THE FIRST THING that struck anyone who met Laz Barrera was his Hollywood-handsome looks. From his brushed-back dark hair and soulful brown eyes right down to his custom-tailored three-piece suit and spit-shined black shoes, Barrera appeared more like one of those Latin leading men who charmed moviegoers than your typical horse trainer. But his appeal wasn’t just skin-deep. Within seconds, his warm, affable, and gracious manner would bubble forth. Those who got to know him better found him to be sentimental, romantic, compassionate—and disarmingly funny. To sportswriters and all the readers they introduced him to, he was always the charismatic, charming, clever, captivating, and colorful Cuban.
Laz Barrera was such a colorful character that Sports Illustrated dubbed him “the Casey Stengel of the racetracks”—a nod to the engaging way he would hold court like the old Yankee manager beloved for his rambling monologues. Barrera certainly had a way with people as well as horses, regaling reporters with homespun yarns, backstretch philosophy, and sage advice dispensed in his unique mix of broken English, shattered syntax, and amusing malapropisms. He did so in a Cuban accent described by the famed columnist Jim Murray as “a cross between Desi Arnaz with hiccups and Ricardo Montalban with a mouthful of mashed potatoes.” The fabled trainer Charlie Whittingham spoke for many of their fellow horsemen when he cracked, “You can never tell whether Laz is speaking English with a Spanish accent or Spanish with an English accent.”
“A lot of people don’t understand my English,” Laz shrugged in response. “If they don’t understand me, it doesn’t bother me, because my horse understands my English.”
Nobody, though, understood him better than Lou Wolfson. Right from their first encounter, Wolfson could see beyond all the style to the substance of the man. He recognized in Laz Barrera many of the same qualities he had admired in Hirsch Jacobs. More so than even second-generation immigrants like Jacobs and Wolfson himself, Barrera was the ultimate outsider: a first-generation immigrant who had paid his dues toiling for decades on the backside of his native Cuba and of Mexico before starting all over from the bottom in the United States. That odyssey stamped Barrera as Wolfson’s favorite particular breed of outsider: the underdog who struggled hard to pull himself up one cheap claimer and one demoralizing disappointment at a time. In this self-made trainer, Wolfson could see the second coming of Hirsch Jacobs. All of which made Barrera, in Wolfson’s eyes, “my kind of man.”
While no one could resist Barrera’s magnetic personality, Wolfson was drawn more to the familiar ring of his rags-to-riches story. With a résumé that read like a Horatio Alger novel translated into Spanish, Barrera seemed to enjoy nothing better than spinning yarns from it in a mishmash of Spanglish and Stengelese. Courtly, courteous, and cooperative, he would spend countless hours fielding reporters’ questions and telling stories—until, he’d sigh, “I don’t got nothing left in my brains.” The abiding image of Laz Barrera finds him at his backside barn entertaining newspapermen and horsemen alike with animated stories of his long journey from impoverished hot-walker at the age of eight to overnight sensation at the age of fifty-two.
WHENEVER ANYONE WOULD ask Laz Barrera what was the secret to his sudden success, his eyes would crinkle. “That’s easy,” he’d deadpan. “I was born on a racetrack.” Then he’d break into a mischievous smile and into a meandering saga that was the stuff of sportswriters’ and screenwriters’ dreams.
The son of a part-time Quarter Horse jockey and a French missionary’s daughter who worked as a midwife, Lazaro Sosa Barrera was born in 1924 in the Havana suburb of Marianao. If not actually born “on a racetrack” (or, as one scribe put it, “in a house in the middle of the infield”), he did grow up just a horseshoe’s toss from the only one in Cuba: Oriental Park, the legendary track that had been built a decade earlier on land his grandfather once owned and that had emerged as a winter haven for American racehorses in that time before Hialeah Park displaced it as the fashionable destination for the horsey set.
“I was born next to Oriental Park in Cuba and have been on the racetrack all my life,” he liked to tell people by way of introduction. “I remember the first time I went to a track. I was maybe four or five. It was the Cuban Christmas, and it was celebrated at Oriental Park. The children were given gifts, and a man gave me a new baseball. I never had a new ball before, and I just rubbed it and looked at it like it was something made of magic. Everyone else watched the races, and I played with the ball. In Havana when I was a boy, I loved to play baseball. First I was a catcher. No glove. No chest protector. No mask.” Here he would pause and point to a white scar under his now-meaty chin. “A bat,” he’d explain. “I couldn’t afford the mask. After the bat hit me, I switched to second base.”
