Ron McAnally - Still pumping out Gr1 winners
Described as the poster boy for the geriatric set and like a fine wine we meet Ron McAnally, the trainer that will never give up. Ron McAnally has just celebrated his 82yrs old and still churning out Gr 1 winners and here we find out about how it all began in 1948 working as a groom, lifelong long friends and owners.
“Like fine wine…” flowed the words from emcee Ted Bassett at the annual Eclipse Awards Dinner to announce that John Henry had been named 1984 Horse of the Year at the advanced age of 9. The same words today could describe octogenarian Ron McAnally, John Henry’s Hall of Fame trainer and poster boy for the geriatric set. McAnally, who celebrated his 82nd birthday on July 11, ages gracefully while continuing to pump out Grade 1 stakes winners. Seated at a Clocker’s Corner table one morning in June near the end of the extended Santa Anita Park meet and looking forward to Del Mar, McAnally made only a few minor concessions to Father Time while continuing his lifelong love affair with his job.
“As long as I’m alive, that’s all I know how to do,” said the soft-spoken trainer of the regimen that keeps him young: showing up at the track early every morning seven days a week. “I don’t play golf, tennis, or cards.” McAnally admitted that he does not move as smoothly as he did when he was 41, largely the result of partial knee replacement surgery in 2012, but the anticipation of his next stakes win keeps a bounce in his step and a glint in his eye. “Dan Landers, my assistant since 1995, has been my right arm, especially since the knee surgery,” said McAnally, who conditions 15 horses at Santa Anita and another four at Pomona with Jose Miranda, an employee for 42 years. Landers walked by and alerted McAnally to the arrival of Miss Serendipity on the track. The 6-year-old Argentine-bred mare had given McAnally his most recent Grade 1 score with a 13-to-1 upset in the $300,000 Gamely Stakes on the Santa Anita turf on May 26. McAnally has not lost his touch with South American imports, who gave him a series of earlier career highlights and have provided most of his success the past two years.
In addition to Miss Serendipity, the McAnally stable also boasts Quick Casablanca, a 6-year-old Chilean-bred horse which two days before the Gamely missed winning the Grade 1 Charles Whittingham Stakes on grass by two necks in a three-way photo. In 2013, McAnally won the Grade 1 Frank Kilroe Mile with Suggestive Boy, a 6-year-old Argentine-bred who remains in training, and the Grade II San Juan Capistrano Stakes with Interaction, another Argentine-bred who was retired to stud in his native land. McAnally said the secret to Miss Serendipity was the same as most of the two dozen other South American imports he has turned into graded stakes winners: patience. “Miss Serendipity took longer than most,” explained McAnally of the mare who arrived last summer at Del Mar but did not make her U.S. debut until January at Santa Anita. “She had a skin rash that we used medicated shampoo on to clear up.”
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THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN - NORTH AMERICAN TRAINER - ISSUE 33
Author: Steve Schuelein
Arnold Kirkpatrick Column - Farewell Friends - John Henry and Tony Ryan
Among the myriad of adages that aficionados of the Thoroughbred game
have devised over the years in an attempt to explain our complex and
often perverse sport, one of the most enduring is "It's not the size of
the horse that’s important; it’s the size of the heart in the horse".
Arnold Kirkpatrick (01 December 2007 - Issue Number: 6 )
Among the myriad of adages that aficionados of the Thoroughbred game have devised over the years in an attempt to explain our complex and often perverse sport, one of the most enduring is: “It’s not the size of the horse that’s important; it’s the size of the heart in the horse.”
We lost two prime examples of that precept the first week of October, when John Henry was euthanized on October 8 due to the infirmities of age, and Tony Ryan died October 3 after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer that he fought for more than 18 months.
They led remarkably similar lives, these two undersized champions, each of them utilizing an excess of intelligence, determination and sheer grit—the basic elements of what we call heart in a horse—to rise from very humble beginnings and become a legend in his own time.
The story of John Henry is well known to most readers of Trainer. Small, underbred and badly conformed, he was a horse nobody wanted, having been sold for $1,100 as a weanling and, $2,200 as a yearling before being claimed for $25,000 as a three-year-old.
From there on the rest was history. In a time when horses are racing less and less, he raced through the age of nine, was Horse of the Year twice and retired as the richest Thoroughbred in history with earnings of just under $6.6-million. In 1985, he was retired to the Hall of Champions at the newly-formed Kentucky Horse Park, where he reigned for 22 years as “the people’s horse,” the major attraction among countless champions of all breeds who have been shown at the park over the years.
More than 500 people attended his memorial service on October 19, the truly extraordinary thing being that the majority of them had never seen him race—they had come to adore him as the shaggy, irascible old war horse he was, not the sleek, beautiful Thoroughbred so often on display at the Horse Park. Also incredible to me were the distances people traveled to honor him. The last time I saw him was in April this year when I took a couple from France to meet him while they were in Kentucky on their honeymoon, and when word got out that he was to be euthanized, people flew to Kentucky from as far away as California to pay their final respects. Once again, they were ordinary people, not those who had been associated with him in his illustrious racing career.
I am told a similar crowd was on hand October 14 when the family of Tony Ryan held a memorial service in Ireland to honor the Irish legend who had died within the previous two weeks at 71.
I had first encountered Tony one night early in the fall of 2001 when I answered the phone and a deep mellifluous voice said, “Mr. Kirkpatrick, this is Tony Ryan and I have been told by several people that you’re the only honest real estate agent in the state of Kentucky.”
“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” I replied with uncharacteristic modesty, “but I do take a great deal of pride in the number of my clients who wind up as long, fast friends, which may say a little something about my character.”
And, although he died too young and too soon in our relationship, I take great pride in the belief that I was a good friend of a great man.
When I looked him up on the day after our initial conversation, I found that Tony Ryan was a genuine Irish legend. Forced to drop out of school at 18 when his father, a railroad engineer, had died from a heart attack, he had gone to work for Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline, for 20 years before founding a highly-successful aircraft leasing company, Guinness Peat Aviation in 1975. In 1985, he formed Ryanair, which is now one of the most successful airlines in the world.
In the process, he educated himself beautifully and became a self-made billionaire who was ranked earlier this year by the Sunday Times as one of Ireland’s ten richest men. Unlike many very rich, self-made men, though, he had many interests outside his primary business, including the arts, viticulture, philanthropy, Thoroughbred racing and breeding, and, in particular, restoration of historic properties, which is why he purchased the historic but somewhat run down Castleton Farm in October of 2001 and began the extensive renovation that it has turned it into the showplace it is today, including a replica of 11thCentury Cashel Tower in Tipperary, which he took great delight in my describing as his having produced the largest erection in the history of Central Kentucky.
I think we dodged a bullet, Tony and I, when he got Castleton Lyons under contract and in several conversations he began hinting broadly that he would like for me to become a part of running the operation. I sensed then that it wouldn’t work and declined, saying, “Tony, I’d much rather be your friend than to work for you.”
As I learned later from numerous sources, he was very difficult to work for—a perfectionist with a fierce temper—but, in his defense, I think that he made no demands on his employees that he did not make on himself. But preternaturalambition and inspiration do not come often to mere mortals, and I, like many others, don’t believe I would have been able to keep up the pace that he set for himself and those around him.
Maybe Tony said it best of all in his choice of a quote from Bishop Richard Cumberland for his epitaph:
“It is better to wear out than to rust away.”
Arnold Kirkpatrick (01 December 2007 - Issue Number: 6 )