The Week in Review: A Pioneering Trainer Rooted in Old-School Ways

The morning after Jack Van Berg won the 1987 GI Kentucky Derby with Alysheba, he brightened a gray day outside Barn 32 on the Churchill Downs backstretch by spinning yarns and telling old stories to a cluster of reporters. Many of those tales involved the debt of gratitude Van Berg said he owed his late father, the Hall-of-Fame trainer Marion Van Berg, whose 16th anniversary of passing happened to coincide with the day after his son's training victory in America's most important horse race.

Van Berg, then 50, underscored how his father had been at once both a relentless, driving taskmaster and a supreme motivator and teacher. He illustrated those qualities by describing how Marion once gave him the whipping of his life after Jack had shirked chores at the family farm in Columbus, Nebraska.

“Three things I don't like to do, and that's walk a horse, hold for the blacksmith, and milk a cow,” Van Berg recounted to the Chicago Tribune. “I was about 12 or 13, supposed to milk a cow while the rest of the family went to eat. Well, I wanted to go eat, too. So I went and bought some milk from the grocery store and put it in the pail. Thing is, it was homogenized already. And cold. Hell of a cow I had there. Milk you get from milking is warm and foamy. Mine was like it just came from a carton, because it did. He took one sniff of that, my dad did, and did I ever get the strap. He was right. He told me I was dumb, and I was dumb.”

That might have been the last time Jack Van Berg ever took a shortcut in caring for an animal. When he died last Wednesday at age 81, he left his own Hall-of-Fame legacy anchored in doing what's right by the horse and being up front about it, even if his honest-to-a-fault demeanor came across as cantankerous or rubbed people the wrong way.

“I got my knowledge of horses from my father,” he told the post-Derby crush of journalists, “and the Good Lord gave me horse sense.”

Now, three decades later, as the racing world mourns the man who was the continent's leading trainer in victories nine times between 1968 and 1986, a number of images spring to mind: Van Berg on horseback observing morning training at the crack of dawn. The consummate, hands-on Midwestern trainer dressed in cowboy boots, a work shirt, and a Stetson hat (always removed in the presence of ladies). An insistence upon being addressed as Jack, not “Mr. Van Berg.” A man with a voracious appetite, an assertive yet not mean-spirited way of getting across his points, and a preference for firm-handshake agreements that sealed deals better than paper contracts. Is it any wonder that in his Hollywood Park tack room, alongside a photo of his father, Van Berg used to keep a picture of his other hero, the rugged, principled film actor John Wayne?

Even as Van Berg endured late-career reversals of fortune (off the track, a series of bad real estate investments wiped him out financially, and the same trainer who established a then-record 496-win season in 1976 suffered through a 1-for-121 year in 2013) his dignity and horse-first ethos shone through.

“There are some people out there, they might have more money than I have,” he told TDN in 2016, “But they ain't near as tough as I am. I will survive.”

In that same interview, Van Berg lamented the way the training game has shifted in terms of client management.

“These young guys come along with the texting and the Twitter. All their B.S. I don't do that. Guy wants me to train a horse, fine. If he don't, I don't ask him.”

Yet despite all the iconic imagery of Van Berg being “old school,” it's possible that the public–and even Van Berg himself toward the end of his life–lost sight of the perspective that for a good chunk of time in the 1970s and 80s, he represented the cutting-edge epitome of the new way training was evolving.

Van Berg's no-nonsense efficiency enabled him to build the first major coast-to-coast racing outfit in America made up of divisions at multiple tracks run by assistants who executed his shed-row game plans on a grand scale. Although commonplace now, this strength-in-numbers form of training was viewed by some in the 1970s as somewhat unorthodox. And just like the 21st Century racing world largely bemoans the proliferation of so-called “super trainers,” it is easy to envision backstretch detractors who (without telling him to his face) viewed Van Berg's assaults on smaller circuits as too aggressive.

And while texting and Twitter are par for the course in this day and age, Van Berg, too, was an early adopter of the technologies that defined his era of glory: Overseeing a late 1980s conglomerate of 250 horses owned by 35 different owners and cared for by 200 employees at tracks in California, New York, Kentucky, Maryland, Louisiana, and Arkansas (plus two farms in California and Kentucky), Van Berg reportedly racked up a $4,500 average monthly telephone bill and even signed up for his own toll-free 800 number.

At the zenith of his training empire, Van Berg spent $70,000 annually on airplane tickets (the hard way, by flying coach). A 1988 Sports Illustrated profile that attempted to keep up with his whirlwind stable-hopping noted one week's itinerary took him from New York to Los Angeles to Newmarket, England (where he had been invited to evaluate the then-emerging concept of synthetic track material). Then it was back to L.A., on to Louisville, a return trip to New York (in a blizzard) before, finally, another all-nighter back to L.A.

That article from 30 years ago also portrays the pioneering Van Berg as constantly punching numbers on his car phone during his travels–which, believe it or not, might be one of the very first documented mentions in print of a Thoroughbred trainer using a cellular device to communicate with staffers and clients.