It wasn’t long before he switched to the backstretch. As the ninth of twelve children growing up “very, very poor,” Laz followed in the family tradition of getting a job at Oriental Park as soon as he was old enough. He was barely eight years old when he started out working seven days a week as a hot-walker for an up-and-coming American trainer named Hirsch Jacobs, leading sweaty horses along the backstretch until they cooled down after their morning works. He made three dollars a week walking hots in the thirties, keeping just fifty cents for himself and turning the rest over to his mother to help put food on the table for his eight brothers and three sisters.
Young Laz worked his way up to groom and, at sixteen, took out a trainer’s license and began conditioning horses at Oriental Park while in his spare time also making race picks in the newspaper El Mundo. By twenty, he had saved up enough to put fifty dollars down to buy his first horse, a filly named Donnagal. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to show what he could do with her. “A terrible hurricane hit Cuba that year,” he would lament. “Donnagal got all cut up by flying glass and could never run again. The track was destroyed and would have to be rebuilt. I was young with no responsibilities, and I felt it was a good time to try something new. So I set off for Mexico City.”
By that time, leaving Cuba had already been a dream of his for a while. “To improve myself,” he would explain. “That is the challenge for everybody. If you think you be a deadbeat, you be a deadbeat all your life. You have to dream and work very hard.” To scrounge up the fare for the trip from Havana to Mexico City, he had to sell off a horse he’d just acquired. Not long after he arrived empty-handed in Mexico, the authorities discovered he was a few months shy of the legally required minimum age of twenty-one and revoked his trainer’s license. As soon as he came of age to reapply for it, he found a patron through friends and figured he had lucked out when that owner signed him to a five-year contract to train a small stable of horses at the Hipόdromo de las Américas.
“This owner in Mexico City thought he knew everything,” Barrera would say with a roll of his eyes. “The first five horses I ran for him, I win. But the sixth horse gets beat a nose on the wire and this owner gets mad—mad at me, mad at the jockey. This crazy man runs down from the stands and wants to beat up the jockey. I say, ‘This is not a man I want to work for.’ I quit. I wouldn’t train for him anymore and went to the stewards and told them so, too. They said, ‘He has you under contract, and if you do not train for him, you cannot train here.’ I said, ‘The hell with this,’ and went to Cleveland, Ohio, and became a jock’s agent for Jorge Núñez, and we did good together. In Cleveland, I got the chance to see major-league baseball games, and my favorite team was the Yankees. When they would come to town, I’d go into the centerfield bleachers for thirty-five cents. I’d sit behind Joe DiMaggio, and one night when he hit three home runs, I caught one of the balls.”
After waiting out his original five-year Mexican contract, Barrera eagerly returned to Mexico City and resumed training horses. Even though races were held only three days a week at the Hipόdromo, he racked up enough winners to rank second in North America one year to Willie Molter, the leading U.S. trainer in the late forties. Not that things ever came easily to Barrera.
“Training in Mexico was tough,” he would recall. “If you didn’t do good for an owner right away, you hear the sound of the vans backing up to take the horses away. At one time, I had seventy horses to train and had the best owner in Mexico to work for. He loved me. He would call in the morning and say, ‘Laz, please don’t eat breakfast before I get there. I want the joy of eating breakfast with you. I’ll cook for the grooms and all the help.’ He would say that I was working too hard and we should fly to Acapulco to rest. I would tell him the only reason I was tired was because he kept me up all night. We would go to Acapulco and get in great games of dominos and we’d win because I could really play dominos. One night a man pointed a finger at him and said, ‘The only reason you win is because that Cuban guy is with you.’ My owner just laughed and said, ‘Go yourself to Havana and get a man who looks like him. But you will have to go many times to Havana and you will never bring a man back who can play dominos like him.’ ”
Or train horses like him, apparently. Barrera was developing a reputation, in Mexico at least, for handling them with care. He wasn’t so much a horse whisperer as a horse listener. “What I’ve tried to do is get to know my horses in the same way I know my friends,” was how he defined his training philosophy. “Racehorses are all different, but I think of them as human beings. I don’t know, are they so different from ballplayers? They are affectionate animals. You get the most out of them if you treat them with affection.”
