Yesterday's BloodHorse reported that midwestern trainer Ronnie Warren passed
away on December 31. Warren was 79 years old.

I worked for Ronnie Warren as a hotwalker/groom/night watchman in 1981-1982.
Ronnie's horses always made an impression on the track, galloping deliberately,
the riders' feet usually out of the irons, in sets of four or five, manes and
tails braided. The gallops were usually preceded by a few minutes of jogging in
figure eight patterns if there was room for such activities on whatever track
Warren was stabled at. The idea was to get the horses out of their stalls for
as much time as possible....

...which was a good thing if you were grooming horses for Ronnie Warren,
because even at a time when trainers were experimenting with alternate forms of
bedding, such as shredded newspaper, rice hulls, or shavings, Warren believed
in bedding all of his runners, from the stakes winners to the slugs, deep in
straw, with a pillow in front of the stall and the stall walls banked with
straw.

Warren was strictly hay oats and water. I do not recall seeing any Warren
horses tapped or injected the entire time I worked for him. In the summer of
1982, when stabled in a private barn at Saratoga (the barn currently occupied
by James Bond), Warren became afraid that someone was going to drug one of his
horses and decided that all horses cooling out would drink from one bucket, a
bucket he could keep his eyes on. Warren's vet tried to convince him of the
danger of this, that one sick animal could take out the whole barn through this
common bucket, but Ronnie would not be swayed.

Ronnie Warren did not believe in breezing horses, so usually runners, even
those coming off of a freshening, would only have one state mandated 3 furlong
work within a month of their race.

During that 1982 Saratoga meet (some cancellations downstate necessitated that
28 straight days of racing be conducted) the Warren runners, with their braided
manes and tails (with white and/or green pom poms added on race day) caught the
attention of a 25 year old [i]New York Times[/i] racing writer named Steve
Crist. Noting the braids and the pom poms and the fact that most of the Warren
runners were badly beaten at the Spa, Crist profiled Warren and his stable in a
column titled "Beautiful Losers". In this article Crist did a good job of
perpetuating some of the Warren myths, such as the time that as a young trainer
in Arizona, Warren fired his two grooms and a hotwalker, did all of their work
for 1 year, and bought himself a new Cadillac at the end of the year with the
money he saved.

There was a large chasm in terms of the class of racing between NYRA and the
midwest at the time, much larger than it is now. The Warren runners who had
been so badly beaten at the Spa, the beautiful losers, went back to Keeneland
and Churchill in the Fall and kicked ass. The fact that their last race was at
the Spa meant that, unfortunately, there were no huge mutuels.

Racing has lost a colorful eccentric; his eccentricity sometimes obscured the
truth, that this man was a brilliant horseman.