Eric Kruljac eyeing up the cup

Words - ED GOLDEN

Joseph Eric Kruljac might have been a contemporary of Dick Butkus save for a twist of both fate and knee, so instead of perhaps joining the Hall of Fame linebacker in the National Football League circa 1970, Kruljac became a thoroughbred horse trainer.

It was an appropriate transition in waiting.

At 71, Kruljac (call him Eric) has enjoyed virtually every moment under the shed row, currently guiding the bountiful fortunes of a six-year-old gelding named The Chosen Vron, a California-bred son of Vronsky that has won 19 of 25 starts including streaks of eight and six in a row, highlighted by back-to-back Grade I wins against open company in the 2023 Bing Crosby Stakes and again last July 27 at Del Mar.

Only two of his 25 races were less than incipient, finishing fifth each time while uncharacteristically failing to make or challenge for the lead.

The current ultimate goal is the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Del Mar on Nov. 2. The speedy chestnut was fifth in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Santa Anita last year but has an affinity for Del Mar, with six wins from eight starts at the seaside oval. His career earnings stand at $1,571,678.

Favored at 1-2, The Chosen Vron lost by a neck to Doug O’Neill trainee Raging Torrent in the Grade II Pat O’Brien Stakes at Del Mar on Aug. 10, taking the lead by a head entering the stretch of the seven-furlong race but failing to overtake his stubborn rival who was on the rail and in receipt of seven pounds,125 to 118.

After the Pat O’Brien, Kruljac had considered running in the Grade II Santa Anita Sprint Championship at six furlongs on Sept. 29 before the Breeders’ Cup Sprint, but put the kibosh on that. Odds-on favorite Straight No Chaser won the Santa Anita Sprint by 6 ¼ lengths in impressive front-running fashion.

“We ran in two tough races (winning the Bing Crosby July 27 before his second in the Pat O’Brien) close together,” Kruljac said, “so he’s been just jogging and galloping since. We’ll go in fresh.

“You have to listen to your horse, especially early on in their career. We had to stop on him after we had run a couple times, then we gave him extended time off, and now we’re being paid for it in bushels, because we gave the horse a chance to get over his problems and mature.

“We didn’t ask him for a whole lot after we gave him a break and it worked out well because he just turned into a machine. A trainer has to stay at the ready when it comes to a horse’s health.

“You have to check them every day, because they’re like strawberries: they can spoil overnight.”

Fortunately for Team Kruljac, it is enjoying the fruits of The Chosen Vron’s labor, and how sweet it is.

“Every horse is different even in some minor ways,” Kruljac said. “Depending on how the horse is handling training, you might back off if he isn’t cleaning up his feed after a workout. Others might be very resilient and eat a hole in their feed tub after a stiff work or a tough race, whereas lesser doers, as we call them, might need more time and have to be treated differently.

“You can tell when a horse likes his feed and it agrees with him if they bury their head in the feed tub after a workout or a race. You’ve got to read the horse.

“The Vron likes what he’s doing. He eats a hole in the bottom of his feed tub every morning. It’s horses like this that make people want to be owners and trainers to come to the barn in the morning. A horse like the Vron is all I need. I just have to keep him together.”

The solicitous Kruljac owns 20 percent of The Chosen Vron along with Sondereker Racing, LLC (40 percent), Robert Fetkin and Richard Thornburgh (each also 20 percent).

“John (Sondereker) is a prince of a man and was at the (Keeneland) auction in Kentucky with me when we bought The Chosen One’s dam (Tiz Molly) as a yearling,” Kruljac said. “He worked the sale with one of my sons (Mack) and I, and that was the beginning of The Chosen Vron.

“Tiz Molly showed a lot of run at the sale, won her first couple outs, then hurt herself, so we formed a partnership, started breeding her and we hit gold. Her second foal wound up being The Chosen Vron.”

Sondereker, 81, principal owner of The Chosen Vron, has enjoyed his days in racing since he started innocuously at the age of 15, mucking stalls and walking hots at tracks near his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. “Nothing serious,” he said with a chuckle. “Just a dollar-an-hour job. I doubled that now at two bucks an hour collecting social security, so I’m doing a lot better.”

He's doing a lot better in no small part thanks to The Chosen Vron, an unanticipated success story that prospective young owners might enjoy should good fortune smile on them. 

