IN A CULTURE that’s maniacally obsessed with precocity and the wunderkind, Saturday’s Whitney Invitational was a relief for the journeyman, a true testament to persistence and endurance, to consistent good work. And this has little to nothing to do with the horse.
Rick Violette, the 65-year-old trainer who conditioned Diversify to his second G1, noted that the five-year-old gelding might be the best horse he’s ever trained. Sixty-five years old and Diversify, a New York-bred, is the best one to come along.
“I guess he’s got to be the best horse I’ve ever trained,” Violette said in a NYRA release. “We’ve had some very, very talented horses. Upstart was a very talented horse, but he never won a Grade 1. Read the Footnotes never won a Grade 1 and was a really, really talented horse. Between the talent and putting up the performances, he’s certainly at the top of the list. He’s a scary good horse.”
This isn’t to say Violette hasn’t trained talented colts and fillies. There was Dream Rush, an electric filly who won the Test and Prioress in 2007. The aforementioned Read the Footnotes, a horse who ran in the Kentucky Derby in 2004 (his final race), was a talented one by Violette’s keen eye. Same goes for Upstart.
Let’s take a look at what it means to grind. Since training in 1977, Violette has amassed career earnings of $44,289,803. His trainer 10 percent of that is $4,428,980. Divide that by 41 years is $109,023 of average salary and if you look at Equibase, there were some fallow years. If you factor in self-employment and taxes and the fact that Violette spent much of his career in New York (where taxes categorically suck), and working 365 days a damn year for over 40 years and you realize that this is quite the thankless profession among thankless professions.
No matter how you slice that banana, you gotta be in this for the love of it all.
Let’s take a peek at the trainer du jour, Chad Brown, whose winning races at Saratoga at a clip of more than a race a day, 18 wins through 16 days of racing (as of this writing). Unless you’re Team Brown, this is so disheartening.
Steve Asmussen has 11 wins so far. Todd Pletcher has 10. Bill Mott has nine. Prior to the Brown v. Pletcher Thunderdome battles of the past five years or so, nine wins would be putting a trainer right in the mix for leading trainer. What Brown is doing, especially at Saratoga, is Tiger Woodsian. Asmussen is winning at a 31 percent clip, ITM 61 percent of the time and he’s still seven wins behind Brown.
I mean this is like Barry Bonds in 2002. Anything thrown in the vicinity of home plate ended up in San Francisco Bay.
What can you do?
The answer, and pardon the pun, is run your own race. It’s all any of us can do in this mess—and it is a mess. Just an ugly beautiful life spent climbing up a sheer rock cliff in the rain with a panther hanging off your pant cuff.
That’s the life of the grinder, the trainer, the writer, the comedian, the painter, the entrepreneur, the man or woman who would rather smile with premature crow’s feet than see their soul drain into another sales pitch for State Farm’s universal life insurance plan.
How can these trainers wake up at 4 a.m., organize the training for dozens of horses, suit up for the races, go to the sales, hob-nob with deep-pocketed clients/owners, go out to dinner, schmooze until 10 or 11 post meridian, AND GET UP AT 4 A.M. THE NEXT DAY AND DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN. To quote the men from the movie Fury, it’s the best job they ever had. Nick Zito once told me, “It’s all I know!” And, for the willing, it sure as hell beats the desk and working for the weekend.
I think of how energizing it must be to be the master of your own destiny, more or less. Like a trainer I know, he said the cream rises to the top. It’s a trite expression, but it’s tried and true (another cliché, pardon). Some cream takes longer to separate than others.
Yes, you have a Brown who seemed anointed. Same with Pletcher. But then you see guys like Zito. Tom Albertrani. Linda Rice. Calvin Borel. Art Sherman. The list is long. Horsemen and women who honed their craft in relative obscurity for the longest of times and when they found their lightning, they grabbed hold of it. Ten, 20, 30-year overnight successes!
Violette’s training victory in the Whitney should not only be lauded as a great achievement on one particular day, but also be celebrated and heralded for the late bloomer, the man or woman who gutted it out one more day.
I’m reminded of a quote from the ruthless, though no less inspiring, Thomas Edison, who once said, “The greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
I like that. And Violette illustrates it perfectly, furlong by furlong.
Brendan O’Meara is the author of Six Weeks in Saratoga. He also hosts The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Follow him on Twitter @BrendanOMeara.
