Don Pierce

DONALD PIERCE: PROOF GOOD GUYS ‘DON’T’ ALWAYS FINISH LAST

In 1962’s Santa Anita Handicap, jockey Donald Pierce was part of a three-horse entry that included Bill Shoemaker and Alex Maese. Pierce was on a horse named Physician, Shoemaker rode Prove It and Maese was on Olden Times.

Maese and Shoemaker were on horses that stood a good chance of winning the race. Pierce says his horse “would have been 100-1” if he had not been coupled with the other two.

There was a common practice among jockeys who were part of entries to split their share of the purse before the race. So if any one of their horses won, the other jockeys would get a share of prize money. But because Pierce was on such a longshot, Shoemaker and Maese cut him out of the deal figuring he had no chance so why share the winnings with him. That meant more money in their pockets. Being the low-key, easy going guy Pierce was, he went with the flow and just focused on running his race. 

So they pop the gates and right away Pierce and Physician get pinched back at the break, leaving him last of 13 horses as they went through the first turn and onto the backstretch. Meanwhile, Olden Times and Maese set the pace while Shoemaker and Prove It sat in third place. 

When they got to the far turn, Pierce began making a move. He was ninth after a mile and picking off horses on the turn. One of those horses was Prove It and as Pierce blew by, Shoemaker yelled out, “You’re in, Don. You’re in.” 

Pierce eventually ran down Olden Times and Maese in the final strides to win the race and pocket ‘all’ of the jockey’s share of the purse money.

“I miss the little ‘Shoe’,” Pierce said of Shoemaker as we enjoyed lunch together at the Brigantine restaurant just above the track with Del Mar CEO Joe Harper and Del Mar’s director of media Mac McBride. It was a roundtable any horse player would pay money to be a part of, the three swapping stories of racing days gone by.

“I would exercise Charlie Whittingham’s horses right over there,” Pierce said, pointing south, out of the window to the Pacific Ocean where they would walk the horses in the cool ocean water. “He would have us stand them in that water a long time.”

Donald Pierce, now 87-years old, will be celebrated with a ceremony in the winner’s circle after Race 3 Friday afternoon at Del Mar. Fellow riders are expected to gather in the winners circle after the race named in his honor. He was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2010 and won 3,546 races during his career yet Dan Smith, racing historian who oversaw Del Mar’s media during Pierce’s days at the seaside oval, believes the jockey from Oklahoma is often overlooked.

“He was a very underrated rider,” Smith notes. “He won all of the big races.” 

Pierce’s list of races won and the multiple times he won them stands alone as great achievements. But when you then consider who he was riding against in those races, his resume becomes truly remarkable. 

There was Shoemaker, Eddie Arcaro and Johnny Longden. Later came Laffit Pincay, Jr., Chris McCarron, Eddie Delahoussaye, Fernando Toro and Daryl McHargue. Names that are stamped in the folklore of California racing from the sixties and seventies. Names that are immortalized in the Hall of Fame.

There was Ralph Neves up in Northern California. He was the Hall of Fame rider who was pronounced dead after a nasty fall at Bay Meadows in 1936. Doctors couldn’t find any vital signs so they rolled him into the morgue and threw a sheet over him. But the sheet began moving a short time later much to the shock of those in attendance. 

“He would shut the Pope off,” Pierce remembers of Neves, “but he never shut me off. I never did figure out why.”

Pierce won the Del Mar Debutante four times, the Del Mar Derby three times, the Hollywood Derby three times, the ‘Big Cap’ four times, the Santa Anita Oaks five times and he set a record by winning five consecutive runnings of the Los Angeles Handicap. 

He went back east and won the Acorn, the Hopeful and the Marlboro Cup along with a riding title at Belmont Park. 

He rode in the 1973 Marlboro Cup that included a coupled entry of Secretariat and Riva Ridge, the 1972 Kentucky Derby winner. Pierce rode Kennedy Road, Canada’s Horse of the Year in 1973. Cougar II, the horse who today’s feature is named after, was also in the race with Pierce’s buddy, Shoemaker, riding. Secretariat won the race in a record time.

