To Race, She Had to Pony Up

Mary Frances Rowe can’t resist four-footed creatures and they can’t resist her.

“Animals always run to me,” she said.

But they don’t always run for her.

The retired office manager learned that the hard way after buying three racehorses in two months, never mind that she hadn’t been around a steed since growing up on her family’s corn and cotton farm in Alabama.

None of the Thoroughbreds proved a winner. Three years later, she is $144,000 in the hole, horseless and angry.

Although most greenhorns who go bust at the track limp away from their misfortune, Rowe has kicked back at the racing establishment, waging a one-woman campaign against a business whose genteel traditions belie the rough nature of the trade.

Rowe’s experience offers an un-blinkered look at the pitfalls that novice owners can encounter in horse racing, a $26-billion-a-year industry that depends on drawing fresh ranks of amateurs to auction stables.

If Rowe gets her way, the enterprise will become more transparent.

The 74-year-old Hemet resident has fought for disclosure of information on the alleged doping of horses in California and has challenged purse awards in drug-tainted races. She also insisted on a rare refund from the man who sold her the Thoroughbreds, Jack Van Berg, a Hall of Fame trainer and 1987 winner of the Kentucky Derby, which is to have its 132nd running today.

Rowe says that, if she has become a royal pain to the sport of kings, it is in hopes of achieving reforms. Her targets describe her as a gadfly and suggest that revenge is her true motive.

“She seems like she’s on some kind of crusade,” said John Harris, a rancher who sits on the California Horse Racing Board, which Rowe has taken to task and to court.

“Little ol’ me.... I’m a fighter,” said Rowe, whose Southern roots add syrup to her speech and starch to her manners (she unfailingly refers to her husband, Clive, as “Mr. Rowe”). “They call me ‘Steel Magnolia.’ ”

Her misadventures in racing began on a March day three years ago. She had visited a Thoroughbred ranch in her neighborhood and became smitten with the horses.

“They came right up to me, right up to the fence,” said Rowe, who had a pet horse named Mr. Bill as a child. “I fed them carrots.”

Ranch manager Montie Wickliffe gave her a tour, and she cooed at the colts and fillies, thinking how much fun it would be to own one.

“I thought, ‘I wonder if I have the ability to pick a good horse,’ ” Rowe said. “I thought I could.”

She had her eye on a colt that was going for $10,000.

Then Wickliffe introduced her to Van Berg, who trains at the ranch. She said Van Berg urged her to consider buying one of his horses, which he kept at his own ranch in Hesperia.

“I thought he was some big shot. I said, ‘Well, maybe.’ ”

From then on, racing professionals say, Rowe failed to do her homework and invested too much too fast. In hindsight, she agrees.

“I didn’t know anything,” Rowe said, sitting primly in her den, a carton of letters, court documents and canceled checks at her feet, the record of her brawl with racing officials and Van Berg. “I’m dumb.”

The world of Thoroughbreds can make any outsider feel wanting in horse sense. It has its own language -- ridgelings and routers, cannon bones and cribbers -- and even playing by its buyer-beware rules is no sure ticket to the pay window.

Horse investors can study bloodlines like genealogists. They can pore over performance histories to the point of eyestrain. But most Thoroughbreds do not turn a profit, and many never reach the starting gate.

After they begin running, less than 30% win enough to cover their expenses, not counting their purchase prices, said Wendy Davis, associate coordinator of the Racetrack Industry Program at the University of Arizona.

“That’s sort of the nature of horses,” she said. “There’s no way, as they say, to put the heart in them and make them racehorses.”

Not only are Thoroughbreds slow-witted -- “they aren’t as smart as dogs” -- but “25% of the time you have horses that have more ability than you can get out of them because of personality quirks,” Davis said.

Rowe was at least dealing with a respected trainer.

In addition to the Kentucky Derby, Van Berg, 69, has won the Preakness and Breeders Cup. In 1985, he followed his late father, trainer Marion Van Berg, into the Hall of Fame. The younger Van Berg is No. 2 in career wins behind Dale Baird.

But Van Berg has been struggling the last several years. He said his horses used to win 18% to 20% of their races, a number that has dropped sharply. Like other trainers, he makes most of his earnings from a 10% cut of purses, not from horse sales or fees.

