Head of the Horse Factory

Thoroughbred racing is described as the sport of kings. But the man who has sent far more winners to U.S. tracks than anyone in history has no blue -- or even bluegrass -- blood in his veins. He was born on Manhattan's Upper East Side and raised in Brooklyn. He cares less about equine lineage than about spotting a well-shaped colt with a cheap price tag.

Yet last week at Aqueduct, Trainer Hirsch Jacobs, 56, saw his 3,000th thoroughbred enter the winner's circle.

For two days Jacobs stood at 2,999 wins -- and New York newspapers waited excitedly for the memorable 3,000th.

Jacobs, as always, went calmly about his business. He entered five horses one day.

All lost. He entered four the next. All lost. Finally, in a $3,500 claiming race on the third day, a filly named Blue Waters won. The Aqueduct crowd of 26,000 sub way jockeys cheered as though they had just seen the Kentucky Derby.

Cheaper by the Dozen. Unlike such other famed trainers as Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons (Wheatley Stable, Ogden Phipps) and Jimmy Jones (Calumet Farm), canny Hirsch Jacobs works for himself: he breeds and trains his own horses. While rival trainers tend to concentrate on a few promising horses, developing and saving them for a handful of high-prize stakes races, Jacobs sends his to the gate in wholesale lots. With his horse-factory methods, Jacobs seldom gets a truly famous horse. He has never, for example, won the Kentucky Derby; nor does he have a candidate for 1960's triple crown of racing. But if he lags in the big races, he hogs the lesser ones: in total wins he has led the nation's trainers for eleven years, topped his rivals on the prestigious New York circuit for 22 of the past 27 years--and amassed a staggering total of $9,000,000 in purses during his 34-year career.

The son of a Jewish tailor, Jacobs began with the only racers that could find moving room in New York City: homing pigeons. In 1926 he tapped his pigeons' nest egg for $1,500 to buy a nag named Reveillon. Two years later, he struck up an alliance with Shakespeare-spieling Isador ("Kid") Bieber, a onetime Broadway ticket scalper famed for his big bets (he won $60,000 by backing an underdog incumbent named Woodrow Wilson in 1916).

Bankrolled by Bieber, Jacobs bought horses, horses and more horses. In 1943 he found his only genuinely great thoroughbred: a red-sheened colt named Stymie, available for only $1,500. Tough as a cow pony and possessed of a champion's heart, Stymie started 131 times, won 35 races, took $918,485 to make him racing's top moneywinner up to that time.

The Secret. To win his 3,000 races, Hirsch Jacobs figures he has saddled at least 20,000 horses. Still in partnership with Bieber, Trainer Jacobs is getting help this year from his sons, John, 25 and Tom, 19. But he shows up at Aqueduct every morning at 7:30. "This business," he said last week, "is full of heartaches. You get a horse worth $50,000 one morning; by afternoon you can't get $1,000 for him." He paused to run an anxious hand down the legs of a horse.

"Shins," he said. "The biggest menace is sore shins. Anyone can train a horse. But to win, you've got to have a horse that's in shape. That's the only secret there is."

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