When Pierce rode in New York, he would hang out with Shoemaker and Arcaro.

“Those two took me everywhere they went,” Pierce says. “We were going someplace and they picked me up in a limousine. They were smoking cigars and I could hardly breathe when I got out of there.”

Back on the west coast, Pierce rode up north and won the Bay Meadows Handicap and even further north he won the Longacres Mile. He won on such greats as Ack Ack, Flying Paster, Silky Sullivan and Triple Bend. But his favorite horse was the Cal-bred Hill Rise.

“He was the best horse I ever rode,” Pierce remembers, “and I rode a lot of good ones. I won everything on him.”

Hill Rise won the ‘Big Cap’ and the Santa Anita Derby. He won the Man o’ War at Aqueduct and then went across the pond, without Pierce, and ran at Royal Ascot where he won the 1966 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, becoming the first California-bred horse to win in the United Kingdom since 1908.

Pierce eventually won every major race in California during his 30-year run. The Kentucky Derby remains that one elusive prize and the Breeders’ Cup was in its infancy when Pierce retired from racing in 1985. 

Pierce doesn’t play golf much anymore, but spent much of his time on the links after retiring. 

“Shoemaker was still riding after I retired,” Pierce says. “He would call me when he had to ride someplace and we’d go play golf wherever he would go. All over the country. He would call me, ‘C’mon Pierce, we’re going here.’”

Pierce was well liked by the other jockeys and anybody who had the opportunity to hang out with him. He won the prestigious George Woolf Award in 1967 for excellence on-and-off the racetrack, voted on by his fellow riders. You can see Pierce’s Hall of Fame plaque and his George Woolf Trophy on the wall just inside the Horsemen’s Lounge on the third floor of Del Mar’s Stretch Run.   

FILLIES TAKE FLIGHT IN FIRST CAL-BRED STAKES OF 2024 DEL MAR MEET

Cal-breds get their turn in the spotlight Friday afternoon in the $150,000 Fleet Treat at Del Mar. It’s the first of eight Cal-bred stakes on the Del Mar schedule this summer. Eleven 3-year old fillies will line up for the seven furlong dirt test led by last year’s California bred 2-year-old champion, Grand Slam Smile.

The daughter of Smiling Tiger has finished first or second in all seven of her career starts including victories in her two starts this year as a 3-year-old, the $200,000 Cal Cup Oaks at a mile on the turf and the $125,000 Melair on the dirt when she won by four widening lengths.

Grand Slam Smile ran at Del Mar last summer, running second to Pushiness in the $125,000 CTBA Stakes. She rebounded nicely off that race, capturing the $175,000 Golden State Juvenile Fillies by seven lengths up at Santa Anita, then finished 2023 with a runner-up finish in the Golden Gate Debutante where trainer Steve Specht says he learned a valuable lesson.

“I ran her back in two weeks in what I thought was a freebie up at Golden Gate,” Specht says. “It was the only time she kind of gave me the finger. I ran back a little too quick that time. She didn’t run a bad race but didn’t run the kind of race I thought she would. It was the only dull race she ever ran.” 

Grand Slam Smile has been off since the end of May and shipped in to Del Mar from her new base at Pleasanton last week. She’s beaten almost everyone in the field except for one.

Pushiness got the best of her in their only meeting in the aforementioned CTBA last year. The daughter of Kantharos is owned by the Repole Stables, a successful New York operation that has positioned a few horses at Del Mar this year with trainer Michael McCarthy in hopes of expanding out west. 

“During my tenure with Todd Pletcher they (Repole) were a large part of the success during those years,” McCarthy says. “Uncle Mo, Stopchargingmaria, the list goes on. So I have a relationship with him and we talked and he was nice enough to send some horses out to California.”

Pushiness lost to Tamara in the Del Mar Debutante following the CTBA score and was given the rest of the year off. She returned earlier this month and ran second in an entry level allowance, losing by a half a length.

