With New Tests on Horizon, Team Talks Journalism: I’m Not a Horse Whisperer. I Just Understand Them”

[Wandering Eyes]

Should we call him The California Kid? It trips off the tongue, certainly. Like The Great Gambino. Or The Iceman.

If Journalism's nickname needs more than just a nice phonetic ring to it, then The California Kid seems fitting for a horse who appears to embody the sun- bleached Pacific Coast ideal. The surfer dude, never happier than out on the waves or cracking a beer on the beach, unfazed by all of life's other meaningless clutter.

Just ask the horse's tightknit coterie of coaches, fitness gurus, therapists and (unofficial) horse whisperers (more on this last one in a bit).

“He's the kind of horse that walks into a stall, gets in, has a roll on his right side, makes a circular turn, finds himself a nice area, gives it a pat or two, then gets down, rolls on his left side,” says trainer Michael McCarthy, after morning training recently, choreographing the action with his hands, as though guiding water down the drain.

The thing is, wherever he goes–Churchill Downs, Pimlico, Saratoga, Monmouth Park–Journalism bears no prejudice. He marches into his lodgings and repeats his routine. No hesitation. No qualms. “Like he's always lived there,” says McCarthy.

“It's his way of telling me, 'You know, I'll be fine here. I'll figure it out,'” says McCarthy, explaining how otherwise, Journalism keeps his room spic-and-span, careful of the decor.     “It's one of the signs that you see from these really good horses.”

Then there was the time, just a few months ago, when the McCarthy stable was in the midst of its annual exodus from Santa Anita to Del Mar, the horses filing one-by-one from the barn out into the waiting 12-wheeled Arcs. All but one horse–Journalism, who would remain at Santa Anita to fly out for the Haskell.

The solitary leftover wasn't fazed. No racing around his stall, getting all hot and bothered. No calling after his companions.

“I come around, all the horses are coming out of their stalls, coming down the shedrow, loading up, hollering at each other,” says Deedee Anderson, the owner of a successful equine therapy business whose client-list has long included the McCarthy barn.

“I check on Journalism, make sure he's okay,” Anderson recollects. “I get to his stall, this horse has already eaten his breakfast and is just standing in the middle, leg cocked, having a snooze–with all of that going on around.”

But maybe the moniker doesn't fit the character as much as it does the moment, of a horse hailing from a circuit that has endured more than its fair share of (well publicized) setbacks over the years, trained by a Cali-native who still, despite the pressures and obstacles this new reality presents, wouldn't want to ply his trade anywhere else.

“Our racetrack surfaces here in California are, on the whole, day in and day out, better than anywhere. Absolutely. All of America,” says McCarthy, then leans forward in his office chair to punctuate the point. “You'll make sure that gets in there?”

This is borne out in the statistics. The Jockey Club's data shows both Del Mar and Santa Anita consistency among the very safest tracks in the country.

Amazingly, there were no race-day fatalities at Del Mar throughout all of 2023.

It's also borne out in the way, despite such marked numerical contraction in recent years out west, California runners continue to consistently go toe-to-toe with the best of them, emerging with reputations enhanced.

“The talent pool may have shrunk a bit here. But the level of talent here is as good as it ever was,” says McCarthy. And Journalism is another timely reminder. “The quality certainly remains.”

After a string of spring and summer East Coast raids that saw him bring back trophies for the Preakness and Haskell Stakes (alongside honorable mentions in bookended Triple Crown events), Journalism's next assignment will require panning for gold on home soils. The GI Pacific Classic, next Saturday at Del Mar.

The race will mark his seventh in six months–a campaign considered quaint by bygone tastes, but almost swashbuckling by contemporary ones.

A sharp five-furlong workout Saturday certainly didn't hurt his chances of appearing. A hard decision, apparently, will come Tuesday (or possibly sooner).

If he does line up next Saturday, the race will mark his seventh in six months–a campaign considered quaint by bygone tastes, but almost swashbuckling by contemporary ones.

The way his trainer explains it, Journalism's fortitude lies in just the right balance of attributes from his sire (Curlin) and damsire (Uncle Mo), matching chassis with engine.

“When you look at him on the end of the shank, you see a lot of Curlin there. You see a wonderful neck, incredible shoulder. Balance. Plenty of condition. He's an incredibly well-boned horse. You know, there's no real flaws looking at him. His eye–he's got an incredibly intelligent eye,” says McCarthy.

“It would be odd to see him walking around and his ears aren't like this,” McCarthy adds, wiggling his middle and forefingers of his right hand, like a Watership Down glove-puppet. “He just has this personality. This fortitude. This confidence. I guess that's when I think of Uncle Mo. He was probably the most genuine racehorse I'd ever been around,” he adds, a nod to his assistant days to Uncle Mo's trainer, Todd Pletcher.

McCarthy set out his shingle as a trainer in his own right just over a decade ago.

In the intervening years, he has built a reputation as a scrupulously disciplined trainer with an uncanny eye for priming the big horses for their biggest assignments.

He coaxed four Grade I victories out of City of Light (Quality Road), culminating in a Breeders' Cup-Pegasus World Cup one-two punch of some clout. He carved an Eclipse Award winning career out of the redoubtable Ce Ce (Elusive Quality). With Rombauer's (Twirling Candy) 2021 Preakness Stakes win, he planted his flag, Lewis and Clark style, along the Triple Crown trail.

