Prominent Maryland Trainer, Dickie Small, Dies

   Richard “Dickie” Small, who won the 1994 Breeders’ Cup Classic with Concern, died Friday night after a battle with cancer. He was 68. 
   Small finished his career with 1,199 wins, including 36 graded stakes wins, and earned total of $38.9 million. He had three career Grade I scores, by Caesar’s Wish, Broad Brush and Concern. 
“Dickie was the consummate horsemen,” Maryland Jockey Club stakes coordinator Coley Blind, a friend of Small for more than 40 years, said. “Horses came first. He put everything into the horses. He knew everything about his horse right down to the pimples. He was a good man and very easy to deal with from the racing office perspective.” 
   Born in 1945, Small came from a family of trainers, his father, Doug, and uncle, Sid Watters, were both well known Maryland trainers. He attended the University of Delaware, where he played lacrosse, and served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret before launching his training career in 1974. 
   Small considered Caesar’s Wish the best horse he ever trained. The Maryland-bred won five stakes as a two-year-old and had three victories as a three-year old, including the GII Black Eyed Susan S. and the GI Mother Goose S. 
   He also conditioned Maryland’s all-time money winner Broad Brush (Ack Ack), who won 12 stakes in 27 career starts and retired at age four with nearly $2.7 million in career earnings. During his career Broad Brush captured three grade one victories in the Wood Memorial, Santa Anita H. and Suburban H.; as a three-year-old he finished third in both the GI Kentucky Derby and GI Preakness S. 
   “The best stories about Dickie involved Broad Brush when he would take him for a ride in the van before races to get him to relax,” added Blind. “He just drove him around the Beltway and brought him back to the barn and the horse performed.” 
Broad Brush sired Concern, with whom Small won the GII Arkansas Derby and the GI Breeders’ Cup Classicand placed third in 1994 Preakness. 
Small won a Maryland stakes race every year of his career, from 1974 to 2013, except one. 
   “That is an amazing statistic,” Blind said. “I remember the year he didn’t do it (2003). He was so disappointed that the streak was broken.” 
   Small was also credited for helping launch the careers of female riders Andrea Seefeldt, Jerilyn Brown, Rosie Napravnik and Forest Boyce. 
   “I had a conversation with Dickie last week via text and he spoke of looking forward to us catching up in the spring,” Napravnik said. “He stayed so positive all the way to the end and I admire him for that and in so many other ways. Dickie was a great horsemen and a great man. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had him in my life.”