Moving tributes to former Kentucky-based trainer from the wrong side of the tracks fought a valiant 15-year battle with cancer. He died on Tuesday [July 15].
Former trainer Garry Simms Sr. went 15 rounds, toe-to-toe, with the blood cancer multiple myeloma after being told in 2010 that he had mere weeks to live. It took a sucker punch, in the form of multifocal pneumonia in both lungs, to end Simms’ fight.
With his family holding his hands, Simms died on Tuesday night [July 15], at Louisville’s Norton Women’s and Children’s Hospital. He was 73.
“Garry Simms was not just a tough physical person,” said Mike Reecer, a former horse owner and Simms’ close friend since they attended Iroquois High School.
“Mentally, he was the toughest person I’ve ever seen. He just wouldn’t quit. He’d give you the thumbs up and say, ‘Keep the faith.’ He really did fight the good fight. He was an amazing man.
“Every time he’d get to feeling better and doing better, before they’d find somewhere else, it was like he was getting a second chance and he wasn’t going to waste it.”
Simms leaves twin legacies: how he fought an incurable cancer for a decade and a half and, before that, how in 2001 he turned his life around. He also was a heck of a horseman who made the most with fairly limited opportunities.
‘One of the best trainers around with two-year-olds’
Trainer Barry King, a CPA who was a business associate as well as close friend, remembers the day – January 10, 2010 – when Simms received the brutal diagnosis.
“He came in with tears in his eyes, and said, ‘I’m done. They give me two or three months,’” King said. “That was 15 years ago. Like I told him when he’d go in for chemo and stuff, ‘You’re a hero to those people in chemo. Because you walk in there and you’re that guy who was supposed to die after three months, and it’s been 15 years.’ He gave all those people hope.”
Simms already was regarded by many as the toughest guy on the Churchill Downs and Trackside Training Center backstretches when he received his diagnosis. Still alive a year and a half after being advised to get his affairs in order, Simms embarked on the most successful stretch of his training career.
That included winning his first graded stakes in 2011 with $4,000 purchase Flashy Lassie in Churchill Downs’ G3 Debutante, followed the next year by sweeping the Debutante [$10,000 purchase Blueeyesintherein] and G3 Bashford Manor [Circle Unbroken, a $92,000 buy].
Simms never paid a lot (comparatively speaking) for horses and never trained more than 15 or 16 at a time, said King, one of Simms’s owners, including as a partner in his three graded-stakes winners, before becoming a trainer himself.
“He was one of the best trainers around with two-year-olds,” King said. “He had a good eye for a horse, a great eye.”
King’s barn today includes a horse that Simms purchased as a weanling and that his owners named Big Garry.
“Garry knew what to buy,” said Frank Miller, another trainer and longtime friend. “A lot of times he’d look for breeding that was first getting started, first-year sires, broodmares unproven on the track but they had good bloodlines.
“He knew how to look at them, too, and then knew what to do with them once he got them. That’s an art sadly fading out of our game.”
‘He woke up and found God and didn’t want to be who he was anymore’
Simms grew up in the rough and sometimes violent Iroquois housing projects in Louisville’s South End, his dad dying when Garry was 19. He fell into an environment where fighting and drinking were an accepted part of life. All the same, those who knew him back then said the man always had a good heart and that you couldn’t ask for a better friend.
One day in 2001, Simms decided he was tired of being who he was. “I hit my knees and asked God to help me,” Simms said in a 2011 interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal. “And it’s been 10 years since I’ve had alcohol. I have turned it around.”
The transformation and sobriety came long before the cancer. Simms’s friends say his hallmark became helping countless others battle addiction, especially those in Alcoholics Anonymous.
“A lot of people say he found God when he got sick,” said his son Zack. “He didn’t find God when he got sick. Dad found God when he got sober. I got to say it was July 28, 2001.”
Miller, a retired professional wrestler, said that when he was young, the older Simms and his running mates tolerated him tagging along.
“It wasn’t like Garry was out looking for trouble,” Miller said at Trackside Training Center. “We just had a knack for finding it at that time, and didn’t back down. But Garry was a family man, a great guy, even in his wilder days.
“He just kind of woke up one day and said, ‘That’s it.’ He woke up and found God and didn’t want to be who he was anymore.
“At that time, he wasn’t thinking of cancer killing him,” Miller added. “I remember him saying he wanted to see his grandkids’ hair grow. He did more than that. To live 15 years after you’re given weeks, he’s the toughest S.O.B. I’ve ever known. Both inside and outside. Garry could give you a lot of tough love. But you needed it. I learned a lot of life lessons from Garry.”
‘What kind of man would I be if I quit fighting because it’s difficult?’
Reecer recalls a conversation he had with Simms a couple of years ago. “Cancer runs in my family; fortunately I’ve never gotten it,” he said. “But I told Garry, ‘I don’t think I could do what you have done.
“You get a treatment on the Monday and you feel like the devil until Friday, when you feel a little bit better. A little better Saturday and Sunday, until where you can enjoy yourself. Then you go back Monday and start the whole process over. I just don’t know if I could do that, Garry.’
