In the latest edition of his unmissable series, America’s foremost racing writer recalls the ultimate hometown hero who became a California legend over a number of years
Here was a racehorse who turned his blue collar into gold. Once no more than a member of the chorus, he grew to seize the great stages of the West, hitting all the high notes of speed, stamina, and consummate class.
For two solid years, from mid-2005 to the summer of 2007, the California landscape was dominated by a tightly-knit gelding who personified Hemingway’s definition of courage as grace under pressure, time and time again.
Lava Man is the kind of storybook Thoroughbred that turns the Sport of Kings on its head. As a racehorse he was a rough customer, up from the streets.
Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. He showed up for bouts in dark brown with white trim, black blinkers and a red shadow roll, daring anyone to mess with the boss in his own house.
Those of us on the Lava Man watch could not wait for the next mile-and-a-quarter race to come along, the distance at which we were taught true champions are tested.
Seven times he took G1 races at the distance over three distinct surfaces. He banked $5.2 million the hard way, without a Breeders’ Cup dime to his name, while earning an everlasting place in the hearts of fans long before he was admitted to the racing Hall of Fame.
Lava Man was sired by Slew City Slew, a son of Seattle Slew bred by Joseph Allen, who partnered with his cousin, Peter Brant, in both their newsprint company and Thoroughbreds.
Their most notable runner was the champion turf mare Just A Game, while Allen bred and raced the important stallions War Front and Dynaformer, and nearly won a Breeders’ Cup Classic with Declaration Of War, who was beaten a nose and a head in the 2013 running at Santa Anita.
Great things expected
As a son of Seattle Slew and Beldame Stakes winner Weber City Miss, great things were expected of Slew City Slew. He did manage a pair of G1 stakes wins and $1.1m in earnings, and retired after his 42nd start. But with a stallion market glutted with sons of Seattle Slew, his fee topped out at just $6,000 while standing at Airdrie Stud in Versailles, Kentucky.
Slew City Slew’s 21 foal crops were replete with solid earners, though only a handful made significant headlines. Other than Lava Man, his daughter Sis City won the Ashland Stakes at Keeneland, while the geldings Win City and Maysville Slew won G3 events.
Among Slew City Slew’s visitors at Airdrie during the early spring of 2000 was L’il Ms. Leonard, an eight-year-old mare owned by Eve and Kim Kuhlmann and California-based trainer Lonnie Arterburn. L’il Ms. Leonard was a daughter of Nostalgia’s Star, noted for winning such American distance races as the Strub Stakes and Gallant Fox Handicap, along with more than $2.2m while in the care of Tiznow’s trainer, Jay Robbins.
The female line of L'il Ms. Leonard is nothing to write home about. There is a sprinkling of minor stakes winners, but nothing of note until arriving at Forever, dam of 1928 Belmont Stakes winner Vito.
As a racehorse, L’il Ms. Leonard won allowance events in her youth, but by the time she came to Arterburn’s attention, she was five years old and running for a $16,000 claiming tag. Arterburn took her anyway, after which she won four of her next five starts.
Following her date with Slew City Slew, the mare was returned to California so that her foal could be registered as a native of the Golden State. Lava Man, her third foal, was born on March 20, 2001, at Poplar Meadows Ranch near the town of Sanger, in the heart of California’s Central Valley. Eve Kuhlmann, a dedicated triathlete, named her horse Lava Man after the grueling, bike-run-swim competition on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Lava Man was unveiled in June of 2003 at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds for a claiming price of $12,500. History would prove this to be a fitting debut for a Thoroughbred who would end up making Cinderella look like a princess born to the manor.
Modest results
The young gelding needed five races before a maiden win at Golden Gate Fields later that year, then as a three-year-old he ranged back and forth between Northern and Southern California with modest results before arriving at Del Mar that summer of 2004.
Arterburn, a veteran of the West Coast scene, was no stranger to a good horse. In 2000 he won the Ashland Stakes at Keeneland with Rings a Chime, a daughter of Metfield bred in Washington. Rings A Chime set the pace in the subsequent Kentucky Oaks and held on well for second behind the romping Secret Status. Later on, she sold for $800,000 as a broodmare.
Lava Man, alas, had yet to show such class. Arterburn and the Kaufmanns ran him for a $62,500 tag going a mile and one-sixteenth on the Del Mar grass – he was fifth, with no takers – then ran him back in a similar race for $50,000. The date was August 13, 2004.
Enter Steve Kenly, his father David Kenly, and partner Jason Wood. They’d been enjoying success with reasonably-priced claimers and allowance horses, with occasional forays into stakes competition.
Lava Man hit Steve Kenly’s radar that summer, who had trainer Doug O'Neill drop in a claim in Lava Man's second Del Mar appearance. The partners spent $50,000 on a three-year-old gelding with a record of three wins in 12 starts.
“At that time, at those levels, those horses would be just a tick away from Cal-bred stakes quality,” Kenly said. “I wasn’t really thinking open company for him at that time, but he had the look of a horse that could improve with age.”
