Fred Hooper - The Extraordinary Life of a Thoroughbred Legend
/This summer, author Bill Heller publishes his latest book, Fred Hooper, The Extraordinary Life of a Thoroughbred Legend. the rags-to-riches story of a true giant of the racing world.
Excerpts from the book are published below with the full book available to purchase exclusively via trainermagazine.com/hooper
Fred W. Hooper didn’t just survive 102 years—he lived them. Every single day until he died. As the keynote speaker at the 1981 Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame inductions in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on August 6, he shared part of a poem that he said reflected his philosophy of life. He was 83 years old at the time.
“I want to be thoroughly used when I leave this earth,” he said. “The harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life. Life is no brief candle to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have hold of at the moment and want to make burn as bright as I can before passing it on to future generations.”
On the morning of his last day in 2000, he called his trainer, former NFL cornerback Bill Cesare, to check about a filly they were going to race two days later. Fred’s third wife, Wanda, who was married to him for 30 years, called Bill back the next morning to tell him the sad news that Fred had passed.
He left behind a legacy of success in so many different fields that it is hard to fathom one human being doing so much. He was:
An eighth-grade dropout who became a substitute teacher at his former grammar school, then, decades later, funded a school, Hooper Academy—still thriving 50 years later in Montgomery, Ala.
A teenage horse swapper, a daredevil at the George State Fair, a barber, a boxer, a potato farmer, a carpenter, a steel worker, a timber trader, a county commissioner, a stockyard builder and an extremely successful cattle breeder.
A construction worker who got his first job with no previous experience and, really, no knowledge of the business, who quickly opened his own company and built roads, bridges, dams, airports and buildings all over the southeast and courses at racetracks around the country.
A Thoroughbred owner who won the rescheduled 1945 Kentucky Derby with the first Thoroughbred yearling he bought, Hoop Jr., named for his son. Later, he fired and rehired trainers as frequently as his friend, George Steinbrenner, went through managers of the New York Yankees. Fred’s favorite horse, three-time champion filly Susan’s Girl, went through seven trainers in her illustrious career: Jimmy Picou, John Russell, Charley “Chuck” Parke, Hall of Famer Tommy “TJ” Kelly, J.L. Newman, Robert Smith and Ross Fenstermaker. “He’d fire me, hire somebody else, then hire me back,” Ross said in 2020. Ross also trained Fred’s $3.4 million-earner, Champion Precisionist, for the bulk of his career.
A Thoroughbred innovator and pioneer—the first owner to successfully ship his horses cross-country on airplanes to contest stakes races, designing the stalls and manufacturing the adjustable ramp to load them on and off; the first to bring three jockeys from Panama to ride in the United States and all three became Hall of Famers: Braulio Baeza, Jorge Velasquez and Laffit Pincay Jr., who collectively won more than 20,000 races, and one of the first to buy horses in South America to race and breed in the U.S. Fred also weighed his horses regularly to monitor their health.
A Thoroughbred breeder of 115 stakes winners, literally creating his own pedigrees with his home-breds.
A Thoroughbred gambler whose speedy Olympia won a legendary match race with a Quarter Horse, earning the $50,000 winner-take-all pot and more than $90,000 he booked in side bets. Olympia was Fred’s first airplane shipper in 1949, returned to finish sixth as the favorite in the Kentucky Derby, then became an incredibly impactful sire.
A Thoroughbred industry leader who formed the national Thoroughbred Owners’ and Breeders Association and the Florida Thoroughbred Owners’ and Breeders’ Association, serving as president in both organizations.
Along the way, he and his horses received seven Eclipse Awards, Thoroughbred racing’s highest honor.
In a beautiful Blood-Horse story after Fred passed, trainer John Russell, also a fine writer, said, “No one ever loved racing more than Mr. Hooper, and certainly no one loved his horses more than this man.”
Fred showed his love every time he drove his Cadillac around his farm’s pastures to distribute carrots to his horses. He’d hide the carrots behind his back, and each horse had to nuzzle him to get the treat.
Fred was the patriarch of a large loving family, all of whom called him Big Daddy. To this day, everybody in Thoroughbred racing still calls him Mr. Hooper—a measure of the immense respect he still generates. “He’s just one of those iconic names in our sport,” Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith said. “When you got an opportunity to ride for a man like Mr. Hooper, you knew you had made it. You knew he was such a giant in the sport.”
