Emerald A Prize Gem Former Playfair, Yakima Champion Trainer Mccanna To Add Emerald Downs Title

By mid-morning of a gloomy gray Puget Sound Thursday, the last of Tim McCanna’s 28 horses have been exercised, rubbed, stabled, fed and left alone.

After a hectic five days of shopping for and finally acquiring eight colts at last week’s yearling sale in Keeneland, Ky., McCanna is back in his element, eager for the rush of yet another weekend at Emerald Downs.

Although the strain of a long racing season has horsemen here strung out and looking forward to a little down time, Tim McCanna finds himself precisely where he’s wanted to be since the day he was old enough to muck out a stall.

On top.

With the season down to its final three days, the state’s winningest horsemen - Larry Ross, the venerable and irascible Bud Klokstad, Clint Roberts - are running a futile chase at Tim McCanna for the Emerald Downs training title.

They’ve run out of time.

McCanna is a win away from setting a record at the 2-year-old track. Ross sent out 50 winners last summer. Only Ross last year and McCanna this year have won 50 in one meeting here.

It’s heady stuff for McCanna, a 1980 Gonzaga Prep grad, who needed only one semester at Washington State University - and three months in Maui after he surprised his family by abruptly quitting school and jetting off to paradise - to determine that life as a veterinarian was fine, for somebody else.

From the back of Barn 12, where his stalls are set off by the family’s characteristic shamrock, McCanna is juggling phone calls. Pacing, putting callers on hold, shifting the phone from shoulder to shoulder, taking mental notes and barking answers over the roar of a nearby freight train, McCanna trades information while his top hand, Don Gonsalves, sits patiently in a beat-up easy chair waiting for his boss’ ear.

“I got great help,” McCanna says, nodding at the 65-year-old Gonsalves, father of jockey Frank Gonsalves. “He’s the glue here.” Four times the No. 1 trainer at Playfair in Spokane, once the leading trainer at Yakima Meadows, McCanna is about to scale the top rung.

From here there’s nothing but repetition, nowhere to go but south, to California and perhaps beyond, a challenge the 35-year-old says he may tackle once his growing family is ready for it.

What separates McCanna from the others who work as hard and care as much is a system of equine shuttle diplomacy built on family ties. That and recently developed patience. Oh, and Tagamet, which Tim will explain later.

He says he’s tried to learn to anticipate problems. Ideally, before horses go stale, he vans them off to his 35-acre spread outside Union Gap near Yakima, where he and his dad - Playfair trainer Dan McCanna - built an arena with a 4-furlong training track complete with an old two-horse auxiliary starting gate once used at Playfair. It’s a tonic for a tired thoroughbred.

“He’ll take six horses off the track Sunday night and bring six fresh ones back with him the next week,” Dan McCanna says. “They seem to do a little better at home. They eat better, I know that.”

Their rehab is helped along by a training device the McCannas call a jogger, a hydraulic overhead belt that can accommodate six horses. It runs at different speeds. “Horses that are turned out - jog them 30 to 40 days and breeze them a week or so off that thing,” Dan McCanna advises.

And they’re race ready?

Some.

“Some get a permanent rest,” Tim McCanna said.

“Others are there until my wife says they’re ready to come back.”

His wife, Jan Krupke McCanna, grew up in Reardan. Her father, Harold, breeds and trains thoroughbreds. Tim trusts her horse sense.

They met while she worked for him at Playfair.

“That’s what you get when you play around with the help,” McCanna said, shooting a quick smile from the beat-up desk in his office tacked on the row of stalls. “You start working for them.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jan McCanna said, “but I do know that when Tim wanted children (they have three) he lost his groom (her).”

The partnership keeps the McCanna barn supplied with fresh horses.

“It’s helped my percentage.”

His in-the-money percentage is better than 58 percent, staggering considering he’s started more than 218 times. Only Klokstad among the track’s leading trainers has a better percentage of horses running first, second or third.

“It took a long time for me to learn to not push the horses,” McCanna said. “Coming from Spokane, I had that old Playfair mentality - run every week, go, go, go, and there’s nothing left of ‘em.”

McCanna isn’t the only horseman who ships stock in and out, but he’s the only one with 50 firsts, 42 seconds and 38 thirds. So you tend to pay attention to whatever he’s doing - like the Tagamet.

“I don’t think I have ulcers, but my amigos here (the Hispanic help) are always cooking the hot food so I get heartburn now and again,” he said. “I got on Tagamet. I have a bunch of nervous horses, so I got them going on it, too. The equine version of it. I have some fillies that have just turned around with it.”

The patience that serves him so well was harder to come by. Still, he was one of the first to ignore the rift between horsemen of the West and East Sides of the state. Although this is his home track, McCanna horses - his and his dad’s - continue to run at Playfair and Yakima.

“He works the whole state,” said Dan McCanna, a retired East Valley School District teacher and administrator. “Maybe that’s why he lives in Yakima (for its centralized locale).” “There are some real bad feelings over there (in Spokane), even about us,” Tim said. “I hear, ‘Don’t think you’re welcome over there (at Playfair).’ Hell, we never left there. We’ve supported the deal all along. I still consider myself a Spokane guy. I’m the same guy I always was.”

The same, with better resources and a wider range of experience.

“The first couple of years I was training with my dad (at Playfair), I think the youngest horse we had was 6 or 7,” Tim said. “On my (stall) application this year I had almost 70 head on it and I think I had only five horses over 3. I got tired of getting all the beat-up, broken-down horses.”

So he’s gone to a 2-year-old program that keeps his barn high on potential.

Tim McCanna’s love affair with horses and his job sprouted as a pre-schooler.

“By the time he was 5 or 6 I was hauling him wherever I went - to Coeur d’Alene and the Blue Mountain circuit, which was big then,” said Dan McCanna. “Waterville. Dayton. Waitsburg. Colfax. Wilbur. Walla Walla and then Spokane. Those bushes were tough. We had a ‘49 Chevy truck. We’d be in Seattle on a Wednesday and some place in Montana by Sunday, going 40 miles an hour all the way.”

As far back as the fourth grade he worked for his dad at Longacres, walking horses and cleaning stalls.

“I still remember putting him on the plane for home,” Dan McCanna said. “It was time for school to start. He was crying. He didn’t want to leave. He finally got on the plane. They put him up with a pilot. He made it home, bawlin’ all the way.”

“They thought I was afraid to fly,” Tim said. “I just didn’t want the summer to end.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. Tim McCanna file Age: 35 Hometown: Spokane Residence: Yakima 1997 Notable With 50 winners, McCanna is tied for single-season record at Emerald Downs and has three days left to claim the mark for himself.

2. Emerald Downs trainer standings 1st 2nd 3rd starts win% in money Tim McCanna 50 43 38 224 22.2 58.5 Bud Klokstad 41 25 15 125 32.8 64.8 Larry Ross 40 39 28 208 19.2 51.9 Clint Roberts 27 30 16 138 19.7 52.9