Biszantz Still Full of Fire

[Wandering Eyes]

Pomona Fairgrounds, 1956. Abandoning his hopes of becoming an attorney, Gary Biszantz was going home to try to turn round his father's automobile dealership in Los Angeles. He broke his journey at a horse sale, having loved Thoroughbreds since being taken racing as a kid, when he would stand on a chair and marvel at “the epitome of strength, speed, skill and style.”

“And the guy next to me puts up his hand at $400 and the auctioneer says: 'Sold!'” Biszantz recalls. “The guy looks at me and says, 'Would you loan me $400?' And I say, 'No–but I'll buy the goddamn horse!' So he hands me the bill and I send her to Mel Stute at Santa Anita, who I played basketball with. Mel says, 'You don't have any money. But you don't have to pay me until she wins, we'll straighten up then.' First time she runs, she wins: 33-and-two, down the chute. And I'm hooked.”

Nearly 70 years later, Biszantz has made a reluctant concession to their passage–otherwise barely discernible, a hobbling gait apart, in this extraordinarily dynamic character–by selling Cobra Farm, outside Lexington, and moving downtown. In the meantime, his colors have been carried by 480 winners, 32 in stakes and four at Grade I level; and, throughout, Biszantz has engaged fearlessly with the ethical challenges that always face our community.

For here's a man who never minces his words, whether in the name of conventionality or false modesty. And why should he, as protagonist of an authentic American dream? His father, from a family of German immigrants, drove from Ohio during the Depression to earn $1 a week as a janitor on a used car lot on Figueroa Boulevard. He ended up with a dealership of his own. “But he was a quiet man,” his son recalls. “A bookkeeper, not a salesman. All he wanted was to get to 5 p.m. and go for a couple of beers and a game of pinball.”

So when he came home to help the failing business, Biszantz put his cards on the table. He wasn't here to lift garage doors, wash sidewalks. What was this dealership worth?

“Well,” his father replied. “Maybe $40,000.”

“Okay, I'll buy 25 percent.”

“But you don't have $10,000.”

“I don't. But I will, because you're going to let me run this place. And every $1,000 we make, my $250 will go against the $10,000 until it's paid off.”

His father looked at Biszantz. “It'll take you five years.”

The debt was cleared within the year. Biszantz then bought out the rest of the business, and opened another dealership in San Diego. But he was barely started. In 1978, Biszantz received a call from one of the professional golfers he had got to know as an accomplished amateur. He'd been using clubs made by Cobra, a small company operated by a friend. They were tremendous, yet the bank was threatening foreclosure. Would Biszantz take a look?

So he inspected the books. A mess. “No cash in the bank, no sales manager, no sales force, no CPA, nothing,” Biszantz recalls. “I'm thinking, 'What in the world am I doing here?' I had $80,000, but this guy owed $160,000. So I called five of my best pals and said, 'I need each of you put up $15,000 and be partners in this firm. I can't pay you anything until we make a profit–and we may never do that.'”

Then he went to the eight employees.

“The good news is we don't owe the bank anything,” he told them. “The bad news is that leaves us with nothing. Next week's payroll included. So I'm giving you a choice. You can either quit today, get a new job and take care of your family. Or you can stay with me and ride this out, and we'll work hard and figure out how to make payroll.”

They all stayed.

Coady

“Eighteen years later, I sold the company for $756 million,” Biszantz says proudly. “Each of the guys that put up $15,000 got many millions.”

What couldn't be bought, however, was the “family” culture that he considers more important to Cobra's success even than his recruitment of world No. 1 Greg Norman.

When they opened a new plant, the management were given reserved parking out front. Biszantz immediately rang the plant manager.

“Take my name off that parking space and put Greg there.”

“But he never comes out here.”

“Yeah, but nobody knows that.”

“Well, where you going to park?”

“Where do I always park? Out back, with everyone else. Don't you ever watch me walk through the plant? Watch me stop at the shipping department, the sanding department, talk to the employees? The Chinese, the Mexicans, the African-Americans, they all know the boss and I know them. And then I go up to my office and can run the company with my piece of paper and pencil.”

Biszantz was determined to maintain Cobra as a byword for quality; tailored, not standardized. Early on he was approached by a discounter's rep.

“I told him we didn't sell in discount stores,” Biszantz recalls. “He says, 'We think you will.' And hands me a $100,000 check. I don't have $5,000 in my bank account. I sat there and held the check and finally handed it back. 'Thank your boss for sending you down,' I said. 'It was a great idea, but you don't have an account–and never will.' That might have been the biggest decision in the history of Cobra. You'd have walked into every retail market in America and seen our clubs at 30 percent off. That kept us special.”

So what made him so good? He was obviously a salesman, for a start.

