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John Shirreffs

By Frances J Karon
First Published: 14 October 2009 - Issue Number: 14

A steady stream of admirers maneuvers their way to the backstretch, hopeful for a glimpse at “the big horse.” Her accommodating trainer greets them all with a friendly smile. John Shirreffs wears the mantle of Zenyatta’s keeper graciously; there’s no grandstanding in this shedrow. Onlookers gather by the sawhorses that double as a saddlerack – high-withered Zenyatta’s tall-tree saddle is on there somewhere – and names of racing’s acclaimed greats float through the air, because a horse like Zenyatta brings that out in people. But two days before the Grade 1 Clement Hirsch Stakes, in which Shirreffs trainees Life is Sweet and Zenyatta will run as an uncoupled entry, he doesn’t concern himself with such talk.
Getting to know the trainer during this very stressful time promised to be a crash course in Shirreffs-ology, an opportunity to observe the man when the world is on his shoulders. John Shirreffs: Raw and Uncensored. Instead, the world is sitting squarely on Atlas’ shoulders, and Shirreffs, well, he’s lounging in a hammock in his barn at Del Mar Racetrack. Steve Willard, champion Zenyatta’s exercise rider, provides the obvious caption: “We’re a very laid back barn here.”
Nerves are kept to a minimum as the Hirsch, and five-year-old Zenyatta’s unbeaten record, looms. “You know how streaks are. They do end.” Shirreffs laughs. “It would be sad, but it happens.” As for the pressure, “I try not to think about it,” he says. “I learned a little trick a long time ago. I give myself a job: I’m putting the saddle on. So I never think about the race, I just think about putting the saddle on. I know it sounds silly, but…”
As a boy of ten or 11, Kansas-born Shirreffs, who grew up on the East Coast, spent weekends in a Long Island livery stable owned by Irish brothers, “Uncle” Eddie and “Uncle” Hughie Gormley. He and other children mucked stalls in exchange for lunch. Rainy days cleaning tack around a pot-bellied stove while men, some from the track, played cards, drank tea and swapped stories, was just the kind of environment to draw in a young boy. “It was fun, a great atmosphere,” he says. The “uncles” gave Shirreffs riding lessons, and before long he was giving lessons himself, riding next to inexperienced city folk and teaching them how to post by moving them up and down with a hand on their elbow.
Later, after the wannabe surfer had completed a stint in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and migrated to the board-friendly waves of California, he began working at a cattle spread after a cowboy named Jim Matthews offered him a job to teach an Appaloosa to jump for room, board and the princely sum of five dollars a week. One day, Shirreffs was riding to another farm and his horse became stuck in a mud bog up to his knees and hocks. “I’d never been there so I didn’t know that the ground was like,” he says. “Being from New York, how the hell would I know what ground looks like anyway?!” As he guided the horse out of the muck, Henry Freitas, manager of Loma Rica Ranch, promptly asked him to break his yearlings. Presumably, Freitas hadn’t seen Shirreffs ride the horse into the mud, or, if he had, says Shirreffs, “Well, he might have thought, ‘That’s my kind of person, not too smart!’”
Thus began John Shirreffs’ involvement with Thoroughbreds, when the dreams of a drifting surfer were preempted by a love of and talent for horses, and Freitas became his mentor. “He had the patience to teach me about racehorses. One of the stories that I like about Henry was when we were busy during breaking season and it was getting a little late, and I wasn’t sure if we had time to get all the sets out, so I said, ‘Henry, we’d better hurry up or we might not make the last set.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘John, we’re not going to rush th...

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