Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Big and full of potential, McKinzie a fitting tribute
CYPRESS, Calif. – The first time Bob Baffert won the Kentucky Derby in 1997 with Silver Charm, two of the people closest to him – lifelong friend Brad McKinzie and longtime client Mike Pegram – were outside the winner’s circle, beaming with joy. Pegram remembers the moment well.
“We’d been there with Bobby and knew what he’d been through,” Pegram recalled last weekend. “We were just standing on the turf course. We were laughing with tears coming out of our eyes.”
The 1997 Kentucky Derby was just one of many days that Pegram and McKinzie shared with Baffert in the next two decades. A year later, Pegram won the race with Real Quiet.
If there is a Kentucky Derby winner for Baffert and Pegram in May, it could come in the most poignant of circumstances. Brad McKinzie died of cancer in August, aged 62. Baffert considered McKinzie to be his best friend.
“He knew everything about me,” he said last weekend. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
One of Baffert’s leading hopes for the 2018 Triple Crown is McKinzie, a Street Sense colt who will start in Saturday’s Grade 1 Los Alamitos CashCall Futurity as the expected favorite.
“Hopefully, he’ll do his namesake proud,” Pegram said.
Baffert and McKinzie met at the University of Arizona in the 1970’s, with ample time spent at nearby Rillito Park, and later in Quarter Horse racing at Los Alamitos. When Baffert made the permanent switch to Thoroughbreds in 1991, Pegram, as a backer, and McKinzie, as a friend and sounding board, were two of the trainer’s biggest supporters.
McKinzie changed careers along the way, evolving from a Quarter Horse publicist and magazine publisher to the leading executive of the Thoroughbred meetings at Los Alamitos and a co-founder of a vital worker’s compensation firm that catered to California trainers.
McKinzie was with Baffert when American Pharoah swept the Triple Crown in 2015, yet another milestone the two shared. Baffert did not have a starter in a Triple Crown race this year. When he won four stakes on the Belmont Stakes undercard on June 10, including two Grade 1 races, the television cameras quickly found the Hall of Fame trainer.
Baffert spoke briefly about Mor Spirit’s win in the Metropolitan Mile and then directly addressed the camera. He briefly sent well-wishes to McKinzie, who was back in California. McKinzie had withdrawn from public life by then. Pegram and Baffert were two of a small group of people who spoke with him before his death on Aug. 6.
Two weeks and a day later, a mass was held in McKinzie’s honor at a church around the corner from Los Alamitos. After the service, Baffert found himself in conversation with owners Karl Watson and Paul Weitman, who knew McKinzie very well.
Watson and Weitman are racing partners with Pegram, and they all sought a way to honor McKinzie. They settled on naming a horse in his memory.
“Do we have any good ones?” Baffert recalled being asked.
“I think I’ve got one,” he replied.
The Street Sense colt was working a half-mile at the time at Los Alamitos, of all places, and doing so rapidly. The name McKinzie was chosen. Big Brad was considered. The colt joined Baffert’s stable at Santa Anita by the end of September and made rapid progress toward his first start.
On the last Saturday of October, McKinzie had his debut at Santa Anita and won a sevenfurlong maiden race so well, by 5 1/2 lengths and earning a 99 Beyer Speed Figure, that he quickly joined the national discussion among leading 2-year-old males. The maiden race has led to a start in Saturday’s Los Alamitos Futurity.
Watson, Weitman, and Pegram will be at Los Alamitos as will members of Brad McKinzie’s family and his friends. The colt is a daily reminder for Baffert of his late friend, whose husky 6-foot-5inch frame, booming laugh, and dry wit made him a popular figure in California racing over the years.
“When I walk by his stall, I think of him,” Baffert said last Sunday. “He’s kind of big and gangly and that was Brad. He fits the part.”
Baffert has won the Los Alamitos Futurity a record nine times – on six occasions when it was held at Hollywood Park and known as the Hollywood Futurity, and the three runnings at Los Al, including with Mastery in 2016. When Mastery won last December, Baffert saw that Brad McKinzie had lost considerable weight and asked about his well-being.
“I saw him at the Futurity, and I thought, there is something wrong with Brad,” Baffert said. “He said he had a back issue. My brother Bill called him the next day. That’s when he told us he had cancer. He didn’t want anyone to know.”
Pegram and McKinzie shared more than just a friendship with Baffert. Pegram and McKinzie worked closely together on a project in the mid-2000’s, with prominent owner Bob Lewis, to expand Los Alamitos to accommodate Thoroughbred racing there and include a turf course and a remodeled grandstand. The plan did not gain traction among the industry and failed.
“Brad is probably the definition of a good friend,” Pegram said earlier this month. “He was a good friend for California horse racing, even though a lot of plans didn’t work out the way it could have and should have. He was always in there trying.”
In 2013, McKinzie was at the fore of the Los Alamitos team than ensured the track gained eight weeks of racing after the closure of Hollywood Park. It became a vital offtrack stabling location for 900 horses not based at Del Mar and Santa Anita at various times of the year.
“California owes him a debt,” Pegram said.
The two men last spoke around Memorial Day.
“He was very private,” Pegram said. “He called me from the hospital. He apologized for not telling me earlier.
“He was very optimistic and so on, but at the same time, when he called me, he still wanted it kept very quiet on what he was going through. We always respected that.”
When Baffert mentioned naming the Street Sense colt as a way to honor McKinzie, Pegram was guardedly optimistic.
“I asked him, ‘Are you sure he can run?’ ” Pegram remembered. “Bobby told me, I’m sure he can run.’
“I said, ‘Let me call Karl and Paul.’ They were as close to Brad as I was.”
They all gave universal support.
McKinzie has immense potential. Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith rode McKinzie in the maiden race and is scheduled to have the mount Saturday.
Baffert is quick to smile when he recalls Brad McKinzie, but admits he has lost a person that was not only a friend but a confidant.
“I was really close to him,” Baffert said. “My mother used to call him her favorite son. All my kids called him Uncle Brad.”
Baffert visited McKinzie frequently in the last weeks of his life, including a day trip from Del Mar on Aug. 4. McKinzie was close to the whole Baffert clan, including Baffert’s young son, Bode.
“He talked to Bode in the last week of his life,” Baffert said. “He said, ‘You’ll meet a lot of people, but you’ll be lucky if you have four or five close friends. Your dad was one of those for me. Stay friends with them all your life.’ ”