How did one of 13 children born on a farm in Cleveland, Ga., accomplish all that? “One of his favorite lines was `Look ahead. Never look back,’” Wanda said. “He always looked forward.”
Sometimes he had no other choice. That made his journey even more remarkable.
“He was a very positive man,” his daughter, Betty Hooper Green, said. “He always said, `Look to the future. Don’t think about mistakes you made in the past. Look to the future and make things better.’”
Hall of Fame jockey Pat Day remembers being at trainer Bill Cesare’s barn the day after Fred’s two-year-old filly won a race at Arlington Park: “We were at the barn, and somebody came by and wanted to buy the filly. He said, `No, I want to keep her. I’m going to watch her babies run.’”
Pat said, “I was flabbergasted. He was maybe 92 or 93. Here’s a two-year-old filly who’s going to race as a three-year-old, then maybe as a four-year-old. Then she’s going to be bred and have a baby, who wouldn’t race for at least another two years. We’re talking six or seven years. I looked at him. He was such an optimist.”
Maybe it was because of his work ethic—one likely instilled by his father, struggling to keep food on the table for their ever-growing family. Regardless, Fred earned his success. Nothing was ever handed to him, so he relied on himself to pave his way through his long life. “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” Fred told Wanda.
He worked alone. He almost always owned his horses by himself, rarely in a partnership. In Jim Bolus’ book Remembering the Derby, Fred said, “I just feel that what I have I want to own myself. I just have always felt like that whatever I do; if it’s wrong, why then I’ll be to blame. I was in heavy construction, building roads and airports and dams over six of the southeastern states for 36 years, and I just didn’t want a partner, that’s all.”
His way with horses was to keep his barns meticulous. He paid attention to all the details, no matter how small. In a December 1, 1997 Sports Illustrated article celebrating Fred’s recent 100th birthday, Frank Lidz wrote of Fred and Wanda’s 912-acre spread in Ocala: “Throughout the estate, from breeding sheds to training gallops, all is immaculately groomed. Flowers abound. Grass is clipped. Stables are clean and freshly painted, masonry pointed and trim, tack in order, hay baled, manure invisible.”
That required attention to detail. “They would put up posts in the ground to build a fence on his farm,” Fred’s grandson, Buddy Green, said. “He would push against the post in a pick-up truck to make sure it didn’t move. He was that type of man. I respect that. He wanted it done right.”
Fred always felt right when he was with horses, especially his own. “Horses were his children,” Buddy’s mother, Betty Green said. “He would stop on his way into town at the vegetable stand, and he’d pick up carrots and take them to his horses. They would break the car antenna. They loved it, and they all would come.”
Fred’s impact on horse racing still resonates long after he passed.
When American Pharoah ended a 37-year Triple Crown drought by sweeping the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes in 2015, he carried bloodlines featuring five of Fred’s horses, Zetta Jet, Tri Jet, Crozier, Olympia and Hoop Jr. Justify, the 2018 undefeated Triple Crown Champion, and Ghostzapper, a superstar on the track and off as a stallion, both trace back to Tri Jet.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced Churchill Downs to reschedule the 2020 Kentucky Derby from the first Saturday of May to the first Saturday of September, a story in the Montgomery Independent documented the first and only other time the Derby was postponed: in 1945 when Hoop Jr. won.
At Gulfstream Park on January 23, 2021, Phipps Stable and Claiborne Farm’s five-year-old horse Performer won the 35th running of the $125,000 Gr3 Fred W. Hooper Stakes at one-mile on turf. The race was formally named the Tropical Park Handicap.
Later in 2021, another senior class graduated from Hooper Academy.
Not bad for an eighth-grade dropout in rural Georgia. Not bad at all.
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Many times, Fred would tell people his favorite horse was three-time Champion filly Susan’s Girl. And while Hoop Jr. and Precisionist also meant the world to him, Olympia may have been the most fascinating horse he ever owned.
A sub-headline on Anne Peters’ July 3rd, 2015, Blood-Horse pedigree analysis of Olympia quoted her story’s final sentence:
Without Olympia our world would be a much slower place
Yet for all the blazing speed he showed in races and passed on to his progeny, Olympia was also the sire of 1970 Steeplechase Champion Top Bid, who won the three-mile Temple Gwathmey Stakes by four lengths at Belmont Park during his champion season at the age of six.
