The Road Back: Blane Servis Returns to the Racetrack

[Wandering Eyes]

For all the incredible experiences Blane Servis remembers from when his father John campaigned champion Smarty Jones, there were a few less-than-comfortable memories too. Take, for instance, the time during Smarty Jones's run for the Triple Crown when Servis's school hosted a pep rally and made a teenaged Servis the guest of honor. As a self-described socially awkward kid, stepping into the spotlight felt a bit more like a nightmare than a celebration.

In high school, Servis discovered that drinking was the easiest solution to overcoming his social anxiety. Later, he turned to prescription pain pills.

“I remember the first time I ever took them,” Servis recalled. “I liked drinking when I was younger because I would drink to a point where I didn't have anxiety about talking to people. It got to a point where I had to drink more and more to feel that way and it was a fine line between drinking enough to feel like that or blacking out. The first time I took a pain pill, I got that feeling immediately.”

Servis managed to keep his life afloat while hiding his addiction for years–working as an assistant for his father, getting married, and eventually becoming a trainer and a father himself–but ultimately the addiction won out. Servis lost his trainer's license, lost his purpose and nearly lost his life.

Still, his passion for the sport of horse racing proved indomitable. Despite the ugliness of his past, Servis found a way back to the business he has always loved and today, as an assistant trainer for Brad Cox, he hopes to make the most of this second chance.

“I have a passion for wanting to better the sport and progress things in the right direction,” he said. “It has been so good to me that it's the least I can do. Even if it's just being a beacon of hope for people that are struggling, that would be a positive thing.”

 

Football to Falling Out

Celebrating Smarty Jones's Kentucky Derby victory | Horsephotos

Servis's earliest memories are from the backside of a racetrack. On weekends, he and his brother Tyler would wake up at four in the morning to make the drive with their father, a stalwart of the Northeast and Mid-atlantic regions, from Philadelphia to Delaware Park.

“There were a bunch of creeks there and my brother and I would catch frogs while the horses were training, and then after training Dad would have us painting boards and fences,” Servis recalled. “I saw firsthand the commitment that this sport takes.”

Servis loved racing, but he also loved football. He told his father that he was going to become a professional football player–either safety or running back–and then own his own horses one day. That plan started to go sideways in high school when he was kicked out of four different schools for various instances of alcohol and drug use. He was supposed to be a preferred walk-on at the University of Arkansas, but couldn't get the grades to get in.

Servis started working for his father, but would often come to the barn hungover and work through the morning only to start partying again in the afternoon.

“I really did love football and I think when that didn't happen, I was living with the guilt of messing up something that I had wanted since I was a kid. My dreams were broken and I didn't know what I was going to do with the next chapter of my life, but that was when I fell in love with the horses. They each had their own personality and I loved everything about the sport.”

Servis became a foreman and then assistant to his father while also working the starting gate at Parx. At that time, some of the early progeny of Smarty Jones were hitting the racetrack.

“Just like Smarty Jones when he hit his head in the gate, some of the Smarty Jones babies were notoriously bad in the starting gate,” noted Servis. “The starter at the gate would always give me my dad's horses and since he had a lot of Smarty Jones babies, I would get some of the worst horses. I always say that taught me more about handling horses than anything.”

When Servis took out his trainer's license in 2013, one of his first acquisitions was Hard to Name (Hard Spun). While the gelding had shown potential early on, he had developed displacement issues and by the time he got to Servis, he was running in $10,000 claimers. For much of his career, Hard to Name had competed in sprints in an attempt to keep him from displacing, but Servis thought that the horse was bred to go long and decided to test out a theory.

“A big part of displacing with a lot of horses is mental,” explained Servis. “I decided that we were going to try to keep him as relaxed as we could and train him to be fit to go a mile. You could see in his races that as soon as the rider started asking him to move, the horse got nervous, his head would go up and he immediately displaced. So we worked with the horse for a while and I told the rider, 'Whatever you do, when they're coming down the stretch just give him his head. Don't ride him, just let him go.' He ended up winning by 10 lengths.”

While Servis's stable started to take off, his addiction continued to maintain a hold on his life. There was a seven-year period after he became a father when he swapped drinking for ADHD medication, but the Adderall led to insomnia–leaving him sleepless for days on end and often sick from exhaustion. After his divorce was finalized, he returned to old habits like never before. He bounced from one rehab to the next, sometimes running his own stable and sometimes working for his brother.

On the job at Turfway Park | Katie Petrunyak

During perhaps the darkest point of his life, Servis had one of his most promising horses break down in a morning work. A few days later, he woke up to several missed calls from a close friend only to find out that the friend had overdosed that very night. The two tragic events sent Servis into a spiral.

“I was staying in my room calling somebody to go feed and water my horses,” he described. “People would come knock on my door and I wouldn't answer. I had just checked out of everything.”