Tall, balding and hobbled by a bum knee, Van Berg has a voice as rusty as an old stirrup. “I tell everybody when they go into the horse business, if they can’t afford to lose their money, don’t get in,” he said recently during a break in the action at Santa Anita Park, where a long-shot mare he trained had just finished second.

“It ain’t no place for people in short pants.”

The first horse Van Berg sold Rowe was Justalittleluck, a 2-year-old chestnut colt.

“He was a nice-looking horse,” Rowe said, displaying pretty much the extent of her equine expertise. “I looked him straight in the eye and asked him if he wanted me to buy him. Then I gave him a kiss.”

She also learned that Justalittleluck was a full brother to Lucky Molar, who has won about $537,000 in purses. “I thought he was a good prospect,” she said.

Before buying him, she asked Wickliffe and her husband to look Justalittleluck over.

“I approved the horse,” said Wickliffe. “But you never know.”

Clive Rowe, a retired engineer, said: “He was a big horse, and he looked real good.... Knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t have gotten into it.”

His wife paid $35,000 for Justalittleluck, a relatively low price on the prime Southern California circuit but steep enough for her; Rowe said she and her husband live modestly on their retirement incomes.

She couldn’t wait to see Justalittleluck run. Occasionally, she drove the 130-mile round-trip to Hesperia to watch Van Berg train him.

“I was excited,” she said. “He had a long stride. I was looking forward to when he would hit the racetrack.”

So excited that, a month later, she took Van Berg up on an offer to buy another horse, Gadabout, for $30,000.

“He was a better horse,” she said. “It was just my intuition.”

The second Thoroughbred doubled the roughly $3,000 in monthly training and upkeep costs.

“That adds up into money,” Rowe said. “It hurt.”

She was hooked, however. “I could communicate with Gadabout,” she said. “He had a big heart.”

Van Berg had a third horse to sell, Walkinthewalk. Rowe wrote two more checks for a total of $30,000.

“He was just a sweet horse,” she said.

But her relationship with Van Berg soon turned sour.

The three horses were stabled at Hollywood Park, Van Berg’s base. They had yet to race, and in workouts, Justalittleluck had trouble reaching a competitive speed. Gadabout developed a respiratory ailment, and Walkinthewalk had problems with her legs.

Rowe would get up at 3 a.m. to drive to the track for morning drills. She did not like what she saw and began to question Van Berg’s methods: Did Gadabout need more time to get well? Should Justalittleluck be pushed harder?

In September 2003, six months after they met, Rowe fired Van Berg.

“I treated that lady nothing but nice,” he said. “She was just a control freak.”

Rowe resolved to find another trainer for Justalittleluck and Gadabout but petitioned the racing board to order a refund for Walkinthewalk.

The panel’s stewards held a hearing, but Van Berg cut it short by agreeing to return the $30,000 and take back Walkinthewalk, which he is now breeding.

He says he returned the cash to be rid of Rowe, not because she was entitled to it. “No way the stewards could have made me refund the money,” he said.

The racing board had jurisdiction to review the transaction because it occurred at the track, the state’s domain. Otherwise, there are no lemon laws for Thoroughbreds.

And for good reason, says Dogwood Stable President Cot Campbell, a South Carolinian who pioneered investment partnerships in horses. “Who’s to say what a lemon is?” he said. “If a horse doesn’t like to race, is he a lemon?”

Campbell helped the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Assn. draft a 2004 code of ethics for horse sales. The voluntary code had been partly inspired by complaints of “dual agency,” in which the same party secretly represents the buyer and seller, allegedly inflating prices.

The guidelines call for more financial disclosure and encourage first-time owners to be realistic about potential losses.

Association President Dan Metzger said neophytes should consider a horse partnership for their initial investment, so they can share the risk with other buyers while learning the ropes.

Metzger said Rowe’s losing fling with racing was not unusual. “It’s tough,” he said.

But the industry needs the likes of Rowe to offset a constant turnover in owners, said Jim Williams, spokesman for Keeneland Assn. of Kentucky, the nation’s No. 1 horse seller.

Last year, Keeneland sold $744 million worth of horses, for an average price of $95,000. Its record year was $754 million in 2000.

“One of our challenges is to get new people into the business,” said Williams.

