A Tale of Two Farrells
May 30th, 2007by Jude T. Feld
Two of the greatest Thoroughbred trainers of all-time, Farrell W. Jones (left) and Charlie Whittingham
Farrell W. Jones is dead. I wonder which one died?
The one Farrell Jones was a cantankerous old bastard who alienated everyone who loved him and even many that admired him. A fighter in his youth, a philanderer in middle age and a horrible self-centered grouch as his days grew short. He fired more trainers than Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor have had husbands. He even fired his son Gary, who was one of the best trainers to ever tighten a girth. No conditioner, even some in the Hall of Fame, was good enough to train his horses. They couldn’t hold a candle to him according to him. And that was probably true.
The other Farrell Jones was a soft spoken, humorous guy, who had a gazillion horse stories and loved to tell them. He was a genteel farmer, who would sit you in the living room of his Hemet, California house and ply you with iced tea while he told stories of Seabiscuit and Manta, Maxwell Gluck and Bunny McLeod. And you listened to them all, soaking it in like a sponge.
I made many two hour trips to Hemet from Santa Anita. “I’m going to Farrell Jones University,†I would tell my wife. Then spend three or four hours with Farrell and drive two hours back – a rather long day, especially when you are a narcoleptic horse trainer, up before the chickens.
Once in a while, I’d get lucky, and Gary and his wife Joan would be visiting. Then the stories would really fly. You could see in Gary’s eyes how much he admired his father but through the years, the men were often estranged, Gary being gauged by some imaginary scale – a huge yardstick set alongside Farrell – hoping to measure up.
Even grandson Marty, who surprisingly chose the family profession despite the obvious friction, was not without scrutiny. One afternoon at “FJU†we watched via satellite, as one of Marty’s trainees finished a promising third in his racing debut.
“Kid shouldda run him for a tag,†the grandfather said. “He wouldda won.â€
With Farrell, winning was not only an obsession, it was a necessity.
I was one of the lucky ones – one without Jones for a last name. I was never single-minded enough to measure up on the “Farrell Scale,†and he knew it too. I liked my family life and throwing parties for friends and family, baby sitting jockey’s kids when they were riding out of town, going to Dodger games, reading novels and biographies, and sitting on the beach at Del Mar in the afternoon instead of looking at claiming horse’s legs from race to race.
Maybe that’s why he was so nice to me. To him, I was like a lost puppy.
Farrell taught me a lot. The value of a good horseshoer, training a horse for early speed, using old motor oil on a horse’s feet to keep them pliable, warming horses up in the post parade, how to change a horse’s racing style, the value of time off when a horse gets sour, getting first-time starters to win and countless other tricks of the trade that helped get me 23 stakes wins in my training career and for that I will ever be grateful.
It must have been the cantankerous old bastard that died, because the soft-spoken, genteel farmer and lone professor at FJU still lives on in my heart.