Barrera may have had a knack for getting the most out of them, but he couldn’t overcome the limitations of toiling in the minor leagues with a lower class of horseflesh. In a sport as capricious as horse racing, being the best down in Mexico was a long way from conditioning well-bred Thoroughbreds in the major leagues north of the border.
“Racing is such a strange sport,” Barrera would later muse. “In 1951, I flew out of Mexico City with twenty-seven thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in sacks. If somebody does this today, they think they are running drugs. I was going to the United States to buy a horse named Crafty Admiral for an owner who wanted the horse returned to Mexico. Crafty Admiral was for sale for twenty-five thousand dollars and had been a good two-year-old in the U.S. We got to Miami and it looked like the sale was all set, but the veterinarian wouldn’t OK the deal because he didn’t think the horse was sound. I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t want the plane to go back empty, so I filled it up with hay and straw and we flew back with no Crafty Admiral. Later he was sold for less than twenty-five thousand dollars and went on to be an excellent horse. If he raced in Mexico, he probably would never have been heard of and he might have broken down.” Here Barrera would pause for dramatic effect. “You see, if Crafty Admiral had gone back to Mexico City with me, I would not have Affirmed today,” he’d continue, breaking into a sly smile. “There probably wouldn’t be any Affirmed today—because Crafty Admiral became the sire of Won’t Tell You, Affirmed’s mother.”
Beyond the racetrack, Barrera was carving out a life for himself in Mexico City. Known there as “the Cuban Tyrone Power,” he certainly looked the part of the swashbuckling matinee idol, especially when hanging out with the notorious Dominican playboy Porfiro Rubirosa. When the international jet-setter was in town, the pair might be sighted kicking a soccer ball down fashionable streets or testing young bullfighting prospects at a tienta with the great Mexican matador Carlos Arruza. Barrera felt so at home in Mexico that it was only a matter of time before he settled down and established roots.
It was at a dance in Mexico City that he first laid eyes on Carmen Miramontes, promptly cut in on her partner, and began courting the athletic young woman everyone knew by her childhood nickname of Cha-cha. She was an Olympic diver preparing to represent Mexico in the 1948 London Games, and each dawn on his way to the racetrack for the morning works, Laz would drive past the outdoor pool where she was training and wait just long enough to spot her on the springboard in her red bathing suit. They were married the following year, in the spring of 1949, and wasted little time starting a family. All three of their children—Blanca, Alberto, and Lazaro Jr.—would be born in Mexico.
By the late 1950s, however, Lazaro Sr. found himself feeling restless, searching for another chance to improve himself and prove himself. He also found himself feeling depressed, having recently attended his mother’s funeral in Havana with the stark realization that he would probably never return to a homeland swept up in the revolutionary tide that had just brought Fidel Castro to power. “I could see the political situation in Cuba was very bad,” Barrera would recall, “people running away.”
At about this time, in 1959, an American named Hal King, a Californian who trained some horses in Mexico City, talked Barrera into going to the United States. “You have so much ability you’re wasting your time here,” King told him. After much soul-searching, Barrera agreed and decided that the time was right to try his luck for a year pursuing bigger stakes in The Land of Opportunity. He would do so “with some nervousness—not necessarily because I was concerned with my own ability, but because of what I was giving up and because I would have to leave my family behind for that year.”
Wrenching as it was, Mexico’s leading trainer left it all behind—the family and the seventy-horse stable replete with grooms and hot-walkers—to start a one-horse stable alone at Hollywood Park near Los Angeles. “When I arrived in America,” he would recall, “I was practically broke. And I could hardly speak a word of English.” All he had to his name was a cheap claimer named Destructo that he had bought in Mexico for $6,000. “When I decided to come to California, there was only Destructo,” he’d say. “I was his owner, his trainer, his groom, his hot-walker, everything.” He’d smile fondly. “My best training job was with that six-thousand-dollar claimer who got me to America. I did well with him. He ran third; then he ran second; and then he won, but he was claimed from me.” When Destructo was claimed out of that last winning race for $7,000, Barrera suddenly found himself with no horse and no money beyond the sale price and purse. “One win and my stable was wiped out,” he’d sigh, shaking his head. “I ran out of horses. I had to start all over.”
