are comprised of synthetics: “Whether you like it or don’t like it, we’re losing horses. That’s never good for a racing program. Look at the horses that are leaving California; that to me is a real, true indication of how it is. If it’s great, people are coming here, because California has the best weather for horseracing.” He continues, “One type of injury has been replaced by another type of injury. Probably one of the most frustrating things for a trainer is there’s no early warning. You can go check your horses’ ankles every day, they feel good, and then one day the son of a gun is lame and you can’t fix it because it’s gone too far. “They probably spent a hundred million dollars around the whole country with synthetic tracks, wouldn’t you say? Close to it, or more. What happens if they would have put a hundred million dollars into the research on horse injuries: broken legs, laminitis, and they found some way to fix a horse’s leg, how to prevent laminitis? Not only would that help all the horses on the racetrack, but it would help every backyard horse around the world. It would have done so much more for the horses in general.” When in 2005 Giacomo’s Kentucky Derby win thrust Shirreffs into the spotlight – albeit reluctantly, just ask the NBC producer who had to beg him to participate in the winner’s circle presentation when Shirreffs just wanted to be with his horse – we learned about the horse smoothie. “Those were the days of bigger, stronger, faster. Those days are gone,” he says now. “On synthetic tracks, you cannot train them bigger, stronger, faster, because they can’t handle that workload on a synthetic track. Giacomo liked apple and carrot juice, so we started off with that, adding a little bit of protein. We didn’t want to add more bulk to his feed because they have small stomachs and there’s only so much feed you can get through, so we came up with this thing that would not only stimulate his appetite but would also add protein. You know, you feed them the same thing all the time and it gets real dull.” “Dull” is the antonym for feeding time around the Shirreffs barn, the whirlwind that is known as “mush mush time.” That’s “mush” as in “push,” not “rush.” “You guys ready?”, he calls out, his voice getting deeper. Someone – it’s all a blur – wheels out the feed cart, and Shirreffs puts on a pair of gloves and grabs a scoop in each hand. His help flits around at full speed, presenting him with feed tubs from every direction with an almost simultaneous chorus of “Aitcho morning” or “Starzig afternoon,” and he processes and shovels out each horse’s feed order from memory with lightning speed. “We’ve got a little New York deli going on here,” he jokes. When it’s time to move to the next point, he yells, “Mush mush! Let’s go!” as if this were the Iditarod. Shirreffs will even break out into a song, or at least a rhythmic chanting of “mush mush,” as the mood permits. The feeding routine is “a little motivational technique,” and it seems to work. “You’ve got to have fun when you can. You know how it is!” His horses eat “about seven” times a day – “We want to be unusual. I am from the 60s!” he reminds – and are fed from small rubber tubs on the ground. “I use them because they become a toy for them afterwards – they can flip them up, throw them around, kick them out.” Indeed, a Giant’s Causeway colt is holding his in his teeth, tossing his head in a scene straight out of Oliver Twist. It’s not uncommon to find a groom sitting beside a stall, handfeeding. “However it works best for the horse,” says Shirreffs. Another perk of being a horse in this barn is assistant trainer Michelle Jensen, who regularly performs massage therapy on them. In the office she shares with Shirreffs, a pink saddlecloth that belonged to Hollywood Story, who Jensen used to exercise – owner George Krikorian also had Grade 1 winner Starrer with Shirreffs – keeps dust off the computer. The Shirreffs stable area is still serene on Sunday, raceday. Between a set, Shirreffs settles into his hammock, by all appearances as relaxed as he was on Friday. “Hard at work!” says Steve Willard, “Take a picture!” Shirreffs covers his face with his omnipresent Mill Ridge hat and says, “No, really, it wasn’t me!” Six hours before post time for the 8th race, two employees of the California Horse Racing Board bring lawn chairs and settle in where one can keep an eye on Zenyatta in Stall 7, and the other on Life is Sweet in Stall 8. Welcome to the California version of the detention