RIP, Chief

By Bill Finley 

It was maybe 20 years ago, perhaps more, a quiet morning on the Belmont backstretch and Angel Cordero Jr. was telling me what he thought of various New York trainers. He had mostly nice things to say about them, recognizing that within the confines of this stable area worked the best and brightest among their profession. But he saved his greatest praise for just one person. 

“The best trainer here is Allen Jerkens,” he said. “A lot of these guys are very good, but no one can do what he does. His mind, the way he thinks, he’s on a different level than anyone else.” 

If you just looked at Jerkens’s record you might not agree. It’s not that he was unsuccessful or anywhere close to it, but he never won a Triple Crown or Breeders’ Cup race. He trained just one champion, Sky Beauty. But the record did not make the man. Cordero wasn’t wrong. Jerkens, who passed away Wednesday at age 85, was a genius. At least in New York, where he trained for nearly 65 years, he was a revered, almost mystical figure. He was “The Chief.” 

Jerkens was not an eloquent man and he seemed uncomfortable when anyone tried to sing his praises. He didn’t particularly like it when he was called “The Giant Killer,” the nickname he earned for beating, among others, Secretariat twice, Kelso three times and Buckpasser. So he never really explained how he did what he did. That was left up to others. 

Peter Berglar was the co-owner of Jerkens’ last Grade I winner Emma’s Encore, who won the Prioress at Saratoga in 2012. 

“From being around him and talking to him quite a bit he puts so much thought into details and how to train and how to figure out the horse,” Berglar told me in 2012. “He set up a training routine for her that has really kept Emma’s Encore happy. It’s unbelievable what he’s done. You listen to him and when he talks about all the little details, at first you think they aren’t that important, but for him everything is important. You put all those little things together and he gets results.” 

Here’s another way of putting it: when it came to horses he had a sixth sense that no one else had. The two–the man and the horse–spoke the same language. 

Jerkens received plenty of accolades along the way. He was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1975 at age 45, at the time the youngest person ever to receive such an honor. In 1973, the year he beat Secretariat in the Whitney and the Woodward, he received an Eclipse Award as the nation’s outstanding trainer. He won numerous training titles in New York. 

But he was never quite the star that he deserved to be. No one ever sent him to the yearling sales with a pocket full of money and he never trained for a sheikh or, really, anyone that would provide him with a pipeline of well-bred, perfectly conformed young horses that were meant to be stars. His best hope for a Kentucky Derby win came in 1978 with Sensitive Prince, who finished sixth behind Affirmed and Alydar. Jerkens never again came close. 

I have no idea if Jerkens aspired for something more, to train a string of top 3-year-olds or to have more powerful owners knocking on his door. But it wasn’t hard to see why Jerkens wasn’t exactly a fashionable choice among top owners. Geniuses aren’t always the most well-polished people, and that was Jerkens. He was always rumpled, a bit disheveled, a little gruff, anything but smooth. Think the polar opposite of Todd Pletcher and that was Jerkens. 

His most loyal owner was Jack Dreyfus of Hobeau Farm. Dreyfus, who died in 2009, was the founder of the Dreyfus Fund and was a wealthy man, but he had simple tastes when it came to horses. His horses were blue-collar types, not fashionably bred. He entrusted these horse to Jerkens and then asked him to turn them into overachievers. The Dreyfus-Jerkens combination beat Kelso with Beau Purple, Secretariat with Onion and Prove Out and Buckpasser with Handsome Boy. 

When Dreyfus died, Hobeau disbanded and Jerkens struggled like he never had before. He won just eight races in 2014 and three this year. I suppose people thought he was too old and that the game had passed him by. 

Not that it really mattered. His mark had been made. Those who knew him, those who watched him operate all those any years in New York, they knew. They knew that the man was brilliant. He was a unique figure in the history of horse racing, cut from a mold that was all his own. He will be missed and must be remembered as one of the greatest trainers ever.