It's one thing to have time to ready the athlete for the big occasion, slowly bring them to the boil. The Triple Crown requires of horse and trainer to draw on an altogether different set of qualities, like the ability to thrown down, even when

the battery's sapped, and still spring back for more, like one of those reflexive punchbags.

“I believe there's something about a good horse, just as with any good athlete, there's something at some stage that sets them apart,” says McCarthy.

Journalism's is a rare appetite for hard graft.

“He put on weight between the Preakness and the Belmont. From a figure standpoint, it looked like his fastest race had come in the last of the three legs of the Triple Crown,” he says, before remarking how, after returning home from Saratoga, the horse appeared disinterested by the idea of downtime.

“We tried giving him an easy couple of weeks. It didn't seem like he was interested in really being backed off on.”

As any trainer will attest, a masterful slight-of-hand performed by many a Thoroughbred is to show all the signs of a full tank during morning training, only to see that gas gauge fall faster than Newton's apple of an afternoon.

Was there any moment where the trainer has questioned his approach?

“You're always kind of questioning yourself a little bit,” McCarthy says. “But I guess I never really questioned myself about running back in two weeks from the Kentucky Derby to the Preakness until maybe about the half-mile pole in the

Preakness, when it didn't seem like he was quite as engaged as he was two weeks earlier.

“I thought maybe that the Kentucky Derby had taken more out of him then I thought,” he says. “Maybe he wasn't quite himself for the Preakness, even though he was doing everything he'd want a good horse to do.”

The final result, of course, speaks for itself. The win speaks, too, of his versatility.

“He hasn't needed it one way or the other,” says McCarthy, pinpointing Journalism's performance in the Haskell at Monmouth Park, swooping from off the pace to gobble up his old Preakness foe, Gosger, in the shadow of the wire–it was the first time he'd encountered an off-track.

“He has not had to take his racetrack with him.”

Given these new dimensions Journalism has brought to his career, has McCarthy gleaned any new lessons of his own? Some new little tricks to add to his already over-stuffed training manual?

The trainer demurs. The horse, he argues, has given him little to really sweat about since first stepping foot into the barn, an $825,000 price tag dangling about his neck.

There were the usual sort of growing pains, he says, during the summer of his two-year-old season, when a growth spurt stalled any plans to kick his year off at Del Mar. “He's a big horse, carries a lot of condition, incredible amount of bone,” says McCarthy.

Launch day would come later that October, at Santa Anita, a corner-store stroll from his stall.

“It gave us no choice but to back off then for a handful of weeks, kind of slowly start back, knowing anyway that he's probably a two-turn type of horse,” he says.

Still, “I think when you have a top-flight type of horse, I think you have more time to step back and chart a course and wait, [because] you know the ability that is there,” McCarthy says. “He's been an easy read from day one.”

Anderson hovers outside Journalism's stall, feeding him chunks of carrot from her pockets–a useful means of distraction, she says, if you want to chance a pat down his neck, unadulterated.

There's a positive correlation, apparently, between proximity to a race and his overall testiness.

As Journalism munches away, Anderson extols the work of exercise rider Marc Witkowski.

“Marc knows this horse really, really well. He talks to his horses, really knows their nuances,” she says, with a hushed sort of reverence typically reserved for potentates and religious leaders.

Witkowski downplays the compliment.

“I'm not a horse whisperer. I just understand them,” he says.

Witkowski attributes his horsemanship to his time as a young hand on a Tucson, Arizona, ranch next to his grandmother's house, overseen by a man who told him always to talk to the horses, “and to treat humans and horses the same.”

“He [Ramon] always said, for people, if somebody was hungry or needed something, you give it to them. With horses, always be kind to them–don't be mean with them ever,” he says.

There's an interesting criss-cross of paths between horse and exercise rider. After winning the GII Los Alamitos Futurity, Journalism was on the easy list for a few weeks with a minor sickness. It just so happened that the rider was also out for a few weeks with a broken bone in his ankle and a twisted knee, the result of landing wrong when dismounting.

Witkowski's return to the saddle coincided with Journalism's return to full work.

“I got back on him when he was just getting back into his routine. We were both so happy,” he says.

“I was so scared when that happened, when I hurt myself, that I was going to miss out on everything,” he says. “The first thing that went through my head was that I was going to miss out. I don't know–I just always knew after the Futurity that he would be going to the Kentucky Derby.”

McCarthy, in turn, points to the crucial (and so often unheralded) work put in by his assistant trainer, Felipe Rivera, and by groom Rolando Navas.

Navas has been with the barn for something approaching a decade, caring for the likes of graded-stakes winning The Lieutenant (Street Sense) and hardened street-brawler Ohio (Elusive Quality).

Of Journalism, says McCarthy, “there have been a lot of constants with him.”

Journalism's five-furlong slingshot of a workout was still on the horizon when we spoke, and the Pacific Classic was still an uncertainty.

“It seems like he's thrived on going to these different venues, different locales, and is a smart horse, you know—he's interested,” McCarthy says, playing coy about his plans.

In other words, wherever you take him, trust the horse to throw his hat into the ring. At the same time, “he's very at home here,” says McCarthy.

Sounds a lot like the trainer.

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