Pierce's old-school training approach benefits Up With the Birds

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – Malcolm Pierce smokes. You can hear it in his raspy voice beneath the heavy Canadian accent. He’ll shake a cigarette out of a pack while sitting on his pony in front of the Fair Grounds clocker’s stand during the winter, watching his stock go around. Contemporary attitudes stamp smoking as archaic. Fine. Pierce, 57, is that kind of old school.

He came to Woodbine from a small town in 1981 and got work with trainer Jim Day. He moved up to assistant and stuck with Day for 14 years. As far as Pierce is concerned, what he saw then still works now.

“I did my share as an assistant. I gained good experience,” Pierce said. “My system runs like Jim Day ran his system – it hasn’t changed a lot.”

Patience is a big part of that system. Give a horse plenty of time. Let him race his way into shape, step by step. Take Up With the Birds. Making his 4-year-old debut in a Keeneland allowance race in April, he finished sixth as the 9-5 favorite. Six weeks later, as the 5-2 favorite in the Dixie on the Preakness undercard, Up With the Birds was sixth again. But in his third 2014 race on July 19, Up With the Birds broke through, winning the Grade 2 Nijinsky Stakes at Woodbine by four lengths. His kick was impressive enough that Up With the Birds races here Saturday in the Arlington Million.

Pierce prefers to ship in late. He’ll put Up With the Birds on a van Thursday afternoon and send him on a 12-hour ride to Arlington. No training here. A couple of meals, peer down the shed row, then go out to race. Up With the Birds figures to be about 8-1 to win the Million, which will have just seven runners. And victory here would be a career highlight for Pierce.

“We could go the easy route,” Pierce said. “There’s a race here at Woodbine the same day called the Sky Classic, and he’d probably be even-money. But these people don’t want to duck anybody. They want to see what they have.”

“They” are Sam-Son Farm, the longtime Canadian racing and breeding powerhouse now owned by Rick Balaz, Kim Samuel, and Mark Samuel. Pierce’s association with Sam-Son goes back to his start at the track, when Day was Sam-Son’s trainer. Pierce worked around some of the elite Sam-Son horses of the 1980s and 90s like Dance Smartly, Classy ’n Smart, and Regal Classic. When Mark Frostad took over the Sam-Son horses, Pierce went to work for him. And in 2010, Pierce began training Sam-Son horses himself, sending out 50-odd runners that year and the next and gradually building the relationship.

Now, all but two of Pierce’s 30-horse stable is composed of Sam-Son stock. The setup makes sense for Pierce, whose spare, no-nonsense persona is the antithesis of the clichéd fast-talking horse trainer.

“For a while, it was more time on the phone talking to owners or general managers, but over the last few years, I’ve whittled down to just a couple clients,” Pierce said. “I’m in seven days a week. I see my horses every day. I look at all my legs before I train.”

The Pierce/Sam-Son partnership is working well. Already in 2014, Pierce has equaled his career-best number of graded stakes wins in a year, with four. And Up With the Birds might be just getting started.

The bay colt, by Stormy Atlantic and out of Song of the Lark, finished second but was the best horse in the $1 million Queen’s Plate last year. The loss stung, but victory in the Grade 1 Jamaica at Belmont in October took some of the sting away. That performance generated high expectations – from bettors, at least – that Up With the Birds initially failed to meet this year. “We were a little bit behind schedule. He got a little later start, and we were probably a little short for our first start at Keeneland,” Pierce said. “The timing of the Pimlico race was good, and he actually got one of his better numbers out of that race, but we always had [the Nijinsky] in mind, and he was a much fitter horse with the two starts under his belt. He’s never much of a work horse. If you just trained this horse and didn’t know him, he doesn’t work like a good horse. The horse he works with could have him any morning he wanted.”

In the afternoon, though, Up With the Birds is a different horse. A much better horse. And with an August 4-year-old in the Pierce program, there still might be more to come.

“I don’t want their best efforts of the year to be in April. I’d like it to be November,” Pierce said, and Up With the Birds might be headed in that direction.