Out of the Clouds by Linda Carroll

Author:Linda Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

While Bob Kleberg was busy trying to build the perfect racehorse deep in the Texas prairie, Hirsch Jacobs was wondering how he was going to get his own magical prospect. Until he figured that out, Jacobs would continue buying up cheap claiming horses and turning them into winners. In 1941, he did that well enough to reclaim the crown he had ceded the previous year as the nation’s winningest trainer, saddling 123 winners to go along with a career-high $165,964 in purse earnings. But he was not content simply to go on as he had been, making a living one cheap claimer at a time.

Like Kleberg, Jacobs had Texas-sized dreams of creating a champion. And so, like Kleberg, Jacobs immersed himself in the study of pedigrees.

Most claiming trainers had been schooled to ignore pedigree in favor of past performance, since the idea was to run the horse back as soon as possible for a slightly higher purse in a race from which it might be claimed away. But Jacobs, the king of the haltermen, was not like most claiming trainers. Pedigree may not have been foremost in his decision to put in a claim—he maintained he went strictly by the horse’s looks and his own gut—but he deemed good bloodlines a bonus. And pedigree certainly figured in his dreams of finding a future champion in the claiming ranks. What’s more, he was starting to develop an interest in breeding. If he couldn’t afford to buy a well-bred champion anytime soon, maybe he could make one.

For years, when he wasn’t busy running his claimers, Jacobs was studying everything he could on champion bloodlines, poring over pedigree charts and the breeding books that lined his home library. While Kleberg was journeying to Bluegrass country in search of bluebloods and knowledge, Jacobs was going to the source himself: the master of all Kentucky breeders, Colonel E. R. Bradley. If a young horseman were going to handpick a mentor, he couldn’t do better than Edward Riley Bradley.

Pushing forty by the time he claimed his first Thoroughbred, Bradley had already led a swashbuckling existence as a Wild West cowboy, a scout in the Indian Wars, a friend of gunslingers ranging from Wyatt Earp to Billy the Kid, a gold miner, a bookmaker, a casino operator, and, in what he always deemed his primary occupation, a high-stakes gambler. If buying a Lexington breeding farm after the turn of the century constituted his biggest gamble yet, Bradley resolved to remove some element of chance through the careful study of pedigrees. He soon emerged as the nation’s preeminent breeder, earning the honorary commission of “Kentucky Colonel” for his pioneering role forging the Bluegrass State into America’s Thoroughbred capital and the Kentucky Derby into its marquee race. By the time Jacobs started picking his brain in the 1930s, Colonel Bradley had rewritten history as the first owner ever to win the Kentucky Derby four times as well as the first to do so twice in a row.

Every chance he got, Jacobs would sit next to Bradley and talk pedigrees with him as they watched the races.

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