A visitor to the Tarzana, Calif., home of Ron and Debbie McAnally immediately feels the presence of John Henry.
A painting of John Henry by the renowned equine artist Richard Stone Reeves rules over the living room. Memories of the 1981 and 1984 North American horse of the year dominate a conversation with the McAnallys. That steel-drivin’ horse was a favorite subject for Reeves, and he was the masterpiece of Ron McAnally’s thoroughbred training career.
“So many stories. I can’t remember all of them,” Ron said this week, though he makes as game an effort at age 92 as any turned in by John Henry in his unprecedented championship run at age 9.
It’s the season for John Henry memories. On Sept. 28, Santa Anita will run the annual John Henry Turf Championship, drawing the best grass-course horses on the West Coast to compete for a purse bumped up to $750,000 as part of the track’s California Crown program. This Sunday marks 40 years since John Henry and jockey Chris McCarron scored the horse’s last Grade I victory in the Turf Classic at Belmont Park, before a win in the inaugural Ballantine’s Scotch Classic Handicap at the Meadowlands in what turned out to be his final start.
John Henry’s career covered 83 races, 39 victories, 16 of those in Grade I stakes, including two Santa Anita Handicaps, wins with four Hall of Fame jockeys, and $6,591,860 in purses, an American earnings record long since eclipsed but still comparable to the best if adjusted for inflation.
Of all that glory, Ron McAnally most fondly remembers the beginning, when owners Sam and Dorothy Rubin sent the 4-year-old John Henry from New York to McAnally’s barn in California in 1979, and the end, when they took the retired gelding to the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Ky., where he lived until his death at age 32 in 2007.
Previous handlers of John Henry had tried to get the best out of the notoriously ornery horse by getting ornery right back at him, but McAnally saw a different way. McAnally, groom Jose Mercado and exercise rider Lewis Cenicola treated John Henry with patience. If he was reluctant to work out, Cenicola would let him stand and wait until he was ready.
“It’s just psychology,” McAnally said this week from a rocking chair. “I told Lewis, ‘Just take your time.’”
“Ron has such a sense for these beautiful animals,” said Debbie McAnally.
After a ligament injury in his left foreleg kept John Henry out of the first Breeders’ Cup in 1984 at Hollywood Park and ended his career, he was taken to the Kentucky Horse Park, his plane greeted by Kentucky Gov. Martha Layne Collins. By the time he arrived at the Horse Park, it was evening and other horses had been put away.
“When the groom took the shank off of him, he let out the biggest roar you’ve ever heard in your life,” Ron McAnally said. “In other words, ‘Look what I did, and you’re leaving me?!’ I said (to Horse Park staff), ‘Don’t you have another horse?’ So they got an old trotter and put him in the paddock next to (John Henry), and he calmed down.”
McAnally would visit, bringing sugar, apple and carrots, anytime he was in Lexington for a horse auction.
“After a couple of years, I went out there. He was at the other end of the paddock. I hollered, ‘John! John!’ He looked over at me and came running over, and I gave him the sugar,” McAnally said. “I tell you, horses occasionally are smart.”
McAnally would train three Racing Hall of Fame horses – John Henry and mares Bayakoa and Paseana – and be inducted into the Hall of Fame himself in 1990.
But the match between McAnally and John Henry was unique: McAnally, raised in an orphanage in Covington, Ky., getting his break working for his uncle, Reggie Cornell, trainer of Silky Sullivan. And John Henry, of unimpressive breeding (by Old Bob Bowers out of Once Double) and build, a loser of 10 races in a row when the Rubins bought him for $25,000 in 1978.
Both the trainer and the horse were “born on the other side of the tracks,” as Debbie McAnally put it.
Seventy years after earning his California trainer’s license, Ron McAnally has not retired, still gets up at 4 a.m., and goes to the track “once in a while.” His barn has shrunk from 80 or 90 horses at its peak to three active runners this year, all bred by the McAnallys and owned by the Deborah McAnally Trust.
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In April, they won races at Santa Anita with The Giants Candy, a 6-year-old gelding, in a $25,000 claiming race, and Charm Your World (at 27-1), a 3-year-old filly, in a maiden race. They’ve retired Charm Your World because of an injury that Debbie said is similar to John Henry’s. But they have Red Diamond, a 7-year-old mare, working toward her first race in eight months early in the Santa Anita meet that opens Friday, Sept. 27.
“It’s in my blood,” Ron McAnally said of horsemanship. “They’ll have to carry me out.”
In the McAnallys’ living room, John Henry looks down, an eternal reminder of how to do your thing the right way and do it until you can’t anymore.
Follow horse racing correspondent Kevin Modesti at Twitter.com/KevinModesti.