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Bob Baffert: From Nogales to Racing's Hall of Fame

Bob Baffert: from Nogales to Racing’s
Hall of Fame

By GENE WILLIAMS

It’s been the proverbial road less traveled from the southern Arizona town of Nogales to racing’s Hall of Fame for Bob Baffert.

It’s a road that wound its way through dusty Southwestern towns, through flirtations with life as a jockey, success with racing quarter horses, first tender steps into the world of training and racing Thoroughbred horses and finally great success on the national stage.

As his skills and those of his Thoroughbred charges grew, the road included stops in such racing Meccas as Southern California, Louisville, Ky., Baltimore, Md., New York and even far to the east in the United Arab Emirates’ Dubai. Horses of his that stand out in most memories include Kentucky Derby and Preakness winners Silver Charm and Real Quiet, Horse of the Year Point Given, Pacific Classic winner General Challenge, Dubai World Cup champion Captain Steve (as well as Silver Charm), and the super filly Silverbulletday, who will go into the Hall with him.

The silver-haired, fun-loving Baffert joins the pantheon of legends Friday, August 14 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

With him along his road have been such outstanding owners as Robert and Beverly Lewis, Prince Ahmed Salmen, John and Betty Mabee’s Golden Eagle Farm, Stonerside Stable of Mr. and Mrs. Robert McNair, Ed Friendly and the tried and true friends Hal and Patti Earnhart and Mike Pegram, the trio that predates all of the others.

And with him, too, was his family, always his family.

“It all started for me with my dad and my uncle in Arizona,” Baffert says of growing up on the family ranch. “I went everywhere with them. I was just a kid of 10 or 12, but I went. Later on, when I was about 14, my dad decided to train quarter horses as a hobby and I did all the stuff with him; groom, exercise and all the rest.

“We self-taught ourselves. It was kind of trial and error, mostly error,” he added with a chuckle. “Our horses weren’t great horses, but we thought they were pretty great. My dad used to put the Baffert name on all the horses.”

The whole dream, Baffert remembers, was to raise a horse good enough to run in the All-American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico. The family never got to run in the Futurity, but they did move their horses to Los Alamitos in Southern California, where Baffert, after he started training, became a household name in quarter horse racing before turning to Thoroughbreds.

His flirtations with the jockey’s life gives Baffert a chance to rag on himself. He took off a year after finishing high school to try to be a jockey. It didn’t take him long to realize he wasn’t cut out for that. Even so, the bug bit him again a couple of years later, and again he found it wasn’t his niche. He says now, with a self-deprecating chuckle, “Nobody ever says ‘I remember you when you were a jockey.’ They say, ‘I remember you when you were trying to ride.’”

It was something less than an auspicious beginning for Baffert when he finally chose to take up training seriously. He had 12 horses as he opened his first stable at Rillito Downs in Arizona – 12 horses and one groom. “It was him and me,” Baffert said. “I borrowed $1,000 from my grandmother so I could buy buckets and other stuff for the barn. I told her I’d pay her back in a month.”

With something of an incredulous, but proud, laugh, he said, “She told me I was the only one that ever paid her back.”

Perhaps a sign of things to come occurred when he won the Rillito Derby with the first horse he ever saddled for a stakes race, a horse whose name he couldn’t remember. One of his quarter horse owners had a couple of Thoroughbreds and asked Baffert to train them and he did. “I really didn’t like the Thoroughbreds much, because in Arizona the big money was in quarter horses,” he said.

It took the first Breeders’ Cup championship day at Hollywood Park in 1984 to really do the trick for Baffert. “That’s what really got me into this. Man, that was awesome. Then I started watching all the Derbies, but I never dreamed about running or winning there. And I sure wasn’t thinking about the Hall of Fame.”

For all practical purposes Pegram pushed Baffert into training Thoroughbreds. Baffert, a bit skittish at the time, told Pegram, “I’m going to need a year to get my bearings because I don‘t know what the hell I’m doing. He understood that, so I went to the [Keeneland] September sale. The first horse I bought was Thirty Slews for $30,000.

“When I won the Breeders’ Cup [1992 Sprint] with him I thought this is it, this is as far as I’m going to get. And, you know, I really didn’t get a lot of business out of that.

“It took Cavonnier to really get me some business. That’s when I really got involved, going to the Kentucky Derby for the first time [1996]. If I had just lit up the board with him I would have been happy, but when I lost by a nose it was sickening.” Cavonnier appeared to be a sure winner coming through the stretch but Grindstone caught him with the final jump at the wire. It has been considered by many as the closest Derby of modern times.

“I had it, it was right there,” he said, seemingly agonizing even now over the loss. “That was my worst loss ever. It wasn’t the Belmont [which he lost three times on the brink of winning the Triple Crown] or losing the Triple Crown. With that loss, I thought I’ll never get another chance; I’ll never be back here. At least I got to feel what it was like to win the Derby – for about two minutes. It really ate at us for a year.”

Of his impending induction into the Hall of Fame, Baffert said, “It’s the ultimate honor. It hasn’t sunk in yet. I don’t think it will, until I get there. My whole family is going. Actually, it’s more for them – my mother and father. One thing about this sport, I’ve had the chance to enjoy it with all my family. My dad would like to have been a trainer, but he was trying to raise seven kids. This Hall of Fame is about him. He’s living his dream through me.”

And that’s OK with Bob.

Going into the Hall with Pegram’s Silverbulletday helps make the day extra special. “It’s going to be great to have Mike there. I think my biggest accomplishment in racing was winning the Derby for Mike Pegram [with Real Quiet]. He’s the guy who got me into this thing. It just proves that good things happen to good people, and I think that’s why it happened to him.”