Winning Ways

Never in the history of horse racing have the stakes been so high. And never before has one stable won so many big pots. Last week, Calumet Farm added up more than $1,000,000 in purses won this year (previous record: $601,660). Its pride & joy, Armed, had put Calumet over a million with his victory in the Washington Park Handicap at Chicago. Armed overtook Assault to become the second biggest money-winner of all time. And there is still another quarter million in purses for Calumet's fast horses to run after this season.

Calumet Farm is as deep in reserves as a Notre Dame football squad. Besides Armed, its stars include a plump little filly named Bewitch, whose high hindquarters make her look as if she were walking downhill. Winner of eight straight races, she is still unbeaten, easily the No. 1 two-year-old of the year. Also on the first team: Fervent, who broke the track record in the $60,000 American Derby; Faultless, the winner of last spring's Preakness.

Even in the lush twenties, when the Whitneys, Woodwards, Wideners and Sinclairs spent millions on the sport of kings, no stable had ever corralled such a fancy crop of horseflesh. Calumet's clear profit this year will top $600,000 (before taxes). The only other fancy U.S. stable likely even to finish in the black is Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney's (which has Phalanx, winner of $236,400, on its team).

The Jones Boys. Luck had something to do with Calumet's success--but not too much. Calumet has led all U.S. racing stables in income for five of the past seven years. What Calumet has, besides plenty of capital, is a lot of good horse-sense. All its horses come from the same incubator--1,038 acres of rolling blue-grass just outside Lexington, Ky. Its proprietor is placid Warren Wright, who inherited his millions from Calumet baking powder. His recipe for breeding horses: "Just mix the best with the best and hope for the best."

To get the best, Wright has paid as high as $40,000 for a prize brood mare, once laid down $62,500 for a one-fourth interest in the imported stallion Blenheim II (Whirlaway's daddy). But a basic ingredient in the Wright recipe is his trainers, the Jones boys--old Ben and young Jimmy. Rival trainers sometimes suspect the Joneses of getting results by mirrors and magic. But they are willing to pass their secret on to anybody. Says Jimmy: "You figure not only on a horse's speed, stamina and breeding, but on his personality--they're like humans, you know."

On the farm, such fancy training aids as vitamin pills and patent-medicine tonics have long been discarded. Says Jimmy Jones: "Grass has pills beat." One Jones trick: in hot weather, young horses are turned out to run at night instead of during the day.

The Feed Bag. Many a trainer is apt to shove ten quarts of feed a day at a race horse, and let it go at that, not minding whether he eats it all or not. Not the Joneses: they are cranks on feed. Armed, who has a finicky appetite, eats only eight quarts of oats a day, so they give him extra heavy clover hay to compensate. Fervent, who is even skimpier on his oats, gets heavy hay and light training. The gluttons are Faultless (eleven quarts) and Bewitch (nine). All four of them eat their hay off the floor. But Free America, another Calumet horse, has to be teased into eating by hanging a hay-bag outside his stall.

The Jones boys are skilled at aiming for the big races. Says young Jimmy: "We point Armed for about six races a year, and use the ones in between as conditioners. You can't keep him sharp all the time." Jimmy believes that races are often won or lost by pre-race strategy, when the Joneses size up the opposition's weaknesses.

With so versatile a horse as Armed, says Jimmy, it is a pleasure to plot a race. The old horse can run down a sprinter by burning him out with an early fast pace. Or, against a slow starter, he can hold his fire and save up to outrun him down the stretch. The trick: to make the horse you have to beat run the kind of race he doesn't like. On fat, roly-poly Bewitch, who is perhaps the fastest thing out of a starting gate ever seen on U.S. tracks, there is only one set of instructions ever given. Says Jimmy: "Just let 'em catch her if they can."

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