Just when things were at their bleakest, he caught a break from a fellow trainer he had befriended not long after arriving in California. Bill Winfrey, who had famously trained the great Native Dancer through a near-perfect career, was stabled across from Barrera’s now-barren stall at Hollywood Park and had taken a shine to the personable Cuban. Winfrey was planning to take a vacation and was seeking a temporary replacement to train the horses he handled for the high-society sportsman Alfred G. Vanderbilt’s stable there. Recognizing Barrera as “a talented and thorough horseman who gives attention to every detail,” Winfrey asked him to take over the training of eight horses owned by Vanderbilt. Barrera did so well with those loaners that Winfrey, upon his return from vacation, concluded that his friend was wasting his time at Hollywood Park. “New York,” Winfrey advised, “is the place for you.”
Shortly after that, Barrera met the New York–based owner who could make the move possible. Emil Dolce, a Long Island restaurateur who had built a small but profitable stable on claimers, was looking for a new trainer. Barrera took over Dolce’s stable on a full-time basis in 1960 and settled down on Long Island with Carmen and the kids.
Among the first horses Barrera trained in New York was Grid Iron Hero, a $7,500 claimer that he turned into a stakes-winning handicapper. Barrera had done such a masterful job with Grid Iron Hero that Lou Wolfson expressed interest in buying the colt from Dolce. Barrera’s commission on the sale would have been $20,000—a pittance for Wolfson, but a windfall for the trainer in those days. When Wolfson came around to look at the bay, however, Barrera felt compelled to pull him aside and say, “Mr. Wolfson, I respect you too much to let you waste your money. This horse is not sound.” Wolfson thanked Barrera for his candor and made a mental note to keep an eye on the trainer’s career.
Several years later, when Burley Parke decided to retire from training, Wolfson remembered the honest Cuban and recruited him to take over Harbor View’s stable. By now one of the leading trainers in New York, Barrera was reluctant to leave Dolce out of a sense of loyalty. Wolfson had his heart set on a private trainer to saddle Harbor View’s horses exclusively, just as Parke had done for the past several years. With Barrera unavailable, Wolfson hired Parke’s younger brother Ivan as Harbor View’s trainer. When Ivan Parke retired just as Harbor View was gearing up its revived stable in the early seventies, Wolfson remembered Barrera and reached out to him once again.
By this time, Barrera had established himself as a trainer known for getting the most out of horses that were generally still a cut below top class. He had been on a roll since winning his first major U.S. stakes race in 1971 with Tinajero, a well-bred gray colt he’d brought over from Puerto Rico for owner Rafael Escudero. On his growing client roster, that’s the owner Barrera had become closest with and the one he couldn’t bring himself to abandon. “I asked him to train exclusively for Harbor View Farm,” Wolfson recalled, “but he told me he had one owner he didn’t want to give up. The man had a malignancy. Laz was afraid he might die if he dropped him. I was so impressed with his loyalty and his feeling. I told him to take part of my horses if he wanted them, and he did.”
That was in 1974. Barrera had come full circle: the eight-year-old boy once employed as a hot-walker by Hirsch Jacobs was now a fifty-year-old man employed as a trainer by the late horseman’s daughter, Patrice, and her husband, Lou Wolfson. Ever since Barrera arrived in New York, there had been no trainer he admired more than Jacobs and none whose advice he heeded more. Whenever one of his horses got relaxed enough to yawn before a race, Barrera couldn’t help but smile and recall one of Jacobs’s maxims: “If your horse yawns, he will run his best.” Now Barrera would get the chance to apply lessons learned from Jacobs to horses owned by Jacobs’s daughter. “Absolutely I believe in fate,” Barrera decided. “Things like that happen too much not to believe in fate.”
As fate would have it, the horse that would propel Barrera from backstretch obscurity to national prominence was almost as much of a surprise sleeper as the one that had done the same thing for Jacobs’s career three decades earlier. Bold Forbes—or, as Barrera would always mangle the name, “Bo Forbus”—would become his own personal Stymie.