John’s tip to them for full gratification: get in on the ground floor

“Mine is a familiar story,” said Sondereker, who grew up around horse racing. “My dad took me to the track when I was young, so I got the bug. I loved the horses, went to school, went into the Service and worked for Wells Fargo for 40 years. I was in finance, traveled for them extensively with operations all over the country and spent five years in Latin America. 

“I had a couple of cheap horses when we opened Prairie Meadows back in the late 80’s but I always liked to live on the West Coast and wanted to see what I could do in racing and have fun with it when I retired, because it was my passion. Now I live on the West Coast, have a home in (Las) Vegas and one in Del Mar where I spend the racing season.

“I’m a realist and I never expected to have a Grade I winner, since I never had one during my first two or three decades. I never expected one this late, and when I saw Vron right after he was born at Harris Ranch, I had no clue this cute, crooked-legged little horse would develop into what he has. He was still around his mom when he was a few weeks old and wouldn’t let me get near him.

“I couldn’t get close to him until he was taken to Arizona where they broke him, then he came back and it looked like he had some potential against California-breds. That was all good, and the next thing you know, we couldn’t stop him from being successful.

“Everything kind of gelled together and I’m blessed because we have an outstanding groom who works with him—he has a three-part Mexican name but I just call him Herlindo. He’s been with Vron since he was a baby and is a major part of the horse’s success.

“Vron’s regular rider, Hector Berrios, stops at the barn almost every morning to see him, so it’s a caring team, but there’s a lot of luck involved, too. Everything came together and I’m just happy to sit on the sidelines.”

Sondereker offers this advice for rookie horse owners: “What makes it fun for me is for the most part I have learned to buy my own horses at the sales, although I haven’t bought any in the last year as I’m getting older and cutting back. I’ve got ‘Vron’ and that’s enough for me now, but the sales aspect of it means so much.

“When you’re confident enough to buy your own horses at a grassroots level, even though there’s more disappointment than there is success, you’re into the whole process. 

“Otherwise, you’re outside of that experience, pay bills and don’t know what’s going on. It’s fun to go to the races when one of your horses is running, but it’s a lot more fun if you bought it and are in it from the start, although it takes some capital to do that, obviously.

“That’s what has kept me in the game, going to the sales and learning my way around. Eric taught me a lot about buying horses. I didn’t understand it well until I started going to Keeneland with Eric.

“Early on I thought I knew it all, and you can make a lot of mistakes, but it’s really a treat to go to a place like Keeneland or Saratoga for their sales. You don’t have to buy anything, because mostly when I go, we’re the underbidder.

“That’s my nickname. I answer to The Underbidder,” Sondereker said, laughing. “But seriously, you get involved in the sport, meet wonderful people, most very cordial. They don’t care if you have a budget of $60,000 or five million, they treat you right. It becomes a passion for you.”

That’s what The Chosen Vron has become for his entire team.

“The horse is just all class, at the barn and on the race track,” Kruljac said. “He’s a gelding, so that reduced some of his heat. He’s quiet until you put a saddle and a bridle on him. He thoroughly relishes training and running in races. Around the barn we just call him Vron, because he’s Vron of a kind.”

The Chosen Vron’s partner in his last 17 races has been Berrios, a 37-year-old native of Chile who began riding at 17 and became a star in his native country, coming to California for the first time in 2011. He has ridden the gallant gelding in his last 17 races, winning 14.

“He breezes him, too, whenever we breeze,” Kruljac said. “Hector’s like a lot of the South American riders. They’re all true horsemen. They’re not just jockeys. They were born to sit on the backs of horses.”

Kruljac had a football scholarship at Arizona State when he suffered a knee injury, dashing hopes of blitzing the likes of the late, great Walter Payton. “I was basically just a target after I got hurt,” said Kruljac, who was 6’1 and 237 pounds in his sophomore year. He’s a svelte 210 today.

“I still walk with a limp to this day,” he said. “As time goes on, old injuries come back and haunt you.

“I had a massive tear in my meniscus. It was bad, but I was still practicing,” continued Kruljac, who left college a semester early and started a private investigators agency in Phoenix, expanding it to 10 before entering racing as an owner, with his brother, Edward, training. Eric sold his business and started his own stable in the early 1990s.

