A horseman’s guide to being a better racehorse owner

by David Mattia

There is a particular moment in harness racing when a good owner can begin to go bad. It usually doesn’t happen after a horse wins. Nobody is looking for a new trainer when the horse is winning races. Everybody feels a little smarter than they actually are. The calls from the owner are friendly. Everybody has a melodious theory about the horse’s future, and the trainer is generally considered a pretty damn good horseman.

Oh, and about the phone calls to the trainer: Remember that the trainer has both a business and a personal life. Yes, the trainer owes you a call now and then, but think about what a lawyer does when you call him about your case.

Anyway, the trouble usually starts when the horse stops winning, although that isn’t always the trigger. It may take a few starts or a few months. The horse that looked like a bargain when the owner bought him suddenly looks like a bad investment, and the trainer who seemed to know exactly what he was doing six months earlier suddenly doesn’t seem so brilliant. Maybe the owner doesn’t like the driver. Maybe the vet bills are getting too high. It could be anything.

Often, and this is the most sickening part, it is another trainer telling the owner that things would be better if the horse were in another barn… his.

The owner, feeling more and more comfortable in the barn area, starts asking questions of other horsemen because he has discovered that he can. He starts having conversations he probably wouldn’t have if his trainer were standing beside him. He hears that somebody else’s horse is going well and begins wondering whether that trainer might get more out of his horse.

Pretty soon he isn’t simply asking questions. He’s shopping.

There is nothing wrong with an owner wanting to make a change. The horse belongs to the owner, the owner pays the bills, hopefully, and the owner has every right to decide who trains the horse. But there is a considerable difference between making a legitimate business decision and quietly pimping out your ownership. That difference matters because horsemen talk. Very few things travel faster around a backstretch than the news that somebody is looking for a new barn.

I spent roughly 30 years running a public stable, and over those years I had owners from just about every corner of the financial and personality spectrum. Some could afford to own racehorses comfortably. Some could afford it only when everything went right. Some paid their bills without ever making you wonder whether the check was coming, while others could turn a month’s training bill into a negotiation worthy of Morty’s Used Car Lot in Van Nuys, CA.

That’s part of the business. You learn to live with it.

But you also learn something else: Winning changes people. More accurately, losing changes people.

Most new owners start out with a perfectly reasonable understanding of what they are getting into. They know the horse costs money every day whether he wins or loses. They understand that the training bill is only one part of the nut. There is stall rent, shoeing, veterinary work, equipment, transportation, racing expenses, and a seemingly endless collection of fees that have a remarkable ability to appear whenever you think you’ve finally paid the last bill.

The trainer gets a daily rate, and in most cases is also entitled to five per cent of the horse’s earnings. The owner carries the financial load. The trainer carries the horse.

That’s supposed to be a partnership.

And when both sides understand what that word actually means, it can be one of the best relationships in racing.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Maybe what harness racing needs is an owner’s rulebook. Not an official rulebook. The USTA has enough rules already. I’m talking about a common-sense list of things an owner should understand before he starts moving horses from one barn to another because the horse hasn’t won in six weeks.

DON’T CONFUSE LOSING WITH INCOMPETENCE

That sounds obvious until you’ve been around this business long enough to watch an owner fall in love with a trainer after three consecutive wins and then decide that same trainer couldn’t train a chicken after three consecutive losses.

Racing doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the horse simply isn’t good enough. Sometimes he draws badly. Sometimes he gets stuck behind a dead piece. Sometimes he gets used too hard in the early going. Sometimes the trip sucks. Sometimes another horse is simply better. And sometimes, yes, the trainer has made a mistake.

The trick is knowing the difference.

A trainer is not a magician. A trainer cannot manufacture talent that isn’t there, and no amount of screaming will change that. For every Fight The Foe, there are hundreds of Armbro Cockroach also-rans.

KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

I learned something about owners from the other side of the fence when I left the business.

I had never worked for anybody, not really. I had been around horses since I was very young and had done the usual stable-hand work while learning, including working for one thoroughly detestable character whom I somehow liked and who seemed to like me. It is amazing how quickly you can learn about horses from a monster. Once I became a trainer, however, I trained my own horses. I built my own public stable. I had owners. I had some very nice horses. Basically, I had enough success as a young trainer that people knew who I was.

Then, about 14 years ago, I walked away from the horse business.

I went into show business instead. In fact, I have remained there to some extent, but within two years, I came back. This time, however, I decided to work for somebody else.

Although I wasn’t exactly Mickey Mantle looking for a job as a batboy, I was considerably overqualified for the kind of job I was seeking. I just needed a rest, and I wanted to get back around horses. Quickly, I found somebody I liked, so I went to work as an employee.

I discovered something rather strange. I worked harder for an employer than I had ever worked for myself. Why? Because I respect good trainers and the work they do for owners.