Of all the horses Barrera was then training for twenty-one different owners, he could tout a couple of Harbor View two-year-olds as Kentucky Derby prospects ahead of this “Bo Forbus.” In fact, when Puerto Rican banker Estéban Rodríguez Tizol, the owner who had bought Bold Forbes as a yearling for a modest $15,200, decided to send him to New York from the San Juan track where he was winning routinely in 1975, Barrera had to be coaxed into finding stall space in his crowded barn at Belmont Park. Upon the brown colt’s arrival at Barn 47 as a two-year-old, Barrera was dismayed to find a small, compact sprinter with warm shins that would require careful care. What was worse, Bold Forbes had a bad habit of easing up if no challengers were threatening his lead. Barrera quickly cured that loafing problem by cutting football-shaped holes in the blinkers to give Bold Forbes more peripheral vision of his charging pursuers, but fixing this sprinter’s inability to be rated would require much more patience and ingenuity.
Heading into the spring of 1976, Barrera had won a lot of races but never a stakes worth $100,000—what racing folk reverently referred to as a “hundred-grander.” He’d come to think of it as a jinx that irked him like a burr under the saddle. That all changed the day Bold Forbes ran off with the Wood Memorial over a mile and an eighth of Aqueduct dirt and thus stamped himself Barrera’s first Kentucky Derby entry.
Not that anyone was giving Bold Forbes any chance against Honest Pleasure, at 2-to-5 the heaviest Derby favorite since Citation in 1948. Bold Forbes was, after all, just a sprinter whose pedigree suggested he could never get the classic distance of a mile and a quarter, especially since his stubborn refusal to be rated meant he would likely burn himself out by the time he reached the stretch at Churchill Downs. Just to make it to the wire, the handicappers sneered, “he’ll need a cab at the eighth pole.” Addressing those concerns in the morning works leading up to the Derby, Barrera sent Bold Forbes off on a series of leisurely two-mile gallops rather than the fast four- and five-furlong breezes that trainers habitually relied on to sharpen their charges.
As it turned out, that would make all the difference in the 1976 Kentucky Derby. After shooting to the front as if the starting gate were on fire, Bold Forbes would have to summon every ounce of heart and newfound stamina down the stretch to fight off Honest Pleasure’s bid for the lead at the sixteenth pole and draw off to win by a length. In the wake of the biggest Derby upset in the twenty-three years since Native Dancer’s sole career loss, friends and family lifted Barrera onto their shoulders and carried him into the winner’s circle where, tears rolling down his cheeks, he told a national TV audience how thankful he was for the opportunity given him in the United States. “It’s still all here if you want to work for it,” said the man who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen three years earlier. “Where else could it happen for a Cuban by way of Mexico City who had lost his one and only horse after his first win in a new country?”
The tears had barely dried when he was handed a telegram that read simply MY MAN and was signed simply BILL. Waving that wire from Bill Winfrey, the trainer who had loaned him the horses to revive his career after he’d lost his one and only, Barrera sobbed, “I am so proud of this. This means so much to me. Since I was a little kid in Cuba, the dream of my life was to train the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Oh, how long this road has been.”
In a sense, the ride was just beginning. Blasting out of the gate in the Preakness Stakes two Saturdays later, Bold Forbes blazed the fastest three-quarters of a mile in Pimlico’s 106-year history before the suicidal pace and a foot injury left him staggering down the lane a well-beaten third. Between the badly gashed coronary band just above his left hind hoof and the marathon distance of the upcoming Belmont Stakes, the handicappers gave him no chance of getting a mile and a half three weeks later without needing a wheelchair at the eighth pole. “Let them talk,” Barrera shrugged on the eve of the Belmont, breaking into a mischievous grin. “But remember the fish: the only way the fish die is when he opens his mouth.”
Bold Forbes wasted no time shutting up the skeptics in his usual style: breaking first from the gate, opening six lengths on the backstretch, then gamely hanging on to his ever-shrinking lead through Belmont’s interminable homestretch to win by a desperate neck. “Never in a million years did I think Bold Forbes would win a mile-and-a-half race,” his jockey, Angel Cordero Jr., breathlessly told the national TV audience afterward. “He didn’t want to go that far, but Laz got him to do it.” The only one more drained than the horse was the trainer, who found himself once again overcome with emotion. “I cried in the winner’s circle,” Barrera confessed later, “because a man who wins the Belmont and does not cry is not a man.”
