Chicken barn came before the golden eggs

One week before the July 18 Del Mar opener, Ron McAnally was on the phone declaring himself fit and ready for the meet, having finally recovered sufficiently from the surgery required for a broken ankle suffered in a spill at home. There was an inquiry, but no disqualification.

It was also his birthday – No. 86 for anyone counting, a number that lined up properly with what he said next.

“If you can believe it, 1948 was my first Del Mar meet,” McAnally said. “Working for Uncle Reggie. What’s that . . . 70 years?”

Yep, which would make McAnally a freshly turned 16 when he reported to work for trainer Reggie Cornell at Del Mar on that Tuesday, July 27, 1948. In the wider world, Citation had followed up his Triple Crown cruise with a win in the Stars and Stripes at Arlington Park. The most popular song in American was “Woody Woodpecker,” by Kay Kyser and His Orchestra. A monkey had been launched into space from New Mexico.

McAnally has seen Del Mar ride racing history through thick and thin. He is to Del Mar as Jonathan Sheppard is to Saratoga, a reassuring presence, as if a large part of the past still sits at the table, offering a homeopathic palliative in these harsh, cluttered times. When they fail to win a race at the meet, as McAnally did last year from only four starters, the fabric of history frays a little, although his 445 previous winners (third all-time) and 77 stakes wins (second all-time) hardly need qualification. Bob Baffert tops both lists.

“When I first got to move back here, I was in this end of McAnally’s barn,” said Baffert, gesturing in the general southwestward direction of the older barns near the mouth of the chute.

“I watched everything he did,” Baffert said. “He didn’t say much, but his horses all looked so fit and tough. I finally went to his assistant, Eduardo Inda, and asked him how they fed. He told me, so that’s how I started feeding mine.”

It was late on the Sunday afternoon before the start of the meet. Baffert and his top kick, Jim Barnes, were in the midst of transforming a dusty patch of county fairgrounds into a summer showplace befitting the temporary residence of the 2018 Triple Crown winner, Justify, not to mention a host of stakes winners most recently joined last weekend by Los Alamitos Derby winner Once On Whiskey.

Even with a media crush of one, Baffert insisted on a brief audience with Justify, now on leave to assess a filling in an ankle. There he was, charging the webbing and having a nip, his white nose marred with a couple of small medicated cuts.

“He did that just today,” Baffert explained with a shake of his head. “He hasn’t been doing anything, though, so he’s tough right now. Pretty good stall, huh? Two Triple Crowns.”

True enough, American Pharoah lingered in the same Del Mar stall three summers ago. And just for icing, American Pharoah’s little sister Chasing the Past resides near Justify. Hip deep in such an embarrassment of riches, Baffet was asked about his stabling at his first Del Mar meet, as he was making the transition from the Quarter Horse world.

“I had three stalls in the chicken barn, over there on the turn,” Baffert said. “The walking ring was about like this.”

The trainer described an area about the size of an on-deck circle. The stabling was, literally, the site of the poultry exhibits during the county fair that was turned into a makeshift horse barn for the seven-week summer meet, and a healthy hike from the more generous digs of guys like McAnally, Whittingham, and Frankel.

Baffert, who was raised on his family’s chicken ranch in southern Arizona, was reminded daily of starting over. But there was light at the end of the tunnel.

“It had to be 1989, when Thirty Slews was a 2-year-old,” he said, referring to the gray son of Slewpy out of the Hatchet Man mare Chickery Chick (cue sardonic laughter).

“He got cast in his stall one day and knocked down the walls,” Baffert went on. “Earlier I had him training at Caliente, because I couldn’t get stalls at Hollywood Park. I subcontracted a guy named Pepe Magano to train him there for 20 bucks a day. He called me one day and says, ‘Bob, I got this horse ready to come in to you. He just worked really good, three-eighths from the gate in 38.’”

Baffert was not impressed. Three-eighths in 38 in the Quarter Horse business will get you a ticket to a dude ranch.

“So I galloped him a few days out of the chicken barn, then I got some little guy to work him threeeighths for me,” the trainer continued. “’What kind of three-eighths?’ the guy asked. I didn’t know. ‘Whatever kind of three-eighths you guys do.’ He worked, like, 34 flat, and the next day he had a little bubble on a tendon. I had to give him four months off.”

Let the record show that Thirty Slews made it back, and as a 5-year-old he parlayed a victory in the Bing Crosby Handicap at Del Mar to the top of the racing by winning the 1992 Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Gulfstream Park. The chicken barn seems like a long time ago.