Photo of H. Allen Jerkens by Jon Kral
David Joseph/Gulfstream Park
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – The $115,000 H. Allen Jerkens Handicap will honor the memory of the legendary Thoroughbred trainer Saturday at Gulfstream Park.
Jerkens passed away in 2015, but he will long be remembered for his unparalleled horsemanship, especially by those who knew him best.
“I worked for him for 19 years. There was nothing like it. If you wanted to learn, he was the right person to learn from,” said trainer Fernando Abreu, who was an assistant trainer for Jerkens at Gulfstream at the time of his passing, “He was there to teach. You just had to keep quiet and absorb it like a sponge.”
Abreu was most impressed by his late boss’s diversified training program.
“He never treated every horse the same. Every horse was treated different, especially the fillies. He was always a little tad better with fillies, to me,” Abreu said. “We played around a lot with the round pen. We did a lot of things with them. We took them to the track and trained them. Feed was the big thing. That was one thing that stuck with me.”
Some people may have been intimidated by Jerkens’ no-nonsense demeanor, but Abreu knew the real ‘Chief.’
“He was great. Some people looked at him as this mean guy just because he spoke loud, but he was really a teddy bear,” Abreu said. “If he got mad at you, five minutes later he was having a beer with you in the afternoon at feed time.”
Jerkens, who was inducted into Thoroughbred Racing’s Hall of Fame in 1975, won 3859 races, his last victory coming at Gulfstream March 6, 2015, less than two weeks before his passing.