By wiring the field in both the Derby and the Belmont, a lightly regarded little sprinter let the world in on a secret heretofore known only to the racetrack regulars: Laz Barrera had a way with horses that few other trainers possessed. Like Jacobs, Barrera had a gift for getting temperamental horses like Bold Forbes to relax and even yawn before big races. And like Jacobs, Barrera had a knack for winning horses over and getting them to run right out of their breeding for him.
There is an old racetrack adage: “A good trainer can’t make a bad horse win, but a bad trainer can make a good horse lose.” After Bold Forbes came within four lengths and a clipped coronet of sweeping the Triple Crown in 1976, this corollary could be heard around the racetrack: “If you’ve got a cheap horse, there’s a dozen guys you can give him to. But if you’ve got a good horse, there’s only one—give him to Laz Barrera.”
EVERY NEW ARRIVAL that came under his shed row would get what was known as “the Barrera Look,” an hour-long examination in which the trainer would simply study the equine specimen without uttering a word. Through his large wire-rimmed glasses, Laz Barrera would observe how the horse was put together, how it moved, how it stood, how it reacted to its surroundings. If he saw anything he thought was off, he would write in a book, “Horse is not happy.”
By the time Affirmed finally got the Barrera Look in the spring of 1977, the two-year-old chestnut had already been put through his paces by two of Laz’s brothers: first going to Willie at Hialeah Park, then to Luis at Belmont Park. They were the first of many Barreras who would have a hand in the care and conditioning of Affirmed.
Just as Hirsch Jacobs had done, Laz Barrera ran his large stable as a family business. His eight brothers would all become trainers—three of them working for Laz himself. Like Laz, his brothers all got their start with horses on their grandfather’s farm and with racehorses at Oriental Park before they turned ten. Some preceded Laz to the United States from Cuba, others followed—but none could boast anywhere near the success he had. Thanks to Bold Forbes’s breakthrough 1976 campaign, Laz led all trainers nationally for the first time with $2.4 million in annual purse winnings. That brought his cumulative purses in the twenty-seven years since he immigrated to nearly $20 million.
His burgeoning bank account enabled him to help dozens of relatives flee postrevolutionary Cuba and likewise immigrate to the United States. By 1977, Laz had brought thirty-seven nephews, nieces, and cousins out of Cuba, setting them up with U.S. residences. “Expensive?” he asked rhetorically. “Yes. But what is expensive when you can do something for your family?”
There was no underestimating the importance of family in the Latino culture generally and in the Barrera clan specifically. So it was predestined that Laz’s sons would follow him onto the Belmont backside. He had told his wife, “You raise the girls, I raise the boys.” His philosophy underscored a cultural machismo: “You know, your sons are the most important thing in your life. Your wife could divorce you. Your daughter, she marries and then she no longer has your name. But your sons, they carry your name all their lives. Nothing can ever change that.” Their given names may have been Americanized—Alberto to Albert and Lazaro Jr. to Larry—but their surname remained synonymous with training horses from the time each was old enough to learn at their father’s knee on the backside. Albert, the eldest by six years, dropped out of college to become a trainer. Larry graduated from high school in the spring of 1977 to go to work as an assistant trainer for his father at Belmont. In no time, Larry would be put in charge of the horses stabled in California, where Laz would come to base his bicoastal operation at Santa Anita Park.
In addition to his own sons, Laz served as a surrogate father to the jockey who became his preferred rider: Angel Cordero Jr. Laz had known Cordero’s father as a jockey in Havana and remembered Junior as a young boy hanging around Oriental Park. Junior was still a naïve teenager when he arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1962 and his father told Barrera, “You know, this kid has never been away from home, so you’re his father now.” Barrera took that responsibility to heart, giving the nineteen-year-old his first mounts. Maturing into a fierce competitor known for his swagger on and off the horse, Cordero went on to lead the nation’s jockeys in wins for 1968 and, thanks to his masterful rides through Bold Forbes’s Triple Crown campaign, in earnings for 1976. After his father died, Cordero took to addressing Laz as “Papa.” Similarly, Cordero called Laz’s brother “Tio Luis,” or Uncle Luis.