Safa has finished in the money in 11 of her 12 career starts, finishing second in five consecutive races this year before finally breaking through with a victory in an entry level allowance at Santa Anita last month. She ran second to Grand Slam Smile in the Melair.

The Fleet Treat is the seventh race on Thursday’s eight-race card. Probable post is 7 p.m.

Here is the field from the rail with jockeys and morning line odds: Loretta Lynn (Kyle Frey, 15-1); Prancingthruparis (Antonio Fresu, 6-1); Back On Track (Jose Valdivia, 20-1); Andiamo Ragazza (Reylu Gutierrez, 12-1); Safa (Tiago Pereira, 12-1); Roberta’s Love (Juan Hernandez, 8-1); Grand Slam Smile (Frank Alvarado, 2-1); Stop Digging (Mario Gutierrez, 15-1); Pushiness (Umberto Rispoli, 9/5); Shamrockin (Scratched) and Quantum Innergy (Hector Berrios, 20-1).

FULL FIELDS, COMPETITIVE RACING TIED TO “SHIP & WIN” 

“Ship & Win” is back for another summer season at Del Mar, a valuable program that has brought fresh faces to the Southern California racing circuit for over a decade.

This is the 14th season of “Ship & Win”, which offers incentives and purse enhancements to owners and trainers who bring a horse to Del Mar and run them here for the first time. A qualified runner gets a $4,000 check to start, then a 40% purse enhancement. To give you an idea, a first-time starter at Del Mar, who runs and wins in an entry level allowance race will earn $106,000, compared to the $76,000 offered for non-Ship & Win runners. That purse enhancement applies to any subsequent start during the eight-week meet.

“The feedback that I’ve received so far this year appears to be similar to last year,” racing secretary David Jerkens says. “Two years ago we had the highest number we’ve ever had of ‘Ship & Win’ runners and last year we had the second highest number so it’s clearly grown and has been a big part of our success the last couple of years.”

More than 2,600 horses have taken advantage of the “Ship & Win” program over the years, most of them in-state. Over 50% of the horses qualifying for the program during the past two summers at Del Mar have come from California. 

“A lot of our local horsemen take advantage of ‘Ship & Win’,” Jerkens notes. “So they’re acquiring horses as early as April for Del Mar. People are aware of it, they know how it works.”  

The program was designed to lure new horses and new barns to Del Mar in hopes they will remain on the circuit even when it moves to Santa Anita, which also offers “Ship & Win” perks in the fall and winter. It appears to be working. Del Mar has become one of the top tracks in the country in terms of field sizes, averaging 8.92 entries per race last summer and 8.59 in its 39 stakes races.

“Last year, stakes field size was eight and a half runners a race,” Jerkens says. “Anybody looks around the country year round you find four horse fields in stakes races is pretty common, especially on the dirt. So we went into the offseason with the mentality of ‘If it’s not broke, don’t fix it’.” 

COOLING OUT:  Umberto Rispoli leads the Jockey Standings after the opening weekend of racing at Del Mar. Rispoli notched five wins, two of them stakes victories. He leads defending champion Juan Hernandez, who collected four wins…Four trainers are tied for the top spot in the Trainer Standings with three victories apiece. Defending champ Philip D’Amato scored one win out of 12 starts but he had four runner-up finishes and leads in money won…The two stakes winners at Del Mar last Sunday came out of their races in good order. Ag Bullet is doing fine following her win in the $100,000 Osunitas. Trainer Richard Baltas is not sure where he will go with her next. First Peace is also doing well after his victory in the $100,000 Wickerr. Trainer Mark Glatt says the G2 Del Mar Mile is an option…Jockey Mike Smith decided to use the dark day at Del Mar on Wednesday to go back east and make a little pocket change. In an artful ride by the Hall of Fame jockey, Smith wired the field in the G2 Honorable Miss onboard Spirit Wind for trainer Saffie Joseph, Jr. and Miller Racing.