Fred’s trainer Ivan Parke bred Olympia, a son of Heliopolis out of Miss Dolphin by Stimulus. Parke had trained Miss Dolphin, a stakes winner who set four track records after selling for just $700 as a yearling at Saratoga in 1936.
American Classic Pedigrees described Olympia as a “small, lengthy bay horse with a Roman nose. Olympia was a blocky, powerful sprinter type who ran to his looks.”
Fred didn’t want his trainer owning horses, so he purchased Olympia when he was one month old while keeping Parke as his trainer.
Olympia shined as a two-year-old immediately, winning his maiden debut at Keeneland April 16, 1948, by three lengths. He went on to win the Joliet Stakes at Washington Park by 3 ½ lengths, the Primer Stakes at Arlington Park by four lengths and the Breeders’ futurity at Keeneland by a neck. He finished second in the Bashford Manor at Churchill Downs, the Arlington Futurity, the George Woolf Memorial Stakes at Washington Park and in the Babylon Handicap and the Cowdin at Aqueduct. He finished his two-year-old season with four victories, six seconds and one third from 14 starts—almost all of them on the lead—earning $76,362.
As a three-year-old, he rocked the racing world.
Stella Moore, a Quarter Horse Champion owned by Quintas I. Roberts of Palatka, Fla., had beaten a speedy Thoroughbred named Fair Truckle in a California match race.
Roberts asked Fred if he’d like to have his Olympia take on Stella Moore in a match race. Fred had been the king of match races with Prince/Royal Prince and he agreed, suggesting they each put up $50,000 in a winner-take-all quarter-mile match race at Tropical Park Racetrack in Coral Gables, five miles north of Miami. Roberts countered with an offer of each owner betting $25,000, and Fred agreed. The match race would be held in between races at Tropical Park on January 5, 1949, matching freshly-turned three-year-old Thoroughbred colt Olympia against the now four-year-old Quarter Horse mare Stella More.
According to Jim Bolus in “Remembering the Derby,” Calumet Farm’s trainer Ben Jones told Ivan Parke that he was foolish to think Olympia could win. “One day, just two or three days before the match race was run, a groom from Calumet Farm’s barn came up there with $1,000 and said to Ivan Parke, 'We want to bet on the Quarter Horse,’” Fred told Bolus. “I said, ‘Ivan, let me have that money. That’s Ben Jones’ money.’ I told the groom, ‘Go back and tell Ben to send some more money up. I have some more left.’”
Almost all accounts of the match race put the figure Fred handled that fateful afternoon in side bets at $93,000.
In Frank Lidz’s 1997 story about Fred in Sports Illustrated, Fred said, “People thought I was crazy to let Olympia race a Quarter Horse at two furlongs. I knew I was crazy, all right, but Olympia was awfully fast, and I thought he could beat anybody.”
But showing great attention to detail, Fred measured the course. “The finish line was 73 feet short of a quarter-mile when the gate was put in the chute,” Fred told Ed Bowen in Legacies of the Turf, Volume 2. “I changed the finish and made them run the full quarter. I wasn’t going to take any of the worst of it.”
Pat Farrell, the Tropical Park Racing Secretary, was given the awesome responsibility of recording bets and making payoffs. “I never saw such action,” he told Chuck Tilley in his 1997 Florida Horse cover story on Fred.
Writing about Fred in his book Stories from Cot Campbell, Racing’s Most Interesting People, Cot Campbell said of Pat: “As he received money, he pushed it into the top right drawer of his desk and locked it. At post time, he then locked the door to the racing secretary’s office and rushed out to see the making of racing history.”
According to Fred, “Olympia and Stella Moore broke nearly even. At the eighth pole, Stella Moore was about two lengths in front, but when they got to the finish line, Olympia was there first.” Olympia had won by a head in :22 4/5.
“The finish was scary, but not nearly as scary as the settling of the bets,” Campbell continued in his book. “After pictures were taken and hands were shaken, a big crowd went back to Pat Farrell’s office for the settling-up ceremonies.
“With a big smile on his face, Pat withdrew his key from his pocket, held it up as a magician might have, and with a flourish inserted it into the lock on the drawer. He flung the drawer open for one and all to behold the absolute staggering cache of greenbacks, now belonging to Fred Hooper.