barn. Shirreffs is not a fan of the detention barn practice in other racing jurisdictions, where runners have to move to a strange barn for secure monitoring. “How can that be good for hours before a race, to have them all stirred up?” Shirreffs asks. “Is that crazy or what?” In their home stalls at Del Mar, Life is Sweet and Zenyatta are content and unconcerned. Most of the help disperses after training hours. Shirreffs remains. He pulls out his laptop and goes through photos, pausing often to tell a story. There’s Zenyatta, lying down in her stall as a two-year-old, with Gus Adair curled up beside her, massaging her tendons with aloe vera. There are pictures of Giacomo in his stall at Adena Springs, with Ann Moss scratching his ear through the bars. He seems especially proud of individual photos of his team who were integral in the development of Giacomo: each poses holding the Kentucky Derby trainer’s trophy. “Well, I think there’s not much thought,” he answers when prodded on his finest training accomplishment. “The Der-beee!” AS afternoon approaches, Shirreffs runs home for a quick change of clothes. When he returns, the only outward suggestion that the trainer is nervous is an occasional stroll, meandering in front of stalls, stopping to go in and run his hand down a leg here and there. Or, he’ll stand a distance across from Life is Sweet and Zenyatta, studying them. Life is Sweet dozes, while Zenyatta nibbles at the rope that normally holds a haynet outside her stall. When it’s time, both runners are prepped – Mario Espinoza on Zenyatta, with Giacomo’s old groom Frank Leal subbing for Espinoza on Life is Sweet – and leave for the receiving barn. Life is Sweet takes the lead; Shirreffs, ball cap pulled down tight to the top of his glasses like a protective mask, and his wife bring up the rear. Like her trainer, Zenyatta is a study in control: only her dance maneuver betrays her excitement to run. She circles around the arena with the other contenders without taking any notice of them. Shirreffs stands in the middle, focused on both of his horses. As the 7th race goes off, Zenyatta halts, ears pricked, mesmerized by the voice of Trevor Denman calling the race. No one rushes Zenyatta. (Nobody ever rushes Zenyatta.) She stands like a 17-hand bronze statue before taking Espinoza for another walk, pausing again halfway around, fascinated that there’s a race she’s not in. Espinoza brings her into the middle of the arena and Shirreffs goes over and talks to her. Zenyatta makes her entrance into the paddock and when she stops to survey the scene, the crowd breaks into a loud cheer. Behind her, Life is Sweet spooks, and Zenyatta throws her head and springs into motion. Espinoza leads her into the corner of the #10 saddling stall, staying at her head to keep her shielded from the commotion. With a steady hand, Shirreffs saddles #7 Life is Sweet, then Zenyatta: with the saddles on, his job is, as he says, done. Shirreffs spends a reflective moment in the empty 10 stall, and Willard tosses Mike Smith onto the black mare’s back. Amid a rush of scrambling to box seats and tables, Shirreffs slips away to watch the race alone at ground level. He’s not exactly incognito, but the fans afford him a little privacy as the Hirsch plays out on the track: under regular rider Garrett Gomez, second-choice Life is Sweet fails to fire, and behind slow fractions Zenyatta belatedly unleashes a furious frenzy to win by a head, without breaking a sweat. That her record remains perfect – at 12-for-12 – is no accident; like a grandmaster at chess, Shirreffs has calculated every move with precision. The trainer eases his cap up on his forehead, smiles, hugs friends, and masterfully avoids the overflowing winner’s circle. He’d like to follow his horses – Zenyatta goes to the testing barn, and Life is Sweet goes home – but attends a press conference instead. When he breaks free, he hurries to the barn to look them over and asks about what he missed in the last hour. Satisfied all is well, he speaks to some fans, then relieves Leal to handgraze Life is Sweet, gently chastising her as she strips bark away from a tree. After a few minutes, someone offers to take Life is Sweet from Shirreffs. “No, I’ve got her,” he says, relaxed, resting a hand on her withers and enjoying the quiet time with his horse. ■ (At press time, Zenyatta won the Grade 1 Lady's Secret Stakes at Oak Tree at Santa Anita to remain undefeated in 13 starts.)

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