Steve Dennis looks back at the life of John Shirreffs. Zenyatta was just one of many greats he trained.
One good horse. That’s all any trainer wants. One good horse to justify all the hard work and all the hard times.
John Shirreffs, who died last week at the age of 80, trained a host of notable horses during a career that began in earnest only in his middle-age, including a longshot Kentucky Derby winner.
But the best he ever had was one of the best anyone has ever had.
Zenyatta
Zenyatta was his horse of a lifetime. A huge, handsome, late-running mare who beat the boys in the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Classic, who was crowned 2010 US Horse of the Year, who won her first 19 starts and lost the last one by a head in heartbreaking fashion, and who inexorably became one of the biggest public favourites the sport has ever seen.
Shirreffs, a Marine Corps veteran from Kansas who served in Vietnam and came home to decorate the California racing scene with an old-school grace and a horseman’s innate instinct across four decades, piloted Zenyatta’s lapidary career with his customarily intuitive touch amid the growing certainty that when his time eventually came, this would be the horse he was most remembered for.
“Zenyatta was the ultimate racing machine,” he was quoted as saying. “She evolved into something great. Even walking to the paddock with Zenyatta was such a special experience, the crowd yelling ‘Zenyatta, Zenyatta, Zenyatta’. She meant so much. She was a miracle.”
“The miracle horse had landed in the right barn to have the opportunity to strew such stardust.”
The miracle horse had landed in the right barn to have the opportunity to strew such stardust. Zenyatta didn’t race at two, making her debut less than six weeks shy of her official fourth birthday.
She frequently gave her exercise riders a hard time as a youngster and was not enamoured, given her heft, with the chafing restrictions of the starting gate.
“If you saw Zenyatta at two or three, you would never have guessed what she would become. But John saw it and gave her that time,” Mike Smith, who partnered the 13-time G1 winner during all her finest hours, told The BloodHorse in heartfelt tribute.
Shirreffs had given his own illustration of his gentle approach in conversation with the same publication.
“I think kindness is the big key to horses,” he said. “I think it’s good to talk to them and I always ask the exercise riders, grooms and hotwalkers to talk to them. Horses are always trying to learn from their environment. If they can interact more with their environment, then they’re going to have a more successful and happier experience.”
What Shirreffs had seen deep within Zenyatta, he’d also perceived hidden beneath the surface in Giacomo, the 50-1 boilover winner of the 2005 Kentucky Derby and owned, like Zenyatta, by Jerry and Ann Moss.
Giacomo
The colt was like one of those peculiar tropical flowers that bloom but briefly once a lifetime. He went to Churchill Downs off defeats in all his three prep races, but Shirreffs’ belief in him never faltered.
“After about his third race, he started to fret a little on the racetrack,” said Shirreffs. “So we had to be careful that we didn’t push him hard.”
He slackened Giacomo’s work schedule, patiently letting the horse come to his strength rather than be hustled into it. After each defeat, Smith recalled Shirreffs saying to him: “I can feel it, I know it’s there. I just want to get it better and better”.
Few trainers bringing their first Derby runner to post would’ve adopted such a nuanced approach to the issue and could’ve had such confidence in their seemingly undistinguished horse.
Few trainers, too, would’ve tried to stay out of the limelight after winning the most important race in the calendar. But that was Shirreffs too.
For him, it was all about the horses. He had to be gently persuaded to face the cameras and the press, to which he reconciled himself with his usual courtesy.
That doctrine also informed his openness with Zenyatta, who was made available to meet and greet her legions of fans even at the height of her power.
He understood completely that to the racing public it was also all about the horses and promoted the sport to them on an almost daily basis with his generosity of spirit.
Conversely, Shirreffs was never about the numbers. He didn’t work the statisticians that hard.
His highest annual return came in Giacomo’s year, with 34 winners, and he never saddled more horses in a year than the 182 of 2004.
His philosophy was instead more akin to that of Grantland Rice’s poetic One Great Scorer, who’s unconcerned with whether you won or lost, but prefers to concentrate on how you played the game.
That was Shirreffs to a tee.
He was a softly spoken, almost soulful presence on the backstretch – perhaps an echo of the surfer dude he might’ve become if horses hadn’t captured his heart – in his inevitable blue baseball cap, happier in his barn around horses and barn people than anywhere else.
“He really enjoys checking on horses,” said Jerry Moss. “And he sees things in horses that people maybe don’t see from time to time, but he can look at a horse for hours, just keep looking at him.”
The record books show that he trained 596 winners, and alongside Zenyatta and Giacomo there were headliners such as Life Is Sweet (Breeders’ Cup Ladies Classic; the one-time name for the Distaff), Tiago and Gormley (Santa Anita Derby), Express Train (Santa Anita Handicap) and multiple Group 1 winner Manistique.
Shirreffs was winning big races right up to the end.
Kentucky Derby third Baeza lit up his final full year with a valedictory Group 1 score in the Pennsylvania Derby. On his last day at the track, Saturday 31st January, he won the Group 2 San Pasqual at Santa Anita with Westwood, a horse making his Stakes breakthrough after a characteristically slow-burn Shirreffs preparation.
“On his last day at the track, Saturday 31st January, he won the Group 2 San Pasqual at Santa Anita with Westwood, a horse making his Stakes breakthrough after a characteristically slow-burn Shirreffs preparation.”
“He waited on each and every one of them,” added Mike Smith. “He gave them all the time in the world they needed. Once he got them there, he could keep them racing forever. He was that good to them.”
And they were good to him.
John Shirreffs had more than the proverbially longed-for one good horse. Many more.
And also one great champion who’ll be remembered as long as horses race – just like the man who trained her.
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