“One of the best ever!” he agrees. “I didn't know the difference between an adding machine and a shredder. But I could outthink you and outsell you. Because you were nervous and I wasn't. And if anyone ever said something couldn't work, I'd always think: 'I didn't say that. You did.'”

With that kind of attitude, little wonder he wanted a Thoroughbred program. He found a manager who could cling to his wavelength, in Mike Owens, and twice they landed on the Derby trail.

“I was talking to somebody at a sale and my wife Betty went and bought this $9,000 mare,” Biszantz recalls. “'Oh my God, what have we done?' But we had to breed her to something. I didn't want to spend a lot, so we sent her to Farma Way, and got a nice, good-looking colt.”

He sent the horse to Mike Puype and pretty much forgot about him. Then Puype rang and urged him to come and watch his first work. They were only going to swing along, around :40.

“But I'm looking at the watch and it says :35-and-one,” Biszantz recalls. “'Wait a minute, there's something wrong here.' Next week, same thing: they want to go half-a-mile in :52, and he goes :47-and-two.”

Cobra King made his debut in a stakes, beaten a head, and then won five of his next six including the GIII Holy Bull. But he blew out in the Florida Derby and retired with a bowed tendon.

The same year, 1996, Biszantz went to inspect stock being dispersed by Fritz Hawn's estate.

“I walked through the farm and said I'd give $1 million for 10 that I could pick,” he recalls. “One was this A.P. Indy colt, kind of a clubfoot, everybody turned him down because of that but he was beautiful otherwise. And that was Old Trieste, a really phenomenal horse. He would go out front and just keep going farther clear.”

Old Trieste went into the Derby off a 10-length romp but ended up needing a new jockey, who breezed him at Churchill four days before.

Returning to the barn, the rider asked: “Okay?”

“What do you mean, 'okay'?” Biszantz fumed. “You know how fast you went?”

“No idea. I didn't ask him for much, just kind of hung on. He was going easy.”

“You just tied the [six-furlong] track record!”

Then he got a wide draw, and was on his knees leaving the gate. But Old Trieste made up for all that with a streak of four graded stakes. The hardest day of his owner's Turf career was when Old Trieste, barely started at stud, succumbed to laminitis.

“I loved the job Mike did,” Biszantz emphasized. “He's been with me 30 years and I always said that it was his farm, I just lived there! I never had to give him instructions, he did it all and did it well.”

Coady

In his candid way, Biszantz was never reticent about flaws he perceived in the sport he loves. For one thing, he feels that California could have avoided its travails, if only it had heeded his forthright advice that the land, stallions and marketplace were not equal to the burden of a state-bred program. In the bigger picture, long before HISA, Biszantz was vehemently critical of slack regulation.

“If your horse broke the track record, won [by] 10 lengths, would you be happy if you knew he was full of drugs?” he asks. “I'd be very embarrassed. The Japanese have long been clean on raceday and look how that's played out. We're getting better here, but for a long time couldn't get it straight. The words they don't like are 'performance-enhancing.' But anything that isn't natural, down to an aspirin if you've a headache, will enhance performance.”

Biszantz remembers how the old school would solve many problems just by turning a horse out 60 days. Nowadays, he feels, people just give the horse a shot. But he reminds us what happened when Lasix was said to be merely therapeutic, key to a virtuous circle of prolonged careers, filled races, boosted handle.

“They were dead wrong,” he says. “Every single measure went the wrong way: starts, field sizes, everything. If I use Lasix, I need to wait two weeks after the race for the horse to rebuild what's been taken out. Then I need my workouts before I can run again. So now I've a five-week interval and my horse will only run six, seven times a year. But if I don't use Lasix, I can run Saturday and again the next week, I can get 18 races out of my horse. And if he comes back a little sore, I'll turn him out two or three months and then start over.”

The words keep flowing, a righteous torrent. Where does the man get his energy?

“It's just fire in the belly,” he says with a shrug. “That's what hurts me now, walking around with this stick, because I was such a good athlete. As a youngster, everybody had to follow me. You couldn't keep up. I was always on the lead!”

But that was just one expression of the self-belief that always drove him.

“Whenever I talked, everybody in the room was always on the edge of their seat,” he says. “They wanted to hear what I had to say. Not many people have even got close to what I've done. And if they have, they probably inherited a lot of money. What I did was almost impossible. But we made it work.

“And we got it done with the horses, too. I saw it all. I saw Noor beat Citation at Santa Anita. I probably talk too much. I got appointed to lot of things, head of TOBA four years, but a Westerner coming to the East Coast isn't treated the same. He's a maverick, cowboy, shoots from the hip. He might be dead right, but they don't need to change anything so long as they've got their reserved spaces at Saratoga. That's the way the game has always been. But we've been here a long time now, we took our horses everywhere and I'm just so proud of the things they've done.”

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