Before attending Arizona State, he spent winters in Phoenix and summers in California as a youngster. His grandfather, Walter Markham, a cattle rancher and a horse owner, employed eventual Hall of Fame member Buster Millerick as his trainer. Kruljac caught the bug and never lost it.

Millerick began training in his twenties, and shortly after Santa Anita opened in 1934, was hired to condition horses for Charles Howard and would work under head trainer Tom Smith when the stable in 1936 acquired Seabiscuit, who would become a global phenomenon.

“Millerick was a very good young trainer,” Laura Hillenbrand wrote in her 2001 multiple award-winning book ‘Seabiscuit, An American Legend’, “but for his new yearlings and the hundred-grander-caliber horses he planned to have soon, Howard wanted the best. In 1935, he went looking for him.”

That man would be Seabiscuit’s taciturn trainer, Tom Smith.

Millerick, reticent bordering on being irascible in public, trained Hall of Fame gelding Native Diver, winner of 34 stakes from two through eight, including three straight editions of the Hollywood Gold Cup. He was the first California-bred to earn $1 million, but the recalcitrant Millerick avoided the limelight like a plague. Louis K. Shapiro, a Millerick client, is quoted as saying, “You never saw him in a winner’s circle photograph.”

“My grandfather used him as a trainer and they were really good friends,” Eric said. “Buster didn’t like owners but he loved my grandfather because he was a cattleman and also a produce broker. He was very outgoing to me and would always give us his box for the races, but he was very tough around the barn.

“An owner would come in without making an appointment and he’d tell him to get the hell out. He’d send his dog, Buttermilk, after him.”

Meanwhile, Joseph Eric Kruljac, one of racing’s good guys, soldiers on, remaining a sedulous stone in racing’s floundering foundation.

One might say The Chosen Vron is Kruljac’s Seabiscuit.

“I’m on the last leg now,” he said philosophically. “The Chosen Vron has just kept me going. It’s so unusual to have a horse like this allowing me to experience all these great things in the twilight of my career. It’s just a blessing. It defies description. I think he’s going to have a good shot in the Breeders’ Cup

“With the exception of this horse, I probably would have bowed out a year or two ago. You take the worst of the game and hopefully live with what’s left of it.

“I’m basically down to one horse, The Chosen Vron, with seven horses total at Los Alamitos which I’m using as a starting point for them, but only three or four are racing right now. 

“I’m way down on stock. This might be my last hurrah, but I’m thoroughly enjoying having a horse like this in the barn.

“For me, I just try to make the horses as comfortable and sharp as we can,” Kruljac said when asked about his training philosophy. “When you see they don’t clean up (their feed) or drink their water, little things that are just different, it’s a signal.

“Once you’ve had a horse for a period of time, you can read them when they might be off their feed a bit or have sore muscles. For great, big, powerful things they sure change at a moment’s notice.”

Eric has four children, one of whom, Ian, 36, is also a trainer currently supervising 12 horses in Southern California. Eric also has two other children, Chance and Meghan, in addition to Mack and Ian.

“Ian’s career started with a bang,” Eric recalled. “The first horse he  ever trained won the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint at Santa Anita in 2016 when he was just 28.”

That was Finest City, a four-year-old daughter of City Zip sent off at 8-1. It was one of only two wins for Ian that year.

Obviously, Ian was delighted with the victory, but was mature enough not to fully bask in its glory.

“I realize it takes a small army to succeed; it wasn’t just about me,” Ian said. “To win, everything has to go right, including the timing. But the hardest part is finding the horse. Then when you do, your entire staff has to be moving in the right direction.” 

Both father and son adhere to the adage ‘patience Is a virtue’ in developing successful thoroughbreds.

“One of the most important things my dad taught me was give a horse time when needed,” Ian said. “That’s what I did with Finest City. She didn’t make the races as a two-year-old but it certainly paid off when she won the Breeders’ Cup.

“We just have to do what’s right by the horse and hopefully racing will benefit in the future. These horses were bred to run and if they’re treated right, they will, and that’s what racing needs.

“My Dad’s my best friend,” Ian continued, speaking on behalf of the entire brood. “He’s a great father to all his kids. I learned a lot from him on how to take care of horses and about life.

“He’s a great man.”