“The drawer was empty. Pat Farrell looked as if he would lose his lunch. His face was ashen, and he thrust his hand into the drawer as if he might be able to feel the money, even though he certainly could not see it! The atmosphere in the room was decidedly tense. Finally, Farrell jerked the drawer completely out of the desk. The bigger drawer beneath it was housing a truly splendid clump of greenbacks. There was the stash of cash. There was no back panel in the top drawer, so as Farrell hurriedly pushed the final batch of bills toward the back of the drawer, the dough had dropped out of sight into the bottom compartment.”
Fred collected, gave a $1,000 tip to Pat Farrell, and then, according to Lidz’s story in Sports Illustrated, came up with this classic: “I told Roberts that if he was game, I’d fetch another Thoroughbred from my stable.’ He said, `No thanks; I’ve got just enough money to get back home.’”
Hall of Fame trainer John Nerud, who would become close friends with Fred, shared this story with Chuck Tilley and Gene Plowden’s book This is Horse Racing: “After I looked at the match race, I went back to my barn and there was a fellow sitting on a bucket and crying; a big man he was, just sitting there crying. I went over and asked him what was the matter. He looked up at me and said, `I just lost an automobile agency today!’”
From then on, Olympia was the horse to beat in the Kentucky Derby. He wore the label of Derby favorite well, though the Daily Racing Form (then called the Morning Telegraph) didn’t include the match race in Olympia’s past performance lines, presumably because he had raced against a Quarter Horse.
Just two weeks after the match race, Olympia led most of the way before tiring to finish second by a half-length as the 2-5 favorite in the Hibiscus Stakes at Hialeah, January 19.
Fred then sent Olympia to California to continue his Derby preparation. In doing so, Fred pioneered what is commonplace today: flying Thoroughbreds cross-country to contest major stakes races around the country.
“Horses weren’t being flown around those days,” Fred told Ed Bowen in 1973. “Eastern Airlines leased me a DC-4, which was a nice plane, but I had fixed my own crates and everything and put the horse and the lead pony in. I fixed some canvas muzzles that had a screw in the bottom of them, so I could put two oxygen tanks in the plane, with about 30 feet of hose on each. The plane was not pressurized. Also, I fixed straps to go over their shoulders.
“I told Eastern that since I had to do everything to get the horses ready to fly, I should pick out my own pilot; so they said I could pick any pilot I wanted. I chose Dick Merrill, who was one of the greatest (and an ace pilot during World War II). We flew two horses out there, left them for 30 days for the races, then flew them back.”
There was a great picture accompanying Ed Bowen’s 1973 story in the Blood-Horse showing the interior of the plane with Fred standing next to Olympia while Dick Merrill was petting Olympia’s face and Ivan Parke looked on.
Soon Olympia and Colosal became frequent fliers. Eventually, other owners and trainers would catch up to the kid from Georgia who pioneered shipping horses by air, long before Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas was celebrated for flying horses coast-to-coast for stakes races. Joe Drape wrote in a January 6, 2013, story in the New York Times: “Back in the 1980s, when his stable was 250 strong and he flew horses all over to win the nation’s biggest races, Lukas earned the nickname `D. Wayne off the plane.’”
Fred did that three decades earlier.
But in 1949, not everyone thought flying horses on planes was a good idea. “He was one of the first ones to fly horses,” Fred’s nephew, Harold Campbell said. “He built an adjustable ramp for horses to use to walk into an airplane. When he first used it, it was one of the biggest things that happened in Montgomery. It was unreal. There were TVs, newspapers. One thing I will never forget is that the article on the front page of the newspaper said:
“Fred W. Hooper – A man that has more dollars than cents, flying horses”
Fred’s reaction? “He didn’t take to that very well,” Harold said. “Damn right. He didn’t let them get away with it. He gave them hell. He did a lot of first-time things. He always ended coming out of it smelling like roses.”
Olympia did his part. Showing zero jet lag—actually airplane lag—Olympia made his first start at seven furlongs as Parke tried stretching out his speed. He captured the San Felipe Stakes by five lengths as the even-money favorite February 5.
Exactly two weeks later, Olympia stretched out to a mile-and-an-eighth in the Santa Anita Derby. Sent off the 3-5 favorite, Olympia led most of the way, tiring late to finish second by a length and a half to Old Rockport.