WHEN the racing aristocracy gathers in Miami on Monday night to honor the outstanding achievers of 2008, trainer Larry Jones will be in the audience hopeful that his Proud Spell will win an Eclipse Award as the nation’s top 3-year-old filly.
It looks like a cinch. And that would make it a big night for The Cowboy, as Jones affectionately is known. It would cap the most successful and tumultuous year of his life and bring some sweet vindication.
What will not be recognized officially is that Jones is sitting pretty with a hot candidate for this year’s Kentucky Derby, a gray/roan colt named Old Fashioned, who is undefeated in three starts and bred to run a mile and a quarter with his eyes closed.
Old Fashioned, in fact, is a finalist to win an Eclipse Award for 2-year-old colts, but Midshipman, the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner, is expected to nose him out.
Anyway you slice it, Jones had the year of his life, with maybe an even bigger one coming up.
He just might be destiny’s child. If any trainer is due to win the Kentucky Derby, it’s Larry Jones.
He burst into the public spotlight two years ago with a blazing, hard-running colt named Hard Spun, who ran up a storm through the Triple Crown before running second to Curlin in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
Last year, Jones soared to the heights and crashed to the depths. Proud Spell won the Kentucky Oaks, and the next day his gallant filly Eight Belles ran a mighty second to Big Brown in the Kentucky Derby, only to suffer a fatal breakdown soon after the finish line.
Her death was tragic, but Jones was pilloried by animal activists, deluged with hate mail, suspected (without foundation) of using drugs, all of it leading to a congressional hearing.
The personal assault on him was a travesty, but he bore it with stoic grace, the pain eased by Proud Spell’s memorable wins in the Delaware Oaks and the Alabama Stakes at Saratoga.
Now, after two straight seconds in the Derby, Jones is set to embark on another cross-country odyssey, a magic carpet ride heading for Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May.
It’s a long way off, and in racing 24 hours can be a lifetime. But few colts at this early point look as well suited for the job as Larry’s Old Fashioned.
“We’re going to ship him to Hot Springs at the end of the month to get him ready for the Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn on Feb. 16 and then the Arkansas Derby,” Jones said this week from his winter base in New Orleans. “Old Fashioned, at this stage, is a much more accomplished horse than Hard Spun. I think he will be able to get the Derby distance a little easier than Hard Spun. He has already won at nine furlongs as a 2-year-old.”
Rick Porter’s Fox Hill Farms bought Old Fashioned, by Unbridled’s Song, for $800,000. Old Fashioned won his first race at Delaware in October by a nose. He won his second start, a mile at Delaware, by more than 15 lengths. Then he pulled into Aqueduct in November and won the Grade 2, 11⁄8-mile Remsen by more than seven lengths, a performance that made the whole country sit up and take notice.
“This is the highest ranked colt we’ve ever had at this time,” Jones said. “In the Remsen, I was very surprised how fast he came home. We knew he was fast, but he came home the last three-eighths in 36.1 seconds and he wasn’t even out of a fast gallop.” The chart said he won “under wraps.”
What intrigued me was that Old Fashioned got away at 12-1 in his first start. The word, clearly, had not leaked out. How come?
“That’s one of the best parts of me galloping my horses,” Jones laughed. Jones weighs about 180 pounds, but he gallops nearly all of his horses, a sight to behold at the racetrack.
“So I galloped Old Fashioned and not a whole lot of people knew about him. We kept a pretty tight lip.”
So for Jones, it’s a new year with new horizons and new hopes. Last fall, he was so overwhelmed by the Eight Belles uproar he announced he was quitting. He cut his stable from 114 horses to 66, then postponed his exit until after the Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita in early November.
“I believe everything happens for a reason,” he said of the firestorm. “We just don’t understand why we had to be part of the reason.”
He’s not looking back. In delaying his retirement, Jones fulfills the eternal truth about horse trainers – they never quit as long as they have a good Derby horse in the barn.
But wait. There’s more. Jones also has another promising Derby prospect, Friesan Fire, a son of A. P Indy, who won the mile LeComte Stakes at Fair Grounds last week, getting the last quarter in 24.14 seconds.
The Cowboy is ridin’ high.