David Ingordo

The day was one David Ingordo will never forget for inexplicable reasons. There was wisdom in what an old man told him, but it was the old man himself that made it have an impact, an old man who saw something in him and in his future.  “I was a little boy, and I was sitting on a tack trunk at the racetrack,” recalled Ingordo. The old man was Charlie Whittingham, offering not so much advice as instruction.

“‘Let me tell you something’…and he said it matter of factly and almost like a military order, and it stuck with me: ‘If you're around these horses, you learn something every day.’”

Sunday Silence and Pat Valenzuela winning the 1989 Kentucky Derby.

The value of the moment enhances the poignancy.  Not every little boy gets to sit at the proverbial feet of a racing giant. Whittingham today would marvel at what the little boy would achieve as a bloodstock professional, but maybe it wouldn’t surprise him. 

Many things have gone into what has made Ingordo, age 50, already a legend himself. Principal among them is being around people like Charlie Whittingham, Bobby Frankel, Brian and Jeanne Mayberry, and Johnny T.L. Jones.

Mornings for David Ingordo as a kid meant going out to the racetrack with his father, jockey agent Jerry Ingordo. “Afterward, if you were at Santa Anita, you went to this place called Coco’s, or if you were at Del Mar, you went to Bully’s.

“It would be Mel Stute with his brother Warren, Henry Moreno, Charlie Whittingham, and Wayne Hughes. On occasion Bobby Frankel might show up. I'd sit there and wouldn't say anything. That was back in the day you were taught to be seen and not heard. And I’m still a bit that way.”

That didn’t preclude listening.