My employer had one principal client, an older owner who could have been my owner years earlier, but I didn’t bite. In hindsight, I dodged a rubber bullet. Not because the owner was a bad person. The owner wasn’t a bad guy at all, and I might have done very well for the owner, but there was a “don’t go there” vibe in my tired head. My tolerance level was zero.

Anyway, while I was working at my new job, this owner did almost nothing but talk to me about the trainer. I became an unwilling confidante.

“Why was I billed for this, Dave?”

“What would you do if your horse was doing this, Dave?”

“Why doesn’t my trainer do this or that?”

Every day there was something.

I repeatedly told the owner the same thing: “Don’t badmouth your trainer to me. I like your trainer. Your trainer works hard. You’re a pain in the ass.”

I wasn’t trying to be coarse. I was trying to establish a boundary. I had been a trainer with owners of my own for decades, so I knew exactly what was happening. An owner who spends his time moaning to one trainer is eventually going to moan to the wrong guy.

Anyway, one day the owner cornered me while I was cleaning a stall.

Yes, me. Cleaning a stall of all things. I suck at cleaning stalls.

The owner told me the plan was to take all the horses away from the trainer and give them to somebody else. The trainer being considered was somebody I didn’t know, but the numbers on paper for the new prospect were, at best, mediocre.

Without giving it a second thought I said, “If you take your horses out of this barn, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your career as an owner.”

Even if I had agreed with half of what the owner was saying, I wouldn’t have let him know. Unless I believed the horses were being mistreated or abused, I wouldn’t steal an owner or spite one. That kind of behavior comes full circle to bite you in the butt.

I was in a position to do something that happens all the time in this business. I could have encouraged the owner. I could have agreed with every complaint. I could have quietly positioned myself as the better horseman, cultivated the dissatisfaction and eventually benefited from it.

I didn’t.

I knew the difference between being offered an opportunity and behaving like a thief, and I respect other trainers under most circumstances.

There is a right way to handle a disagreement with your trainer. You talk to the trainer. You don’t wander around the backstretch auditioning replacements while the person currently responsible for your horses is standing 10 feet away.

The owner in my story was talking to people who had something to gain from taking the horses. The owner-stealing scenario is as old as Ben-Hur. It has probably been happening since the first horseman discovered that somebody else’s owner had money and wasn’t completely happy with the current trainer.

There are plenty of people working around racehorses who would be delighted to tell an unhappy owner exactly what he wants to hear if they think it might result in a horse coming into their barn. That doesn’t mean every groom or assistant trainer is dishonest, and it certainly doesn’t mean that everyone working for somebody else is there because he lacks the ability to train horses.

There are only so many owners, only so many horses and only so many public stables. A man can be a damn good horseman and spend his working life cleaning stalls because there aren’t enough owners to give everybody a barn of his own. Another man may have mediocre statistics and still wind up with horses because of an owner, a connection, a family name, money behind the operation or some other advantage that has nothing to do with whether the person can actually get a horse to the races.

So when an owner is unhappy and starts talking to every trainer within earshot, remember that the people listening aren’t necessarily disinterested observers. Some of them are highly-motivated manipulators.

The owner in this story eventually stayed with the trainer and continued to achieve roughly the same amount of moderate success. There was no miraculous transformation waiting in another barn.

But the owner did make another mistake, and this one had nothing to do with the trainer.

The owner thought he knew more than the trainer about picking horses out of yearling sales.

He didn’t.

Picking yearlings is a skill. It is also an art, and even people who have spent their entire lives doing it get plenty wrong. You can stand at a sale, look at a yearling, watch him walk, examine his conformation and breeding, study his attitude and athleticism, and convince yourself you’ve found the next great horse.

You can almost always be completely wrong.

Like they say, “That’s horse racing.” Oh, how I hate that phrase. It oversimplifies some pretty horrible stuff.

A good owner doesn’t have to know everything about the horse business. In fact, one of the characteristics of a good owner is knowing where his checkbook ends and his trainer’s expertise begins.

A good owner knows how much money can be lost without destroying the household. A good owner knows what questions to ask his trainer before he asks anyone else. A good owner knows when to listen. And occasionally, a very good owner knows when to shut up and let the horseman make the horseman’s decision.

That doesn’t mean the trainer is always right.

It means somebody has to be allowed to do the job that person was hired to do.

A FEW BAD OWNER QUICKIES

Over 30 years, I have had enough owners to learn that there are probably as many ways to become a bad owner as there are ways to lose a race. In truth, I have only had three owners I truly liked. One was on a budget, but brilliant, and his inexpensive horses did well for me. He treated me with fatherly respect, and his death affected me deeply. The other was a very wealthy New York City guy who knows who he is, and we never had a harsh word because he knows I would never cheat him and I know he would never cheat me. The third is a doctor who is far too nice to be involved with harness racing.