When Laz had set up his New York stable in the early sixties, he brought in Luis, two years his senior, as his top assistant. By putting Luis in charge of the horses stabled in Barn 47 at Belmont, Laz could rest assured that his instructions would be carried out by a trainer he trusted and respected.
From the March day that Affirmed was shipped up from Hialeah with all the other Harbor View horses, Luis was charged with conditioning him and bringing him up for his maiden race. For the next two months, Affirmed, like Alydar, was putting in morning works at Belmont in preparation. His regular exercise rider, Bernie Gonzalez, would get the mount in Affirmed’s first race, taking advantage of the five-pound weight allowance accorded apprentice jockeys. Laz, staying in California until the racing season was over at Santa Anita, planned to arrive after Belmont’s spring opening and then to settle into Barn 47 for the season. He wasn’t about to change his itinerary to catch Affirmed’s maiden race. He would fly in afterward.
AFFIRMED WAS DESTINED to make his racing debut in total obscurity. Two days into a strike by pari-mutuel workers that precluded betting at Belmont Park, the grandstand was a ghost town that Tuesday afternoon of May 24. A total of 5,662 diehard fans would take advantage of the free admission and pass through the turnstiles that day, but only a fraction of those would be able to claim they actually witnessed Affirmed’s debut in the fourth race on the card—a maiden sprint of five and a half furlongs with a modest purse of $10,000.
Even among the ten young horses entered in that maiden race for two-year-olds that had yet to win anything—half of whom were first-time starters like himself—Affirmed was barely on the radar. Although there was no wagering at the track and the tote boards were strangely dark, the morning-line odds installed Affirmed as a 14-to-1 longshot, the fourth-longest price in an uninspiring field.
That couldn’t dampen Patrice Wolfson’s enthusiasm for her special pet.
That afternoon, Patrice stood on the verdant grass of Belmont’s paddock, the walls of the track’s ivy-covered clubhouse rising high behind her. As the two-year-olds paraded by, she scanned the walkway looking for her boy, excited as the mother of a kindergartner on the first day of school. Suddenly she spotted Affirmed prancing at the side of his groom as they made their way to the saddling stall where he would be tacked up for the race. She was struck by how beautiful he looked on this day, his neck curling, his chestnut coat glistening in the sun, his caramel-colored mane billowing in the breeze. As the colt and his groom made their way along the path, he started to jig and tossed his head. “He’s certainly on his toes today,” Patrice thought, and realized that was part of what made him so glorious to look at.
She hung back, opting not to walk over to the stall but instead to watch from across the paddock as Luis Barrera and the jockey’s valet saddled Affirmed. She watched as Luis threw Bernie Gonzalez up in the saddle and then as the rider and colt made their way around the parade ring. When they had started for the track, she headed up to the owner’s box where Lou sat waiting for her.
She was relieved to see her Affirmed go into the starting gate quietly and excited when he broke well on the lead. She hadn’t known what to expect in this first race. While Affirmed was close to her heart, there was no reason to think he’d do anything special on the track. But there he was leading the pack and steadily drawing away from the other horses. He crossed the wire four and a half lengths in front of a Cordero-ridden horse named Innocuous. Patrice was so delighted that she scarcely noticed that Affirmed’s win was greeted by an eerie silence in the near-empty racetrack. Those who were able to get their $2 wagers down at an Off-Track Betting parlor collected a tidy $29. Though his time was a pedestrian 1:06, respected turf writer Joe Hirsch wrote in his Daily Racing Form column: “Any colt who can win his first race has accomplished something; when he can win it like Affirmed did, he is something special.”
Later that night, Laz Barrera called the Wolfsons at home to ask about the race.
“Patree-ci-a,” he said in that unmistakable accent of his, “what did you think?”
“Oh Laz, he had such nice action,” Patrice said. “He looked beautiful.”
Laz told her that he was pleased with Affirmed’s performance, but that he’d heard the colt was “on his toes.”
“I heard he was all over that little girl groom,” he said. “She couldn’t handle him. We’ll have to do something about that.”
That would be one of many changes now that Affirmed had caught Laz’s attention. In the three weeks until Affirmed raced again, Laz would be on site to take over the hands-on training. There would be a new groom, a new jockey, a newfound respect for the lanky chestnut colt.
And looming ahead was the much-ballyhooed Alydar, the pride of Calumet.