Juvenile Champion Raises a Toast to Glass

[Wandering Eyes]

It is the length of the road that makes you truly appreciate the view from the summit. Strictly, yes, you would get exactly the same panorama if you just got yourself dropped up there by helicopter. Conceivably you could win an Eclipse Award with the first 2-year-old you ever bought, and feel due excitement about maybe going on to the GI Kentucky Derby. But it just means so much more if, like Ben Glass and his patrons Gary and Mary West, you have been on this journey together for four decades. They have shared other wonderful moments on the way–but it’s actually the countless tougher days, in between, that permit them such satisfaction in their newly anointed champion Game Winner (Candy Ride).

For the past 25 years, Glass has served the Wests as racing manager; for 13 years before that, he was their trainer.

“When we first started, we were claiming horses for $2,500 in places like Grand Island, Nebraska,” he remembers. “And you know what, there’s nobody better for the racing game than Gary and Mary West. They are the best. Gary’s like a brother to me. You’re not going to surprise him with anything. If it can happen, it’s happened to them. I’m telling you, they’ve had some bad luck and some good luck, and they take it all on the chin.”

In 2002 they had the second favorite for the Derby in Buddha (Unbridled’s Song), who had beaten Medaglia d’Oro (El Prado {Ire}) in the GI Wood Memorial S.

“We got to the barn at five in the morning, to watch him gallop, and they said he was hurt,” Glass recalls. “And Gary just said, ‘Well, I’m going back to bed.’ I could tell you so many heartaches they’ve had, and they’re just good people. When it says West behind a horse, that horse is in good hands, believe me. We had a horse in New York one time who had a double compound fracture. They were told to put him down, but Gary said, ‘Well, can he be saved?’ I said, ‘Let me find out.’ And they did save him, they spent all that money so that they could give him away to some guy in Washington.”

Glass and the Wests have literally seen it all. When Mongoose (Broad Brush) won the GI Donn H., also in 2002, they were having their picture taken in the winner’s circle when Glass looked down the track to see what had happened to their other runner.

“And he’s lying down on the turn, he’s had heat stroke,” Glass recalls. “So we stood smiling for the win picture, and then I took off running. The game is full of ups and downs but that was the most up-to-down I’ve ever had. One horse taking the picture in the Grade I, other horse laying on the track. He did get up. But I mean, it’s a crazy business we live in.”

As the Wests became able to invest more and more in their stable–alongside, that is, over $200 million committed to a charitable foundation–Glass discovered a fresh frustration to the racing of Thoroughbreds.

“When Gary started buying the better horses I thought, man, these are beautiful horses, we can’t lose,” he reflects. “But Gary kept telling me, ‘Ben,’ he said, ‘if you get one graded stakes winner among all these horses, you’re beating the odds.’ And I finally realized he was right, that for some reason most of them won’t be runners–and that just breaks my heart. Such big, beautiful horses! It’s so tough to figure out. I guess they can’t all run, but it really bothered me for a long time, knowing you’re spending all that money and that most of them won’t make it. But I’ve learned to take it now.”

In naming Dollar Bill (Peaks And Valleys) as his favorite to date–quite an accolade, considering that the Wests have just retired a previous Eclipse champion in West Coast (Flatter) to Lane’s End–Glass discloses both what he most admires in a horse, and also what potentially sets Game Winner on another plane.

“Yes, Dollar Bill was kind of a hard-luck horse,” Glass says. “But he had a heart of gold. I mean, West Coast was a racehorse and a half, just wasn’t quite the same when he came back from Dubai. But Dollar Bill always was a trier. It was just that when he got in trouble or got bumped, he couldn’t quite get going again.”

So while his trainer Bob Baffert rewrote the Triple Crown rulebook with the overnight sensation that was Justify (Scat Daddy), Glass likes the way Game Winner satisfies the conventional criteria of race seasoning. Because when backed into a corner, unlike Dollar Bill, he has shown the class to get back into top gear.

“You know, in the Breeders’ Cup I thought he was going to get beat down the backside,” Glass confesses. “I didn’t think he had any prayer, as wide as he was; and then when he got bumped coming down there, I thought: ‘Oh man, everything in the world’s against us.’ But it didn’t bother him: he just shrugged his shoulders, kept on running. So we found out he can take a beating and keep on ticking.

“And the fact he lost a lot of ground is good for us, because he looks like the farther they go, the happier he is. He’s a big, powerful, strong-built horse, and I think he’s got a big heart–which is what you need most in this game. That desire to win is half the battle. Seeing him bounced around in a rough trip like that, and keeping on going, I think he has the heart it takes to be a champion.”

Certainly Game Winner was tailor-made for the Wests, who send Glass and his team to the yearling sales with a very specific brief. The two races they most covet are the Kentucky Derby and the GI Travers S., so they only want two-turn prospects with Classic dirt pedigrees. Various elements go into that mix: a heavy emphasis on dosage, for instance; and an aversion to mares who fail to produce a stakes winner in her first five foals, or to older mares period. Nor do they have any need for fillies, with enough already coming through the breeding program. West doesn’t want turf blood, either, albeit Glass contends that it can bring with it the required stamina.

