Like John Henry, Coach Ron McAnally endures – Orange County Register

A visitor to Ron and Debbie McAnally’s home in Tarzana, California, immediately senses John Henry’s presence.

A painting of John Henry, painted by the renowned equestrian artist Richard Stone Reeves, hangs in the living room. Memories of the 1981 and 1984 North American Horse of the Year dominate conversation with the McAnallys. The steely horse was a favorite subject for Reeves, and he was the masterpiece of Ron McAnally’s thoroughbred training career.

“There are so many stories. I can’t remember them all,” Ron said this week, even though he is making as great an effort at 92 as John Henry did during his unprecedented championship run at age 9.

It’s John Henry memory season. On Sept. 28, Santa Anita will host the annual John Henry Turf Championship, which will draw the West Coast’s best turf horses for a purse boosted to $750,000 as part of the track’s California Crown program. This Sunday marks 40 years since Henry and jockey Chris McCarron last won a Grade I race in the Turf Classic at Belmont Park, before a victory in the inaugural Ballantine’s Scotch Classic Handicap at the Meadowlands, which turned out to be his final race.

John Henry’s career spanned 83 races, 39 wins, including 16 in Grade I stakes, including two Santa Anita Handicaps, victories with four Hall of Fame jockeys and $6,591,860 in purses, a long-eclipsed American earnings record but still comparable to the best when adjusted for inflation.

Of all that glory, Ron McAnally fondly remembers the beginning, when owners Sam and Dorothy Rubin shipped 4-year-old John Henry from New York to McAnally’s stable in California in 1979, and the end, when they took the retired gelding to the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Ky., where he lived until his death at age 32 in 2007.

John Henry’s previous trainers had tried to get the best out of the notoriously aggressive horse by getting back at him, but McAnally saw things differently. McAnally, groom Jose Mercado and training rider Lewis Cenicola treated John Henry with patience. If he hesitated to train, Cenicola would let him stand and wait until he was ready.

“It’s just psychology,” McAnally said this week from his rocking chair. “I told Lewis, ‘Take your time.’”

“Ron has such a sense of these beautiful animals,” Debbie McAnally said.

After a ligament injury to his left foreleg kept John Henry out of the inaugural Breeders’ Cup in 1984 at Hollywood Park and ended his career, he was taken to the Kentucky Horse Park, where his plane was met by Kentucky Governor Martha Layne Collins. By the time he arrived at the Horse Park, it was late and other horses had been taken to safety.

“When the groom pulled the rod out of him, he let out the biggest roar you’ve ever heard in your life,” Ron McAnally said. “In other words, ‘Look what I’ve done, and you’re leaving me?!’ I said (to the Horse Park staff), ‘Don’t you have another horse?’ So they took an old trotter and put him in the paddock next to (John Henry), and he calmed down.”

McAnally would visit him, bringing sugar, apples and carrots, whenever he was in Lexington for a horse auction.

“After a few years, I went to him. He was at the other end of the paddock. I yelled, ‘John! John!’ He looked at me and ran over to me, and I gave him some sugar,” McAnally said. “I tell you, horses are smart sometimes.”

McAnally would train three Hall of Fame horses – John Henry and the mares Bayakoa and Paseana – and would himself be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1990.

But the match between McAnally and John Henry was unique: McAnally, raised in an orphanage in Covington, Ky., got his start working for his uncle, Reggie Cornell, the trainer of Silky Sullivan. And John Henry, of unimpressive bloodline (by Old Bob Bowers and Once Double) and unimpressive constitution, had lost 10 races in a row when the Rubins bought him for $25,000 in 1978.

Both trainer and horse were “born on the other side of the tracks,” as Debbie McAnally puts it.

Seventy years after he earned his California training license, Ron McAnally has not retired, still getting up at 4 a.m. and going to the track “every now and then.” His stable has shrunk from 80 or 90 horses at its peak to three active horses this year, all bred by the McAnallys and owned by the Deborah McAnally Trust.