Hovdey: Fresh start for David Jerkens

It’s okay to haze the new kid a little bit. Go ahead and nail his desk drawer shut. Cram a live chicken in his locker. Have him paged by the principal, all day long. But what they did last summer to David Jerkens in his first season as Del Mar racing secretary went way too far.

No, they didn’t make him refinish Joe Harper’s deck, or muck Bruce Headley’s stalls, or stick him with the check at Pamplemousse Grille. What they did was present Jerkens with a brand new turf course to play with and hundreds of thousands in purses, and then pull the grass out from under him barely a fortnight into the meet, leaving him with only an increasingly decrepit Polytrack surface upon which to stage two crucial weeks of the show.

How do you like paradise now, DJ?

The good news is that Jerkens weathered the storm last summer – with its equine casualties, its turf course scapegoating, and its widespread finger pointing – to emerge with his equanimity intact, a mature grass track, and a new dirt surface on the main course. For all the nightmarish qualities of the 2014 meet, the 76th season opening on Thursday is stacking up as a fresh start, because who doesn’t love winning a race at Del Mar?

For an owner, winning a race at the seaside track is a special treat, since it usually is done in front of so many friends and family. For a trainer, a Del Mar win goes a long way toward the weekly nut, which is substantial considering the local rent. For jockeys, when they win, they feel like they are athletes taking part in a popular spectator sport instead of playing to what sometimes feels like only the cameras of TVG.

As for the fans, they will waltz into Del Mar this summer secure in the knowledge that they are, without a doubt, at the center of the racing universe – better known as the home of American Pharoah. Looking northward from the grandstand, that will be him way over there, second barn in from the main stable gate off Jimmy Durante Boulevard, bedded like a prince in Bob Baffert’s shed row and dozing the afternoons away, dreaming his Triple Crown dreams.

At one time or another last winter, Southern California was ground zero for the three most exciting Thoroughbreds in the land. It was reasonable to hope that, come Del Mar, one of them might still be on hand to draw a crowd. But injuries have sent Shared Belief and California Chrome into limbo, while American Pharoah’s goals are oriented eastward.

Still, Jerkens is hopeful that Del Mar’s nearly $8 million in stakes purses will attract some invigorating imported talent to challenge the local lights in the best racing of the meet.

“I look at the trainers from back East who ran horses at Santa Anita this year, and I’m encouraged,” Jerkens said. “Chad Brown, Christophe Clement, Graham Motion, Larry Jones, Dallas Stewart – they all sent runners. The challenge for us is being up against not only Saratoga, where everyone wants to win a race, but also Monmouth and Delaware and good purses there.”

Jerkens is the son of trainer Steve Jerkens, who is in turn the brother of trainer Jimmy Jerkens, both them sons of the late trainer and reluctant racing demigod Allen Jerkens. Allen, when reached in his last few years in New York or Florida, would always end a phone conversation with, “How’s my grandson doing out there?”

He was doing just fine, thank you, as Golden Gate Fields racing secretary. Then, racing VP Tom Robbins called to dangle the Del Mar job, which now has expanded from a seven-week summer meet to five more in the autumn and host-in-waiting for the 2017 Breeders’ Cup.

“I like to think of last fall as the real start for me here,” Jerkens said, displaying a healthy ability to supress the trauma of last summer. “That was a great meet, with great possibilities ahead.”

Fine, but that was then. How about pulling a few family strings to get a couple of runners from Uncle Jimmy’s powerful New York stable out West? There’s a million-dollar dirt race called the Pacific Classic coming up on Aug. 22 that would seem to have Jimmy Jerkens’s stable stars Wicked Strong or Effinex written all over it.

“My uncle’s like my grandfather,” David Jerkens said. “You know them – they don’t ship. But that won’t keep me from trying.”

The younger Jerkens cut his racing office teeth working at NYRA with Mike Lakow, who is now at Santa Anita, and with Sean Greely at Golden Gate. He was asked if his family pedigree has helped at all with horsemen’s relationships.

“I think they know I appreciate how tough their job is from being around my dad, my grandfather, and my uncle,” Jerkens said. “They’d talk about racing executives they respected, people like Lou Raffetto and Tommy Trotter. As far as the name goes, though, I still get called ‘David Jenkins’ a lot.”

Whoever it is, the racing secretary must do his job at the intersection of pressure points from track management, local owners and trainers, and the increasingly vocal constituency of horseplayers.

“It can be a juggling act to put out the best programs that satisfy all three,” Jerkens said. “With things coming from different directions, I like to try and be the calm at the center.”