Eventually, the racing commission suspended his training license when he failed to show up to his barn for a week. Unable to step foot on a racetrack for two years, Servis searched for jobs at breeding farms in Pennsylvania.

One day, a friend sent him a TDN article about Walden Racing that described how the team there had gone through Stable Recovery together. Servis insisted that he did not need to go through a recovery program, but he did call trainer Will Walden and ended up landing a job as a barn foreman at WinStar Training Center.

WinStar's Elliott Walden had one stipulation for the job: he could not drink or use drugs. Servis reiterated that it wouldn't be a problem. Things were looking up as he made the move to Kentucky.

But it wasn't long before Servis reverted back to his old ways. After one long bender and several days of failing to show up for work, Servis woke up one morning to find Will Walden, WinStar's General Manager David Hanley and Stable Recovery's Christian Countzler and Mike Lowery standing at his door. Hoping they wouldn't come in and find the four empty vodka bottles in his bedroom, he groggily stepped outside and immediately passed out cold in the doorway.

“My passion and desire to be in the sport had made me bullheaded enough to where I kept telling myself that I was going to make something happen,” said Servis. “I was backed up against the wall where my only options where to try to do something about this or deal with the fact that I was not going to be able to work in racing. I'd just have to do a normal job where I was completely miserable every day.”

When he finally came to, Servis committed to going to Stable Recovery.

Power of Patience

Servis's time at Stable Recovery was not without its setbacks. Six months in, he ignored the Stable Recovery team's advice and visited family and friends back in Philadelphia, relapsing soon after he got there. When he returned to Kentucky, he told himself that he would go back to Stable Recovery eventually.

Months later, he woke up one morning feeling worse than ever before. Looking in the mirror to find scabs all over his face, he couldn't remember anything about the previous night.

“I looked at my phone and found that I had texted some guy when I was blacked out about buying weed off him,” described Servis. “He didn't have any, but apparently instead I had bought fentanyl off the guy. I didn't remember any of it. I realized that if I'm able to do that blacked out, where I don't have control of my decisions, I'm going to end up dying. I was terrified and went right back to Stable Recovery.”

Servis and Painted Desert (Medaglia d'Oro), a half sister to Grade I victress Wet Paint, who looks to break her maiden this weekend | Katie Petrunyak

This time, Servis went in with a completely different mindset. He committed to trusting the program's process and allowed himself time for healing.

“My trip to Kentucky was originally driven by horse racing, but I ended up learning so much about recovery and myself, and I got a brotherhood of people that I never had back home. Stable Recovery was perfect for me because it involved doing something I was passionate about and it was a program with a strict structure, which is what I needed.”

After completing the program, Servis started working as a groom at Godolphin's training division at Keeneland. It was a ways down the ladder from where he had once been. Instead of running his own stable, he was relegated to grooming three or four horses each day. But Servis was willing to be patient and he stayed there for a year.

This February, a job posting on Facebook led Servis to an interview for an assistant position with Brad Cox. He landed the job and signed on as the head of Cox's division at Turfway Park.

The first few weeks have been like nothing Servis could have imagined for himself as he manages a string of 20-some horses. Already this month, the Cox stable has collected five wins and one runner-up performance from six starts at Turfway.

“I forgot how much I missed it,” Servis admitted. “I can be hands on now, doing things that make a difference in a horse's career. It's very exciting for me because I love nothing more than being able to work with a horse and watch them blossom.”

After the Turfway meet ends, Servis will likely move to Cox's Keeneland division and stay there through the summer working with 2-year-olds. He said has always enjoyed working with young horses. Reflecting on it now, he likens training juveniles to cultivating patience and discipline in his own life.

“With these horses, over time you start to see how these little things you're doing can make a big difference,” he said. “The extra work and effort you're putting in can completely change them and take them to a different level. It just shows you the importance of discipline, structure and continuing to do the right thing every day.”

Servis intends to get his own stable up and running again one day. For now, he's more than content just being back in a shedrow, taking small steps every day to change his life for the better.

“The reason I drank to begin with was because of the shyness and the nervousness, but mostly it was just me being in my own head, being anxious and overthinking stuff all the time. I could be in a room full of people and still feel completely alone. I came to the program to stop drinking and screwing up my life, so that fact that in the process I was able to get to a place where I can actually have peace in my life and not be constantly overthinking, that is one of the most amazing things. I don't worry about the future too much because I trust in God and I'm not caught up in my past because we work through that. That doesn't mean the worry doesn't start creeping up every once in a while, but it is so much better than it ever was before. I'm blessed to be able to experience that.”

Stable Recovery is a recovery housing program in Lexington, Kentucky that offers men in the early stages of recovery access to 12-step meetings, life skills training and-through the Taylor Made School of Horsemanship-the opportunity to develop a trade in the equine field. To learn more about Stable Recovery, click here.

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