Horse Racing: Inexact but Incorporated

When Eddie Neloy was 14 and a sophomore in high school, he ran away from home to become a jockey. "How was I to know," he sighs, "that I was going to grow up to be 6 ft. 2 in. tall and weigh 220 Ibs.?" Since Eddie couldn't ride, he wound up coaching. Now head trainer for the Phipps family (Millionaire Sportsman Ogden Phipps, his son Dinny Phipps and his mother Mrs. H. C. Phipps), Neloy, 45, is the most successful conditioner of thoroughbred race horses in the U.S.

Unlike many big stables that concentrate on quantity—running hordes of horses in cheap races and hoping for a small but steady return—the Phippses' is strictly a quality operation. There are only 32 horses in the stable, and five of those are two-year-old "maidens" who have yet to enter a race because of injury, inability or lack of seasoning. Of the remaining 27, fully a dozen are stakes winners, and another four have placed in stakes races. The star of the stable is Buckpasser, a son of Tom Fool, who won more money last year ($568,096) than any two-year-old in history, has won eight out of nine races so far this year—setting a world record (1 min. 32 ⅜sec.) for the mile in the process—and needs only to win this week's Travers Stakes at Saratoga to become the first three-year-old equine millionaire.*

Double Play. Only slightly less spectacular is Great Power, a two-year-old with five victories in seven starts and $97,225 in the bank. Two weeks ago, at Illinois' Arlington Park, Buckpasser won the American Derby—on the same day that Great Power was winning the Sapling Stakes at New Jersey's Monmouth Park. That double play was worth $146,791, gave Trainer Neloy a total of 29 stakes victories so far this year, and boosted the Phippses' 1966 winnings to more than $1,400,000.

Since his cut of those winnings is a flat 10% plus expenses, it is no wonder that Neloy is no longer Eddie Neloy, Esq., but Eddie Neloy, Inc. A World War II machine gunner who lost the sight of his right eye at Anzio, he moodily insists that "training is an inexact science"—but since 1945, when he saddled his first winner, Neloy has won 700-odd races and 17 of his horses have won more than $100,000 in a single year. Before he signed on with the Phippses last November, Eddie worked mostly as a "public" trainer for as many as 14 owners at the same time, earned a reputation for spotting hidden talent in horses that other trainers had given up on. In 1963, he invested $125,000 of Gedney Farm's money in a promising colt named Gun Boat—plus a so-so horse named Gun Bow that was thrown in to sweeten the deal. Gun Boat broke a leg. Gun Bow won $798,722.

Game Plans. Training thoroughbreds, says Neloy, is much like coaching a football team: "Horses are athletes, the same as humans. The only difference is that humans talk. My job is to persuade the horses—or force them—to do their best." He regards jockeys as his "quarterbacks," and like any good football coach, he spends a lot of time working out his game plans.