First and foremost, however, a good owner is not a heavy gambler or bettor. It’s fine to bet a few dollars here and there. Why not have a little fun? But some owners exist only to bet. It’s never a good recipe. What’s even worse is when they win big and tell you they didn’t get the bet in.

Then there was the owner who wanted to know why every expense existed, as though the veterinarian, farrier, farm manager, driver, and racetrack had all gathered in a secret room and decided to rob the owner. Everything was a conspiracy.

How about the owner who wanted a deal on everything. He found out that his open pacer was being towed four miles per day. So, rather than pay the trainer, me, he trailered the horse to the training farm every morning. He then sat on the shaft and towed his own horse to save the money, until he broke the jog cart and didn’t offer to replace it. The horse was earning, on average, about $7,000 per week.

Let’s not forget the loon who I suspected was jealous of his own horses. If his horse won, he would be dejected. If he finished third, he’d be elated. Once I caught him measuring a horse’s stride on a video replay screen with a tape measure. The next day he told me to let the hobbles out three inches. He’d measured it. The horse broke leaving the gate.

There was the owner who “demanded a blood test” every time one of his horses got beat, the owner who wanted to know why the horse wasn’t winning and then objected when the trainer suggested spending money to find out why, and the owner who became a completely different person after one bad drive.

I could go on for a thousand pages, but let’s aim the next one at both owners and trainers.

TRY NOT TO MAKE DEALS

This applies particularly to trainers, but owners need to understand it too.

You cannot build a stable by living on deals. Do you think Stanley Dancer made deals on overnight racehorses? Heck no. He sent the owners their full bill. He may have even charged them for the envelope and the price of the stamp needed to mail it.

When trainers make concessions to owners simply to get horses into the barn, they begin to diminish the value of their own expertise, assuming they have any to begin with. Some deals are worth making. A good horse can justify an unusual arrangement, and there are circumstances in which sharing the upside makes perfect sense, but almost always, deals are a bad sign.

A trainer should never make a deal merely because there is an empty stall that needs to be filled, and an owner should refrain from wanting deals. If you cannot afford the full freight — and I know that things are tight — just sell the horse. Let someone else deal with the deal.

The trainer isn’t necessarily looking for a warm body in the stall. The trainer is trying to put enough horses in the barn to make his business work. A horse that comes in under a bad deal still eats, still needs to be shod, still needs veterinary attention, still occupies a stall, and still generates expenses. So, unless you’re saving the life of an unwanted horse, don’t do deals.

Eventually somebody begins to resent the deal. The trainer thinks, “I’m doing all this work and earning nothing.” The owner thinks, “I’m paying all these expenses, and the trainer is getting his percentage.” What began as a clever arrangement becomes another source of friction.

An occupied stall is not necessarily a profitable stall.

DO NOT SNATCH A HORSE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

An owner should never secretly take a horse away from a trainer when the trainer isn’t there to shake hands, settle the matter, and square up the bills. The midnight or pre-dawn take-away is about as low as it gets.

One morning, before sunrise, I received a phone message.

“Dave, we took the horse. Your check is in the tack trunk.”

That was the entire transaction.

No explanation. No opportunity to discuss where the horse was going, why the horse was being moved or whether there was something I could have done differently. The horse was simply gone.

And there was one other small problem.

There was no check in the tack trunk.

There never was. There never is.

I have always believed that if you’re going to take a horse away from a trainer, you should at least have the courtesy to do it in person. You sit down, you say what you think went wrong, you listen to what the trainer has to say, and then you make your decision. Maybe you agree to disagree. Maybe you shake hands. Maybe you don’t. But you settle the bill and you walk away like adults.

The horse may belong to you, but your trainer’s dignity doesn’t.

BE AWARE OF THE LOOMING MASS EXTINCTION EVENT

There is another reality an owner needs to understand before firing a trainer, and it has very little to do with whether the trainer is actually doing a good job.

Harness racing is not operating in an expanding ecosystem. It’s more like a terrarium in an unheated and squalid apartment.

The sport has become smaller, and as its ecosystem shrinks, Darwinism takes over. There are fewer horses, fewer owners, fewer stables and fewer opportunities for a horseman to make a living training horses. The food supply has contracted.

Imagine a prehistoric carcass lying out on the plain. One Triceratops is down, and a herd of hungry Velociraptors is circling it.

That’s a sad way to view harness racing nowadays, but it’s optically accurate.

Currently, there’s a relatively small group of trainers and drivers who consistently get the horses that matter, the horses that are aimed from birth at serious money and have a legitimate chance to influence the future of the sport. There are perhaps 10 guys who occupy that territory with any regularity.

And then there is everybody else.

The “everybody else” clan is not necessarily composed of bad horsemen. Some are very good. Some may be every bit as good or better than the people sitting at the top of the standings. On this end of the food chain, a lot of perfectly capable horsemen try to survive on whatever is left. They are competing in an ecosystem where there simply isn’t enough prey to go around.

