Stuck With Some Winners Trainer Couldn’T Sell His Horses, So He Got Them To Make Money

There’s an expression in coaching that works in horse racing.

First applied to Don Shula, when Shula was winning big with the Miami Dolphins, it goes, “He can take his and beat yours, or he can take yours and beat his.”

The same could be said for Rex Keeton, owner, trainer and breaker of thoroughbred race horses.

Keeton brought a seven-horse string out of the Western Washington country near Oakville. It was so modest in appearance and breeding that no one was interested in taking it off his hands, even at give-away prices.

Keeton had sent them to Emerald Downs to a partner who simply gave up on them. The partner quit in June, even though he himself had time and money tied up in them.

The Keeton Seven surely weren’t stars at the Auburn, Wash., track, but for the first time in three years in this state, there is a court of last resort for cheaper horses.

The fall meet at Spokane’s Playfair Race Course.

Keeton was ready to quit, but he had these seven that he felt could run. He asked the race office over here to put the word out that his horses could be had for $1,500 a head.

When there were no takers, the 63-yearold Keeton felt he had no choice but to move into a tack room on the backstretch at Playfair - his two-month manger-like home away from home - and campaign them himself.

By the time Keeton left Spokane on Monday, he had won over $14,000 in purse money. He also pocketed a check for owners incentives. Breeders awards will bring in close to $10,000.

And he pulled off the biggest strike of his career in the $11,600 Spokane Derby on Nov. 5, when jockey Rowdy Luark rallied from fourth in the stretch and won on one of Keeton’s 3-year-olds named Por Por Pitiful Me.

Quite a score for a 23-1 shot that, in September, Keeton would have sold to any of us for $1,500.

This guy knows the front end from the back end. He didn’t grow up on a horse but he grew old on one. Everything about him says country.

The Oklahoma drawl. The angles chiseled into a weather-burned face that has spent more years in a barn and a pasture than hours in a turf club chair.

He looks exactly like what he was, a professional roper and bulldogger. “I wasn’t very big,” the rail-thin Keeton said, “but I could throw ‘em down.”

A pack-a-day man who wears his western dress shirts buttoned to the neck, Keeton picked a good year to retire from the training end of the horse business.

Actually, he picked a good year to unretire.

He had decided to pack it in last March, when he sent his horses to trainer Bryan Hille at Emerald Downs. When that deal came to an abrupt halt, Keeton said he called Ted Martin, Playfair’s director of racing.

“Ted tried to sell all seven of them over here, but nobody ever called me on them,” Keeton said. “So, three weeks later when I checked and Ted told me nobody was interested, I said, `Give me some stalls. I’m coming over.”’ Although his address says Oakville - where he breaks and raises horses with his wife Doris on a 40-acre spread, complete with half-mile training track - he’s in his racing heart an east-of-the mountains guy.

“I am for the horsemen over here,” Keeton said. “I just don’t get treated at Emerald Downs the way I get treated over here.”

The most satisfying aspect of the race meet over here is the number of starters per race. Until this week, fields at Playfair were close to full.

Unfortunately, too many 45-1 long shots ran like 45-1 long shots. Too many fit horses were too easy for the trained eye to spot and bet down to almost nothing.

But Keeton’s horses always had a chance, often out-running their odds and producing super wagering payoffs.

The key?

“A ton of miles,” he said. “A lot of good gallops, not fast gallops. Get ‘em good and fit. We ride a lot of ‘em up in the hills (near his ranch not far from Elma, Wash.). I can ride up to the back of my pasture and go for miles and miles.”

More than unbeatable scenery, the romps are part of a freshening process. Keeton is unimpressed with bullet works, the notations in the Daily Racing Form that emphasize the track’s quickest morning practice runs at given distances.

Professional handicappers often jump on bullets, with such comments in the Form as, “Works whisper ready,” and “Bullets in the holster” or “Razor sharp in the a.m.”

Sometimes that does bode well. More often, Keeton says, it means a horse has left his best on the track, before the real running starts.

“I don’t believe in fast works,” he said. “Let them have something left for the end. If I do have a speed horse I don’t go as many miles. You train a little differently for speed, but about all my horses come from off of it. They’ve got that kick at the end.”

Playfair’s racing surface favors speed, yet Keeton - the advocate of the late-run closer - left town this week as its leading trainer.

“I’ve had a great meet,” he said, “especially when I think that somebody could have had all seven of ‘em for $10,500.”

Keeton might still be living in and around his native Pawnee, Okla., if not for the loss of his two teenage children, a boy and a girl, in separate car wrecks two years apart in the mid-1970s.

Tragedy put an end to the fun of rodeoing. It almost put an end to the fun of living.

The girl, Lori, was a barrel racer and roper who rode horses every day she could after school. When they lost her, the Keetons tried to concentrate on their boy, Marty. When he was killed, they eventually “sold everything back there and came out here.

“You had to fight off the depression,” Keeton said. “Still do. It may be why I don’t have a lot of weight on me. I was 168 or so when I rodeoed. I’m 138 now. You work hard, keeping your mind off it. It’s still tough.”

Before he headed home, Keeton found it easier to sell the horses he wanted to part with all along. Locals snapped up six of the seven, some for a little more than Keeton expected, some for a little less.

But he took his Spokane Derby winner home with him.

The plan was to send Por Por Pitiful Me to Santa Anita, to trainer Mark Glatt or Dennis Ward, start it for $32,000 in the winter or early spring and maybe later drop him in for a $16,000 claiming tag.

If they lose him for $32,000 or $16,000, that’s a bargain. It’s also an incentive to stay in the critical end of the business - turning out fit horses for an industry chronically short of them.

“I’m not going to miss the actual training much,” Keeton said. “I’ll break horses. I’ve got lots to do taking care of my place.

“I keep two of Don Munger’s (horses) all the time. I’ve got the babies. I’ll go ahead and get ‘em going but I’m not going to travel. I’m not going to go to the track.”

In his last season as a trainer, Keeton coaxed six winners and 17 in-the-money finishes out of only 29 starts.

All with horses nobody wanted.