“He said, ‘Mike, I love my family more than anything. What kind of man would I be if I quit fighting because it’s difficult? I’ll fight until my last breath. I got to walk my daughter down the aisle when she got married. Nobody thought I’d be around to do that.
“I’ve seen three grandchildren born. I watched my kids grow up to be good young men, a good woman. My wife, I love her dearly.’ He said, ‘I’m not done.’
“I said, ‘That’s a good reason to keep fighting.’ And I know he suffered, good gawd almighty. That’s a long time to have stage 4 cancer. He has taken more chemo treatments and more radiation treatments than most bodies could stand.”
Simms was a born entrepreneur, owning and operating a variety of businesses including The Cue Club pool hall when he was 25. Later he owned Double Down Sports Bar, concrete and trucking businesses, and at one stage had an operation hauling horses between tracks.
“Dad’s always been a jack of all trades,” said Zack Simms. “Before he got sick, he would come to the barn in the morning, he’d drive the dump truck, trailer and bobcat or skid loader into the barn, park it there over by the church or on the street.
“He’d do the horses, then he’d leave and go do concrete all day until dark. He’d come back the next morning with dump truck, trailer, bobcat. He did that for years. He had a passion for working.”
Simms got into training through the late Dianne Carpenter, serving as her assistant trainer until opening his own stable in late 1991. He won 248 races and more than $6.1 million in purse earnings before his last starter on December 10, 2021, at Turfway Park. His best season came in 2012 with a career-high 22 victories from 84 starts.
Zack became an integral part of the stable, becoming his dad’s assistant trainer and at times serving as the operation’s trainer of record.
Zack Simms, who today runs his own commercial concrete company, said his dad was never cancer-free but at times was in remission. Garry faced other health issues, however. That included having a heart attack and undergoing triple bypass surgery last year. The elder Simms was in the ICU at Norton so many times he might as well have had a standing reservation.
“He had tumors he had to do radiation on, tumors on his spine, on his ribs,” said Zack. “They did radiation on that, then it shrunk, then it came back and they’d do it again.
“He had pneumonia at the beginning of the year, had sepsis three times. Just all the radiation, chemo, bone-marrow transplants, he had to get kidney stents every six months. He never quit. Somebody said the other day – and I agree 1,000 percent – ‘If it could have been beat, he would have beat it.’ But it was God’s time, and God said it’s time to go home.”
Reecer said his friend did everything he could to beat back the inevitable, that if he felt up to doing a push-up, he wouldn’t do just one.
“He’d do 10 of them,” he said. “He just kept trying to keep his body strong. He’d eat right. Of course he didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. But he did not ever get his strength back. After that bypass surgery, he got to feeling bad. He told me, ‘I know this old stuff is back. I can tell.’
“Sure enough, it was … he had so many issues, his body was just wore out and beat up.”
‘He gave quite a few a start, a chance, a lotta good!’
As the Simms family grieves, they take solace in how Garry Sr. inspired others.
“I’ve had hundreds of text messages over the last two days: ‘Your dad saved my life.’ ‘He was like a father to me,’” Zack Simms said. “So many people have reached out and told me how special he was to them. I don’t know how many – but a lot – have said, ‘Your dad was my best friend.’ He always saw the good in people.”
Zack pointed to a Facebook post by horsewoman Shannon Zuver that read, “He gave quite a few a start, a chance, a lotta good!!” The post started with: “To have such a reputation as a badass, he sure hid it well, with all his love, laughter, kindness, and giving to others always. Real racetracker Hall of Fame.”
Simms’s other son Garry Jr. posted on Facebook: “A fighter he was! He kicked cancer's ass!”
Daughter Ashley Larson wrote: “Your life was a true testimony of resilience and faith. I saw what faith of a mustard seed looks like bc I watched you live it. Fly high with the angels, Daddy, you are truly where you belong. You left an impact on this world … your last words to me were ‘God’s got it’ and I know he has.”
Zack wrote: “Working for him allowed me to learn a lot about horses, but more than anything I learned about life.”
Miller said he can’t say if his longtime buddy ever truly felt good physically after developing cancer.
“He felt good about who he was and where he was at, I’ll say that,” Miller said. “Mentally, and in his heart, he felt very good and happy where he was at – and the fact he was still here.”
Trainer Greg Foley and Simms became fast friends when Simms first got into horse racing. Foley says he was pretty much busted one winter many years ago and, as Turfway Park’s meet was ending, needed a way to get his horses to Louisville.
“Garry said, ‘I’ll come and get you. I’ve got this old van,’” Foley said. “He did, got the horses on there. That thing broke down about halfway home, and he pulled over. I was following him. He got in there and got to tinkering with it and eventually got it back running. We finally made it back to Churchill. We always laughed about that. There are a million stories I could tell you.
“I’m going to miss him. He was one of the good ones.”
Garry Simms Sr. is survived by wife Dianna, sons Garry Jr. and Zack Simms, daughter Ashley Larson, and granddaughters Kaelyn Whitehouse, Venice Larson, Allie Simms and Piper Simms. (Obituary)
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