Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Death of a Horseman

LOS ANGELES, November 17, 2009--Al Schwizer, a crackerjack exercise rider who was still doing what he did best virtually until the day he died by his own hand, was once asked about Bobby Frankel, for whom he worked for close to 30 years. Schwizer pressed his index finger against his temple and said: "Bobby's got something upstairs that nobody's got. He's right 99 per cent of the time."

Both New Yorkers--Schwizer from Amityville and Frankel from Brooklyn by way of Far Rockaway--they were peas from the same pod around the barns of the California tracks, Schwizer galloping Frankel's horses in the mornings and Frankel saddling them for hundreds, even thousands, of winning races in the afternoons. Frankel is also gone now, a cancer victim at 68, and this week family and friends were to give him a farewell sendoff at Hillside Memorial Park, a fine cemetery, as cemeteries go, off the 405 in Los Angeles. Interred at Hillside is a Show Biz Hall of Fame--try Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Dinah Shore and Shelley Winters, just for openers. Also at rest there are Hank Greenberg and Milton Berle, who said that he didn't cash many tickets at the track, but more than a few of them were on Frankel horses. If anybody was capable of making Berle a winner at the races, it might be Frankel with his horses.

Many years after Frankel, I also left New York for California, about the time Bobby was shedding the label of a claiming trainer out here. As though that was a pejorative in his case. He turned the California claiming game upside down, buying horses out of races and successfully running them back by the carloads. There were no sacred cows in his roughshod path, and no apologies along the way. If anything, Frankel was wont to rubbing it in. "I'm the best in the business," he told Sports Illustrated in 1974. He was barely 33, and by most news accounts Brash had replaced Bobby as his first name.

His watershed horse, the one that took him from the claiming game to a higher level, was probably Wickerr, whom he claimed for $40,000 and then twice saddled for wins in the graded Eddie Read Handicap at Del Mar. After that, the sky was the limit, and a decade later, in 1990, a computer kicked out Frankel's name and someone representing a Saudi Arabian prince called to ask if he'd take over the Juddmonte stable's North American racing interests. Frankel's hubris was still around, but it was no longer in overdrive. He called Eddie Gregson, a Kentucky Derby-winning trainer and a good friend, to say that he didn't want to take these horses if it meant that Gregson would be losing them. "Take 'em," Gregson said. "You've got to take 'em, because they're going to fire me, anyway."

I was never above talking to claiming trainers--we all know that they're the horsemen who really make the game go--but the necessities of the job inevitably send you in the direction of the stakes barns, and now Frankel, his barn chockablock with well-bred stock, was a regular interview target. We weren't always simpatico. He thought that I had ridiculed him in print for running a maiden in the Kentucky Derby, and gave me a full helping of the Frankel wrath. A few days later, he changed his mind and apologized profusely.

It was clear sailing the rest of the way. A good thing for me, because he was as good a story-teller as he was a horseman. The one I liked best was how he cut his eye-teeth at Aqueduct's betting windows by parlaying a $40 grubstake into $22,000. He bet his favorite jockey, Bobby Ussery, on a day when he won five races, and the one race Ussery lost, Frankel wisely got off him to bet the winning horse. In one afternoon, he had probably made more money than his father, a caterer, would earn all year.

These were the days when Frankel was also learning the backside of the game from Buddy Jacobson and other wiseguy New York trainers who gave him a long leash. When Jacobson was needed with his division in Florida one winter, he turned over his Maryland string to Frankel and gave him carte blanche. Jacobson and Frankel, that was a lasting friendship that went far beyond the race track. When Jacobson, facing 25 years to life for murdering his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend, escaped from the Brooklyn House of Detention, his hegira took him to Southern California, where the first call he made was to Frankel. The next morning, a couple of cops were waiting to quiz Frankel at his barn.

Jacobson, recaptured and returned to New York without Frankel's help, died in prison before his appeal could be heard. "Did he really do it?" I asked Frankel early on.

"Why don't you go to Attica and ask him?" Frankel said. With Frankel's help, that's exactly what I did. Now Jacobson and Frankel are both gone, and I still don't have the answer.

If turf writers had to tread gingerly around the Frankel barn, so did some of his owners. The most on-and-off relationship was with Ed Gann, the wealthy San Diegan. It was said that Gann's wife, Bernice, patched up many of their quarrels. When they weren't fighting, Frankel won the Japan Cup with Pay the Butler for Gann, and scored other important wins with Wickerr, You, Peace Rules and Medaglia d'Oro in Gann's name. "You got it wrong," Gann once said as he corrected me. "I've never fired Frankel. He's always firing me. We don't call him George Steinbrenner for nothing."

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