For rookie owners, he said, two Keeneland horses offer a primer in the enterprise’s fickleness: Seattle Dancer fetched $13 million and flopped at the track; Real Quiet sold for $17,000 and won the 1998 Kentucky Derby.

Rowe said she never heard of Keeneland or horse partnerships. But she did ask around about a trainer to replace Van Berg and hired Santa Anita-based Ted West, one of the hottest on the circuit.

He didn’t fare much better.

“Both horses were OK,” said West. “They just didn’t work out.”

Justalittleluck couldn’t find his stride, and Rowe eventually sold him to an exercise rider for $1. Gadabout finally began running and finished third in one race, earning Rowe $1,900, her first and last piece of a purse.

Four months later, and two years after she became an owner, she sold Gadabout for $3,000 to a pair of North Dakota brothers. They entered him in a handful of Winnipeg races, going winless.

For $2,500, the brothers shipped him off to two Minnesota men, who retired him. “He’ll make a nice riding horse for somebody,” said Jerry Phielen, one of the buyers.

Some washed-out Thoroughbreds that don’t make good breeding candidates get a second career jumping hurdles in horse shows. Others are retrained as riding-stable attractions or pets, are euthanized or condemned to slaughterhouses.

Rowe said selling Gadabout tore her up.

“I just bonded with him. He was Mr. Bill reincarnated,” she said. “I cried for a week.”

But she was not through with racing.

After her set-to with Van Berg, someone anonymously sent her a package of racing results that identified winning horses that subsequently tested positive for illicit levels of drugs.

Rowe said that drugs had never been an issue with her Thoroughbreds but that the notion of anyone’s doping a horse infuriated her. She worried that the animal might suffer physically.

So she fired off letters and knocked on doors, inquiring if the racing board enforced its drug policies effectively. Again and again, she drove the 90 minutes one-way to the California Thoroughbred Breeders Assn. library in Arcadia, where she pored over racing results and other material.

“I was doing it to protect the horses,” Rowe said.

She also traveled frequently to Santa Anita and Hollywood Park to question officials and hand-deliver letters demanding information. “They’d run when they’d see me,” she said. “They just wanted me to shut up and go away.”

Not true, said Frank Moore, chief investigator for the California Horse Racing Board. “We tried to help her out,” he said.

Rowe ended up finding a race in which a purse had not been stripped from an over-medicated horse, as required by law. That prompted the racing board to review 4 1/2 years of purse awards, and it found two more cases in which disqualified horses kept prize money.

Horses are tested for dozens of drugs after each race. The most common violations involve elevated levels of permitted medications, including painkillers and a bronchial drug that opens the breathing passages.

Racing board spokesman Mike Marten said there were 82 positive tests during the 4 1/2 years reviewed, a period in which 40,000 races were run.

Marten said the failure to re-award the three purses had been an oversight.

“It was surprising,” he said. “It certainly never occurred to me that a purse would not get redistributed.”

To prevent a recurrence, the racing board’s executive director assigned an administrator to monitor such purses.

That wasn’t good enough for Rowe. She told of hearing rumors that the racing board had contracted with an informant to snoop around the barns for dirt about doping.

Last year, she filed a lawsuit seeking documents that she believed would have confirmed this. The suit cost her $17,500 in legal fees.

The courts rejected Rowe’s claims on grounds that the records -- if they existed -- could not be publicly disclosed because they would be part of an ongoing investigation.

Despite the setback, Rowe’s actions have delighted Terry Francke, general counsel of Californians Aware, a nonprofit devoted to promoting transparent government. He says the racing board has been too opaque about enforcement of drug policies.

“I think of Fran as that rare horse owner who decides not to take ambiguity as an answer and to treat the Horse Racing Board as the government agency it is,” Francke said.

Her preoccupation with alleged horse doping also has drawn praise from an unlikely quarter: Van Berg, who suspects that drugs are playing an increasing role in racing.

“She’s on the right trail there,” he said.

Rowe’s only remaining Thoroughbred-related investment is a painting of Alysheba, the Van Berg horse that won the Kentucky Derby. She bought the watercolor from him for $18,000.

Not long ago, she decided to sell it, gambling $255 on an ad in a racing publication.

There were no takers.