Jimmy Jerkens
/By Bill Heller
How do you measure patience...in months waiting on a talented horse...in years waiting to go out on your own?
How about perseverance? Overcoming the loss of key clients? Fighting through heart surgery and a hip replacement?
Trainer Jimmy Jerkens, who has enjoyed the most successful run in an already successful career the past five years, sees no other way to function. Rushing horses is anathema to him. So he does the right thing with his. “You’re forced to,” he said. “You have no choice.”
Giving into lost business or personal health issues would be unnatural to him. So he fought through both. “It’s all I know how to do,” he said. “I kept working and tried hard not to lose faith. It was hard not to. I figured I’d best buckle down.”
Green Light Go winning the Gr.2 Saratoga Special
He buckled down so well that he set personal highs in earnings in 2014, topping $4 million for the first time, and he did it again in 2015 and in 2017, when his horses earned more than $5.5 million. He’s already over $3 million this year thanks to his lightly-raced six-year-old Preservationist, owned by his long-time client Centennial Farm, and his precocious two-year-old Green Light Go, owned by Stronach Stables.
It’s hard to believe that Jerkens didn’t win a single stakes in 2011 and 2012 and went through 2011, 2012 and 2013 without a graded stakes victory. Or that his stable shrunk from 40 to 12.
Looking forward to Preservationist and Green Light Go’s next starts in high-profile Gr1 stakes at Belmont Park—Preservationist in the Jockey Club Gold Cup on Sept. 28 and Green Light Go in the Champagne the following Saturday— helped him get through hip replacement surgery on Sept. 23. A year earlier, he had heart surgery when stents were inserted.
Jimmy and Shirley Jerkens
Of course, his wife Shirley (they were high school sweethearts who grew apart then reconnected 25 years later) helped him get back on his feet and tried to prevent him from doing too much too soon, which of course, he tried to do.
“You want to do right for your owners,” Jerkens said. “You want to do things right. It’s seven days a week. There’s a lot of stress. That’s what’s hard about this business. There’s no downtime unless you make time for it.”
Shirley is a physical therapist for the New York State Department of Education, with a small private practice treating 8- to 18-year-old athletes. She is an accomplished rider and gallops horses for her husband every summer.
She knows and appreciates how hard he works: “He takes no vacations. He goes back to the barn three times a day. He sees how the horses are doing at that particular moment.”
Close your eyes and you can almost see his departed father—Hall of Fame trainer Allen Jerkens—nodding in approval that his two training sons, Steve, 63, and Jimmy, 60, learned the right way to take care of their horses and the commitment and work ethic that is required before success can follow.
“I’m very proud of Jimmy,” Steve said. “He puts everything into it and he deserves any success he gets. Like my father used to say, `You got to fight it hard. You got to keep at it.’”
It’s a family trait. Jimmy and Steve have two other siblings: Jimmy’s twin sister Julie, a school teacher and author of children’s books; and their older 67-year-old brother Alan, a recently retired sportscaster for the NBC affiliate in Tulsa, Okla. “They’re all a bunch of hard workers,” Shirley said.
Jimmy didn’t spend a lot of time figuring out where he wanted to work. He knew what he wanted to do with his life at the age of 11, when he began working weekends and summers with his father and older brother. “I was a barn rat,” he said. “It was unbelievable. We worked all day. Went to the track kitchen with the other help. We worked from dawn to dusk and never gave it a second thought.”
Steve said, “We were going to the barn with my father for as long as I can remember, on weekends and summers. Always to the barn. We’ve been doing it all our lives. At an early age, we learned to take care of the horses and we enjoyed it. We loved getting horses ready for the races. It was a great life. It kept us out of trouble.”
They’d play basketball on a wooden hoop at a small farm in Huntington, Long Island, where their father kept a couple horses. “My older brother [Alan] was a pretty good player,” Steve said. My father was very competitive. We’d have touch football games after feeding behind his barn at Belmont in the parking lot. That was very competitive. Stable hands from other outfits would show up and we’d choose sides. And we all played polo at West Hills Stable. I met my wife Joan at polo.”
The first time Shirley talked with Jimmy (they both went to Walt Whitman High School in Huntington—he was two years ahead of her) was at a polo farm where she had her horse stabled. “He was there with his dad and Steve,” Shirley said. “I was 13.” They dated for five years before going separate paths. “I wanted to get out and see the world,” she said.
Twenty-five years later, they bumped into each other at a polo event in Miami. “We just got talking,” Shirley said. “I found he was split up from his wife. I was getting divorced from my husband. That was it. We had dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab. We walked through the rain. It was romantic. From then on we’ve been together.”
They married and went on a delayed honeymoon to Napa Valley, arriving on Christmas Day in 2008. “We stayed for one week,” Jimmy said. “Believe it or not, it was a little bit of downtime. The horses had shipped to Florida. It was actually a good time to go.”
He had a good time during what may be the only real vacation he’s ever taken. Shirley testified, “He did relax,” knowing how unusual that is for him.
Shirley was surprised to see a side of Jimmy that he and his father shared: “Even with all their skills and their success, they’re very humble.”
Jimmy, though, idolized his father. “Growing up and seeing my father—he was at the pinnacle of his career. WOR-TV had horse racing on the weekends. He was on almost every weekend. I was so proud of him, seeing his horses run on television. You get so proud of it, you wanted to be a bigger part of it. My father had such devotion to his horses. He was my hero. I guess it just kind of rubbed off. I wanted him to be proud of me. I knew I wanted to do it.”
Steve saw his younger brother’s passion for horses at an early age. “He was always a student of the game,” Steve said. “He read books about breeding. He had a great memory about horses. Worked hard at it. Even galloped horses.”
One Saturday afternoon at Saratoga was one of the highlights of both Jimmy and Steve’s lives. They watched from the backstretch as their horse Onion stepped into the starting gate to tackle Secretariat in the 1973 Whitney Stakes. “That was like a fantasy,” Jimmy said. “We just didn’t know what to expect. He (Onion) was super sharp. He broke the track record four days earlier. We were hoping he’d get a check.”
But there was an obstacle for Steve and Jimmy. The toteboard blocked their view of part of the stretch. “We saw him in front, then we were blocked by the toteboard a little bit,” Steve said. “Sure enough, he was still in front. It was great—some thrill.”
Jimmy said, “We just couldn’t believe that. I’ll remember that for the rest of my life. We jumped up and down like idiots. We just beat one of the best horses to ever live with a homebred gelding. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
They celebrated…(ready for this?) By playing touch football!
Jimmy’s hoop days are long gone, but his passion for his horses continues unabated. And it served him well while working for his father and then finally, he went on his own in December 1997, two months before his 39th birthday. “It was my father’s idea,” Jimmy said. “I had just gotten divorced, and I was pretty down. He was trying to pull me out of a little funk. He said, `Why don’t you go out on your own?’ He had an owner, Peter Blum, who started my brother out. He said, `Take his six horses that I have. Maybe Mrs. DuPont will have a couple. Earl Mack possibly.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it sounds good.’ That’s what we did.”
Jimmy’s success was immediate. In his first full year on his own in 1998, he won 35 of 186 starts and his horses earned $1.4 million. Not bad for a 39-year-old rookie. He topped $1 million for 13 straight years before his stable took a mighty hit. Actually two hits.
With Jimmy as his trainer, Edward Evans’ Quality Road won the 2009 Gr2 Fountain of Youth and the Gr1 Florida Derby. That made Evans’ decision to take all his horses from Jimmy hard to fathom. Then another long-time client, Susan Moore, took her horses from him. “He went from 40 horses to 12,” Shirley said.