We met George Grey last week. A mainstay for Hall of Famer Allen Jerkens from 1970 to 1985, the 69-year-old groom came back to Saratoga to work for Phil Serpe this summer. Serpe knew Grey was our kind of guy. Wow was he right.
Grey talked about Onion, Kinsman Hope, Sailors Watch in last week’s column, “Old School.”
Here’s another edition.
Aunt Bud had Jerkens confused. Flummoxed.
A New York-bred when there weren’t many of them and they weren’t very good, the daughter of Third Martini and the Rare Earth mare Terra Rosa was toiling.
“George, I can’t figure this filly out,” Jerkens said to Grey.
That was a challenge to the soldiers at Camp Jerkens.
“You know what, I took her out to graze her, took her out to graze her, I found out what was wrong with her,” Grey said. “She was just eating grass, eating grass. But when another horse came over there, she stopped eating grass and just started paying attention to the other horse.”
Now, these are the days when it was more than grazing. No cell phones and nowhere to go, this was more than a token pick of grass. No, these were grazing, walking, wandering, pondering sessions around Belmont Park and Hialeah. All hands on deck, all eyes on the horse.
“Take that horse down the road,” Jerkens would say, pulling off his shirt and grabbing a shank.
Duck Butter, Paycheck, Jimmy, Ralphie, Train Robber, George Grey would start walking and watching.
“So, me, somehow, that energized me,” Grey said. “We had guys, typical racetrackers, drink and whatever, but they would get the job done. Knew how to rub horses.”
The next morning, Grey tacked up Aunt Bud and walked her around the shedrow, waiting for her exercise rider.
“I asked the guy who was doing legs, Mr. Jim Campbell, ‘Give me a leg up on this horse,’ ” Grey said. “I got on her, I was just going to ride around until Jimmy Rhodes got there. He didn’t come fast enough.”
Another turn turned to another turn and another turn. Sometimes turning left will make you veer off.
“Give me Jimmy Rhodes’ helmet,” Grey said.
Far from a rider, Grey and the other grooms and hotwalkers would sometimes ride the horses around the shedrow after they trained or on off day, but that’s as far as it ever went. Until that morning.
“I used to sit on horses when they came back from the track, for a few rounds, but I took her out there and galloped her once around,” Grey said. “When I got to the top of the lane, there was a horse, like, say from me to the end of the of the barn in front of her. I said, ‘Go get her.’ She went and got her.”
That was the easy part. Grey riding leg long in a pair of muck boots and a borrowed helmet didn’t know what to do next.
“Got to the end, I couldn’t figure out, ‘Should I pull her up this way or pull her up that way?’ ” Grey said. “She pulled up all right. Then I really got cocky, walking back, I took my feet out of the dog-gone stirrups, she took off. Oh man, I finally pinned the stirrups against her and got my feet back in and pulled her up.”
Grey still wonders why he did it.
“You couldn’t tell me a nothing. I was on top of the world,” Grey said. “Cooled her out. I put her in ice. Put her in the stall.”
Jerkens walked down the shedrow and asked Grey a logical question.
“When you going to get that filly out?” Jerkens asked.
“Chief, she been to the racetrack already.”
“Well, who got on her?”
“I did.”
Jerkens is still screaming.
“He had a wang-dang doodle. A wang-dang doodle,” Grey said. “He was yelling, ‘They told me you was crazy and now I know you’re crazy.’ ”
Once cooled out (horse and trainer), Grey explained Aunt Bud’s lack of focus and swears Jerkens put blinkers on her and things changed. In 1976, Pat Day guided Aunt Bud in a pair of blinkers to a win against $13,000 claimers at Aqueduct. She won five more races that year, rising to the allowance ranks, all with blinkers.
“Whhhh, whhhh, whhhh. She got distracted and I figured that out in that one day. She would get distracted, when you put blinkers on her, she ain’t got that distraction,” Grey said. “My attitude…like I say, it’s just like a horse, if you finally get her right, she was running for $15,000, you could jack that joker up to $40,000 if you could catch her in her rhythm. Yeah. Yeah.”
Jerkens didn’t fire Grey that day. Or maybe he did. Who knows, they lost count along the way.
“He’d get mad at you and tell you off and then reach in his pocket and ask you if you need anything. Like I said, he gave me a blank check for a Mercedes,” Grey said. “You could always get a job with him. I could anyway. He would tell you off and tell you you’re fired and then the next day he’d ask the guys, ‘Where you at?’ They’d say, ‘You fired him.’ He’d ask you, ‘Why didn’t you come yesterday?’ I said, ‘You fired me. What the heck could I do?’ ”
Asked how many times he got fired, Grey looked at his hands.
“How many fingers I got?”