That is what I mean when I say harness racing is approaching a mass extinction event. It isn’t that everybody suddenly became a bad horseman. The habitat changed. The herd got smaller.

And when the herd gets smaller, every animal becomes more important.

This is why something as seemingly insignificant as a driver change can become the beginning of the end for an owner and his trainer.

In a healthy owner-trainer relationship, the owner calls the trainer and says, “What the hell kind of drive was that?” The owner may remain pissed off for 20 minutes, but the matter is settled.

In a shrinking business, however, the driver change becomes an excuse. The bad trip becomes the evidence. The horse’s recent record becomes the prosecution.

Suddenly the owner is thinking about moving the horse.

That is how fragile things get when everybody knows there aren’t enough horses to go around.

ATTENTION TRAINERS: YOU’RE NOT OFF THE HOOK. YOU NEVER WERE

Everything I have written so far can make it sound as though the owner is always the problem.

The owner isn’t.

Trainers create bad owners, too.

A trainer who treats an owner like dirt cannot reasonably expect loyalty simply because the trainer knows more about horses. Expertise is not a license to behave badly. You can be one hell of a horseman and still be a miserable businessman.

If you don’t return phone calls, or you don’t explain what you’re doing, you’re creating a toxic ambiance. If you treat every question as an insult, make decisions without communicating them, embarrass an owner in front of other people or act as though the owner is an inconvenience rather than the person paying the bills, don’t be surprised when the owner eventually looks elsewhere.

And don’t tell yourself there are plenty of other owners.

There aren’t.

This isn’t exactly a booming industry with new clients pouring through the gate every morning. The same Darwinism that makes an owner valuable makes a trainer’s client base valuable, too.

A trainer who has a good owner should act like it.

That doesn’t mean allowing the owner to dictate every training decision. It means treating the owner with the same basic respect the trainer expects in return.

Another mistake trainers make, particularly in an industry this small, is assuming a good horse will excuse bad behavior.

It might for a while, but it will eventually fizzle.

An owner may tolerate a trainer’s personality because the horses are winning. A winning horse has a remarkable ability to make everybody more forgiving. But eventually the horse gets claimed, gets old, gets injured or stops winning. Then the owner is left with the relationship itself.

If the relationship has been neglected, there may not be much left.

BEFORE YOU FIRE YOUR TRAINER

So, before you fire your trainer, ask yourself a few questions.

Is the horse actually being trained badly, or is the horse simply not as good as you thought?

Did the trainer make a mistake, or did another horse beat you?

Are you unhappy with the trainer, or are you unhappy with the driver?

Are you angry about the veterinarian’s bill, or is the veterinarian’s bill simply evidence that horses cost money?

Did the trainer really mishandle the yearling selection, or did you insist on buying the horse you liked better?

And most importantly, have you actually talked to the trainer?

If the answer to that last question is no, you’re not ready to fire anybody.

You’re ready to have a conversation.

There is nothing wrong with leaving a trainer. I have done it myself as an owner, and I have had owners leave me. It happens. Sometimes the relationship has run its course. Sometimes the horse needs something the trainer can’t provide. Sometimes personalities simply don’t fit. Sometimes one side loses confidence in the other.

That’s business.

What isn’t good business is allowing suspicion, gossip, ego, and outside influence to destroy a relationship that might have been repaired with one honest conversation.

The harness racing business is too small for all of this nonsense. The people at the top are getting more of the horses that matter, while a large population of capable horsemen are fighting over what remains. That is not an environment in which owners and trainers can afford to treat each other as disposable.

The owner who thinks there is always a better trainer waiting around the corner may discover that the grass isn’t greener. It may simply be, let’s just say, over-fertilized.

And the trainer who thinks a good owner can be treated like an ATM with a lead shank attached to it may eventually discover that money has a long memory.

I’ve spent enough years in this business to know that neither owners nor trainers are saints. They are horsepeople, which is a different and occasionally more entertaining category of human being.

Owners get impatient and trainers get arrogant. Owners listen to gossip. Trainers tell owners what they want to hear. Owners think they know more than they do. Trainers sometimes think they know everything. Both sides make mistakes.

The difference between a bad relationship and a good one is not the absence of mistakes. It is what happens after the mistake.

Talk about it. Own it. Fix it if you can.

And if you finally decide that the relationship really is over, have the decency to say so to the person standing in front of you.

Shake hands.

Pay the bill.

Take your horse.

Then move on.

Because the next race is coming, the next bill is coming, and somewhere down the backstretch there is another horseman looking down the road at the same shrinking herd as you.

The carcass is getting smaller.

The Velociraptors are getting hungrier.

And there aren’t many Triceratopses left.

Choose your alliances accordingly.