“We take all that into consideration before we buy a horse,” he says. “So really it eliminates a lot of horses I don’t even have to look at. Makes my job a lot easier. I know exactly what Gary wants, and there’s no sense looking at anything else because he’s going to nix it. He’s the boss! But I know he’s right. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve bought a lot of horses and, with those that didn’t turn out, we went back and looked and tried to figure out why. You put that in the memory bank, and you end up with a program that works for you. For a long time, for instance, we tried to buy freshman sires. And boy, we were getting burned so bad. If only one out of 25 sires can stay in Kentucky, that tells you right there how lucky you got to be with those.”

In the case of Game Winner, Glass was astonished to learn from his consignors that not one other person had scoped the horse. Sure enough, he was able to pick him up for $110,000 at the Keeneland September Yearling Sale.

“Evidently he had something other people couldn’t live with,” he says with a shrug. “I have no clue what that might have been. But that’s the way it works. Everybody looks at a horse differently. Unless you get the spectacular standout everybody’s found, and you’re going to have to give a million.”

After passing the first sieve of the Wests’ paper prescription, yearlings have to pass muster with their inspection team. Glass is accompanied by Des Ryan, who manages the Wests’ broodmares at Dell Ridge Farm; Ocala breaker and pre-trainer Jeff Kirk; and veterinarian Dr Doug Brunk, who like Glass hails from Nebraska. And then they have to pass Dr. Craig Van Balen, who scopes them and reads the X-rays.

“So it’s a team effort,” Glass stresses. “We all work good together, there’s no ego trips here. Most times we’re all on board. They lead the horse out and we’ll all be looking at each other like, oh boy. So if somebody is worried about a funny-looking tendon or something, we’ll have that ultra-sounded to make sure nobody’s making a mistake, and we’re glad that one person on the team saw it. Then we come back and all go through it together, and try to put a number to a horse; and then Mr. West will put the final number to it.

“But the truth is that I have to really, really love a horse before I want to buy him. Because when they’re selling 5,000 head [at one sale], you can buy what you love. Of course a vet can say no, or you can be outbid by Sheikh Mohammed. But we don’t ever try to talk ourselves into one. Because I found that’s the surest way to buy a bad horse. I hear that stuff all the time: ‘Oh, he can live with that, it’s just baby bone or whatever.’ When I was young I probably thought I can do this, I can conquer the world. But now it’s there we take them off the list. We’re pretty critical.”

Glass loves the way Bob Baffert and Wayne Lukas know whether or not they like a horse the moment it is led from the barn, and similarly heeds his own gut instinct. Specifically, he likes a deep chest and stifle; a bit of length; and a big overstep. All lore he absorbed in youth, when issued his first licence aged just 16 at Arlington Park.

By then he had absorbed a great deal from his uncle in California–a gifted horseman, never quite able to fulfil his talent in his own name, but valued by several big trainers–while his father always had a string of horses as a sideline. Yet Glass was immersed as a psychology major at college, intending to become a youth counsellor, when the call came. “I had two trimesters left when my dad’s trainer messed up,” he remembers. “So I told my wife, ‘I’ll just run down to Hot Springs and help my dad out with these horses and then I’ll come back and finish college.’ But when I came back I got my wife, loaded her up, we went to the racetrack and never went back.”

Then one day Gary West, who had recently cashed in one of his first big businesses, was told by a friend about a nice filly Glass was breaking. And when West came to see her, he liked the filly–but loved the horseman. Soon West established that Glass was as skilled as he was honest: he claimed a horse named Joe Blow for $13,500 and, training at Ak-Sar-Ben, Glass kept him going for another five seasons and 23 wins.

A few years later he saddled the Wests’ first graded stakes winner, Rockamundo (Key To The Mint), in the GII Arkansas Derby at 108-1. It was only when his sons were approaching the age to leave home that Glass, eager to spend time with them while he could, resolved to quit training. He was going to raise cattle, but West asked him to come back aboard as racing manager.

“Training horses, I loved that life: couldn’t wait for that alarm to go off at four in the morning,” Glass admits. “But family’s got to come first. And I’m too old now. A trainer’s life is rough. Seven days a week, they don’t know if it’s Christmas or Thanksgiving.”

As it is, he enjoys the privilege of seeing how a man like Baffert operates. “All good trainers develop their horses,” Glass says. “For Bob, there’s no [adequate] superlatives. He can just watch horses train and know what they need. But every trainer has his own theory, trains his own way. Some work them fast, some don’t; some work close to the race, some don’t. There’s no set-in-stone way to train a horse.

“You can’t talk to horses. You got to know how to read them, how to listen when they’re telling you something. I used to have horses I’d take out and gallop the morning of the race; I had others, you did that they wouldn’t run a jump. It’s crazy. Each horse is different. There’s no manual. So it’s quite a humbling experience to get one to the winner’s circle, knowing you helped develop that horse.

“And like I was saying with Game Winner, I really believe that the good ones, down the lane, they want to beat those other horses. I had horses, they didn’t win, they’d sulk. And when they won, they thought they were king of the world. Horses are a lot smarter than most people allow. Pigs are supposed to be smart, but I don’t know if a pig would know if he won a race or not. But horses, they have great personalities. I know they’re happy when they get into that winner’s circle.”

 

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