SAN DIEGO — Now came time for the racehorse and the trainer to attempt a reunion with the Pacific Ocean between them. Reunion would have to come by FaceTime, from Japan to California. It would come last September, and it would require the indispensable help of a “Chromie,” that term for fans of California Chrome, the magical horse of proletariat breeding who won the Kentucky Derby 10 years ago, then sprinkled fine mirth across the Triple Crown until the Belmont Stakes proved one test too far.
The Chromie, Marianne Malczewski, held up the phone from the farm about an hour from Sapporo, and the oldest trainer to win a Kentucky Derby, Art Sherman, held a phone in his San Diego home where he’s retired and 87 and waking up later than ever — even 7 a.m. sometimes! — and walking two dogs and joining his wife of 64 years, Faye, at the occasional neighborhood block party.
The attempt at reunion might answer some questions.
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Do horses do FaceTime?
Will a racehorse who won $14.75 million, the Derby, the Preakness and the Dubai World Cup, who finished third and second in Breeders’ Cup Classics and who was horse of the year twice even bother with FaceTime?
What a path they had taken from spring 2013, when the colt of the $8,000 mare and the $2,500 sire arrived at the Hollywood Park barn of Sherman, a former jockey turned trainer, with a smallish operation and a discerning approach that saw quality but not fame. “He had the right conformation and the right look to him, and seemed smart,” Sherman recalled in late April from his living room couch. “Then he adapted pretty fast after that, you know, training-wise. He wasn’t hard to train. He liked to do his work, and he was an eager beaver, which is always good in a racehorse.”
He would win nine times in graded stakes races while running from 2013 to 2016, causing Sherman to sit years later and epitomize the mystery of the sport when he said, “I never thought that he’d be the horse he turned out to be.”
He blossomed to elite as he tore through the California Derby-prep season and arrived in Louisville an underdog in life but a favorite in the country’s most humongous race. Then he filled the Shermans’ week with friends they knew they had and friends they didn’t know they had and microphones every time Art turned around. He got Sherman into the position of incurring morsels of second-guessing because he didn’t work the horse during the week, of which Sherman speaks a fine bromide of life: “You’ve always got to have a knock or two against you.”
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Then California Chrome arrived at the top of the stretch situated neatly in third before pouncing to an airy lead and doling to his humans a feeling words cannot convey as Sherman, the trainer who would go 1-0-0 lifetime in the Kentucky Derby, felt his old jockey feelings rekindle in the stands. Then the Shermans and California Chrome’s unpretentious owners headed for the winner’s circle through the masses as, Sherman says now, “If you didn’t have the highway patrolmen leading the way, I don’t think I’d have made it down there!”
Then the horse who relished competition kept filling the Shermans’ lives with memories and their glassed living-room cabinet with coveted baubles. Through 27 races and 16 wins, he airlifted Sherman’s career from good and happy to beyond his dreams and on to wonderland.
He allowed Sherman’s life a dumbfounding set of travel extremes: He’s the same person who, as an aspiring jockey at 18, rode in a boxcar five days from Los Angeles to Miami with eventual 1955 Kentucky Derby winner Swaps, with water spitting into Sherman’s face whenever Swaps would dip into one of his water buckets, and then, at 78 and 79, rode Emirates to Dubai up front where the water came from the onboard shower. “I said to Faye, ‘They ruined me as far as airplanes; now they put you in like cattle!’ ” Sherman says.
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All the while, California Chrome shouted a lesson to anyone willing to hear: The world teems with skilled horsemen and horsewomen whose names we never learn as they toil morning upon morning.
“I always thought about that, you know, being a former rider, riding for [trainers],” Sherman says, “and I said, ‘Gee, they always had them good claiming horses, good leg men, conditioners,’ you know, but just never had that opportunity to have a great horse. So I always thought I was fortunate enough to do that and, you know, always thought that I was lucky, really lucky, to come up with California Chrome in my barn. A $2,500 mare and a $1,500 stud fee. You know, what’s your chance of doing that now?”
He says: “It’s a lot of pressure when they get $2 million for a horse. I don’t care what they say. You know there’s added pressure. There was never added pressure for me, you know, knowing that he was a ham-and-egger that made it. You know what I mean? Just one of them guys that slipped through the cracks, just got lucky, he turned out to be one of those horses that you always dream of, the poor people in this game, you know what I mean? How do you get one like that now? ... Look at the sheikhs and stuff — they can’t buy a horse to win the Derby. It’s killing them, too. You talk to [Sheikh] Mohammed [of Dubai], he says, ‘You know I have never won the Derby.’ I say, ‘A lot of people have never won the Derby, who thought they would.’ It’s not the easiest race in the world to try and win.”
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Malczewski, the Chromie who provided the FaceTime assist, saw that win, the lone Derby she has witnessed in person. She kept visiting California Chrome at his races and thereafter, taking him Mrs. Pastures cookies for horses when he lived in Kentucky until he seemed to equate her voice with the promise of treats. He took her global as well, over the Pacific for her first trip overseas. In one of those cases of friendships formed over shared fondness for certain horses, Malczewski, who is from near Buffalo, would join a friend from Kansas City and a friend from San Francisco in traveling to Japan, where California Chrome has resided in stud since early 2020, a relocation from Kentucky that caused Sherman some melancholy.
They traveled to California Chrome’s current residence, and they started with the tour, and they found him in his swell digs with his head in the hay until her voice found its familiar refrain, “Chrome, I’m back!” whereupon, she said, “His head popped up like, ‘I know those words.’ ”
He got the cookies, and soon she got out the FaceTime.
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In San Diego by then, Sherman coped with his second year of retirement. He does not golf. He does not make stuff. His thumb is not green. He does walk the dogs, and he does let loose his ready and lengthy laugh. He fields calls from sons Steve and Alan, and he treats the former, a trainer, to his vivid observations. (“You can’t win by going 10 wide! Tell them jocks to sit down and save the ground!”)
Old jockey injuries, such as the one to the collarbone, flare up sometimes. “Most of my friends have passed away,” he says, “and owners. I’ve outlived all my owners.” He appreciates California’s horse safety push as helping deter “the bad apples,” he said, but he disliked some of the rigors therein, as in, “I said, ‘God almighty! I’ve been working for 40 years; now I’ve got to go to a class to learn!’ ” He misses the track ecosystem, and he really, really misses the horses. “I’m finally accepting retirement,” he says. “I’m not loving it, but I’m accepting it — let’s put it that way.”
He can’t believe it has been 10 years, and now an old friend with a long face appeared on FaceTime from Japan, and a sport long on complication distilled to one of its original strands of magic: that kinship from species to species.
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“And it was the darnedest thing, too,” Sherman says, “because I yelled, ‘Hey, Chrome!’ And he looked at me. He went like that” — Sherman stirred and contorted his face at this point — “like he knew my voice, you know what I mean? And I said, ‘Oh, wow, he still remembers me, you know.’ ”
“Oh, yeah,” Malczewski said. “His head looked right at the phone like: ‘Where are you? I hear you, but where are you?’ ”
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