As recalled by O’Neill, there was one other claim in for Lava Man, requiring a ‘shake’ to see who would get the horse. O’Neill won.
“He came to us in great shape,” O’Neill said. “A tremendous- looking individual and very sound. Since he was only three, we thought there was a lot more in him, but no one in their wildest dream could imagine him doing what he did.”
Hitting the board
In his first series of starts for his new people, Lava Man won a small stakes and hit the board with regularity. Then, on opening day of the 2004-05 Santa Anita season, he hinted at great things to come by finishing second in the prestigious Malibu Stakes, beaten just half-a-length by Rock Hard Ten, subsequent winner of the Santa Anita Handicap.
“That was the day we thought, 'Wow, we’ve really got something here,'” Kenly said.
Three head-scratching losses later, O’Neill strapped a set of blinkers on Lava Man and the team entered him in a $100,000 claiming race, as a way of shaking things up. The price was too high for most stables, but there were exceptions who had rolled such high-priced dice in the past, among them the canny Jerry Hollendorfer, who was well on his way to training nearly 8,000 winners.
With Garrett Gomez aboard, Lava Man won by a comfortable length and a half. O’Neill called Kenly to report on matters.
“‘F***ing Hollendorfer …,’” the trainer mischievously began, then quickly came clean. There was no claim. “He almost gave me a heart attack,” Kenly recalled.
Jason Wood still laughs at the memory. “Steve goes, ‘You can’t believe what Doug just did!’” Wood said. “But that was really the day – the blinkers went on and the light went on.”
The ‘Lava Man Era’
After that, the ‘Lava Man Era’ of Southern California racing began. Mark the date at June 18, 2005, with his victory in the historic Californian Stakes.
The Hollywood Gold Cup followed – by an astounding 8¾ lengths over Borrego, the colt who went on to win the Pacific Classic and Jockey Club Gold Cup – then ten more major stakes victories in his next 12 starts at Del Mar, Hollywood Park and Santa Anita.
The tally included two more Gold Cups, a pair of Santa Anita Handicaps, and the 2006 Pacific Classic to become the first horse to win the West’s three major races for older horses in a single season.
“Turf, dirt, synthetics – whatever you threw at him he was able to compete at the top level,” said O’Neill, who has gone on to win the Kentucky Derby twice and five Breeders' Cup events.
“And he loved to train,” the trainer added. “His rider Tony Romero was the perfect companion. They would two-minute lick on a daily basis, galloping a mile and a quarter in 15- or 16-second clips. Do that to a lot of horses, and they’ll get right out of the feed tub. But he thrived.”
At the end of 2006, while on a roll of seven straight stakes wins, Lava Man was poised to earn Horse of the Year honors if he could replicate his California form at Churchill Downs in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, where such top easterners as Bernardini, Invasor, and Lawyer Ron awaited.
As it turned out, however, the competition did not matter. Lava Man simply could not win a race away from his home court. He was 0-for-5 and never got close.
“He took us to some incredible places,” Kenly said. “We live in Arizona, so we were getting on a plane for all his California races, plus all those other events. The crazy thing is, he was almost always winning those big California races, but time after time he’d get nothing when he went out of state.”
Kenly thinks the deeper dirt courses with a higher sand content at tracks like Gulfstream Park and Belmont Park were not to his liking, and it certainly showed in a race like the 2005 Japan Cup Dirt.
Spinning his wheels
After spinning his wheels at the start, Lava Man raced indifferently around the Tokyo oval to finish far back. Leandro Mora, who traveled with the horse, recalls the grim post-race scene.
“He lost the whole frog of his left fore,” Mora said. “Can you imagine how much it must have burned, on a track so sandy as that? To give you an idea of how bad it was, from the grandstand to the barn it is a good mile, maybe a mile and a half. He bled all the way back, leaving a trail of blood.”
Alas, Lava Man had no such visceral excuse on other dirt tracks away from California, nor even on firm turf at Nad Al Sheba when he failed in the 2007 Dubai Duty Free. At home he was Superman; on the road he was a feeble Clark Kent.
“As we went along, he did battle some feet issues,” O’Neill (right) said. “But we had the great farrier Jimmy Jimenez in our corner, and he did a wonderful job. I think it was more that he was a very high-energy horse in his stall, just short of being a stall walker. I give his groom Noe Garcia a lot of credit for being the calm, quiet person Lava Man needed.
Everything we could think of
“We tried a variety of things, though – ship him out early, ship on top of a race – everything we could think of,” O’Neill added. “He just never settled, was never happy. He never had the same relaxed energy away from home that he would running out of his own stall.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a horse like him who was a Grade 1 horse in his own backyard and was an average horse on the road.”
Lava Man recovered from his sour Dubai trip to finish a solid second in the Whittingham Memorial, an effort that set him on his old edge for a run at a third Hollywood Gold Cup on June 30, 2007.
For context, no horse had managed to win the Gold Cup even twice since Hall of Famer Native Diver won his third straight in 1967. Also a gelding bred in California, Native Diver beat a handsome collection of contemporaries during his three-peat, including Santa Anita Handicap winners Hill Rise, Pretense, and Quicken Tree.
Corey Nakatani, also on his way to the Hall of Fame, had been firmly in Lava Man’s saddle since the Japan Cup. For his third Gold Cup, the gelding needed every ounce of Nakatani’s powerful finishing touch.
Over a hybrid synthetic-dirt surface, Lava Man wore down the front-running A.P. Xcellent to win by a nose, while giving the runner-up eight pounds in yet another example of his status as a horse who, more often than not, refused to lose.
“The majority of horses are pack animals,” O’Neill noted. “They love running with their buddies. The select ones will separate themselves from the pack, which, to me, defines a brave horse. He definitely was one of those.”
Fitting gesture
In a fitting gesture to the history of the moment, Lava Man’s third Gold Cup trophy was presented by Jerry Lambert, who rode Native Diver, and Laffit Pincay, who won a record nine Hollywood Gold Cups.
Three weeks after the Gold Cup, Lava Man's groom Noe Garcia was making the early morning commute from LA to Del Mar as the racing caravan moved south for the summer meet.
At around 1am, as he approached the racetrack exit ramp, a car struck the back end of Garcia’s green Sienna van. The blow sent the van into a spin, then it tumbled to the driver’s side before coming to a stop.
An investigation revealed that Garcia (right) had been the victim of a road-rage attack by a drunken driver, who was later apprehended. That was of small consolation to Garcia, who lost most of his left arm when his van skidded along the highway. The racing community was in shock at the news, while the O’Neill organization was traumatized by the assault on the man who cared for their star attraction.
“You can’t talk about Lava Man’s success without talking about Noe,” O’Neill said.
Garcia, a native of Guatemala, was a husband and father of four children. On a visit to the hospital a few days after the accident, Leandro Mora (right) assured the bandaged and battered Garcia, “As long as there is a Doug O’Neill, you will have a job,” he said.
The 2007 Gold Cup turned out to be Lava Man’s last hurrah. He never won another race. Was it because Garcia was no longer at his side, calming Lava Man’s edgy behavior, tending to his every physical need? Perhaps, and that would make for a good story.
More likely, however, was the combination of California’s total conversion to synthetic racetracks, along with the inevitable wear-and-tear of five seasons and 40 starts.
Barely tolerated
Lava Man just barely tolerated the all-weather surface at Hollywood to win the 2007 Gold Cup, but he refused to extend himself over the deep, sticky ground at Del Mar that summer in the Pacific Classic, which was won in the absurd time of 2:07.29 for the mile and a quarter.
Neither did Lava Man extend himself over Santa Anita’s new synthetic surface, in a race he would have won by many lengths on conventional dirt.
O’Neill gave his horse a break at the end of 2007 and brought him back to the races at age seven for a solid turf prep and then a third run in the 2008 Whittingham Memorial. With Tyler Baze aboard, the old horse nearly stole the show, losing by just a neck and a nose.
Encouraged, his people went for the Eddie Read Handicap at Del Mar, then a G1 turf race at nine furlongs. But after he finished last of six, beaten just over three lengths, they sent him off for a round of diagnostics that revealed bone bruising to his ankles.
End of the fairytale
Stem cell treatments raised hopes for a return to competition, but after a single poor effort at the end of 2009, it was apparent that the Lava Man fairytale was over.
The aborted comeback delayed by one year Lava Man’s eligibility for the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs.
Even so, in his first appearance on the ballot in 2015, the unlikely star from California was elected, along with the champion sprinter Xtra Heat and jockey Chris Antley. Trainer King Leatherbury was also inducted that year on the strength of a bountiful career with claiming horses, though none of them ever were remotely as successful as Lava Man.
“It was a real surprise,” Steve Kenly said. “Even though he never won outside of California, it turns out he had fans everywhere.”
“Everything about that experience was special,” Jason Wood said. “Our families were there for the ceremony. Steve gave a great speech. Then walking through the museum and seeing all the other horses that had been inducted, it was amazing to think that Lava Man would be there forever.”
Star attraction
By then, Lava Man was playing an integral part of the O’Neill operation as a ‘pony’ during training hours. In 2014, he accompanied stable star I’ll Have Another east for victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes. Later, he could be seen alongside the multiple stakes winner Hot Rod Charlie, winner of the Pennsylvania Derby.
Still a star attraction, Lava Man drew as much media attention as the younger racehorses in his midst, often posing at home with Garcia. True to his word, O'Neill continues to employ Garcia as a hotwalker to this day, paying him at the full rate of a groom.
In his last hurrah as a stable pony, Lava Man took Hot Rod Charlie to the post for the 2022 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland.
The following day, he made the short trip to Old Friends Equine near Georgetown for a well-earned retirement among such geriatric superstars as Big Brown, Touch Gold, Game On Dude, and fellow Hall of Famer Silver Charm.
“I appreciated every minute of Lava Man’s run,” said Kenly. “You might forget some of the details, but you never forget how he made you feel.”
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