Robertson has knack for finding bargains

NEW ORLEANS – Hugh Robertson bought his first horse in 1971, a filly named Ensorcel whom trainer Frank Kirby sold to him for $2,000. Robertson trained her a bit, sent her to Ak-Sar-Ben, and won two races right away, making a tidy profit.

Nearly a half-century later, things haven’t changed much. Ak-Sar-Ben and most all of the racing in Nebraska, where Robertson was born and raised, is long gone, but Robertson still is making something out of horses found on the cheap. At the Keeneland September yearling sale in 2014, he outbid a couple of mildly interested parties on a filly by Big Brown and out of the Stephen Got Even mare Dakota Rae. He paid $7,000. Robertson’s wife, Theresa, named her Lovable Lyss after a granddaughter, Alyssa, and Lovable Lyss, following two highly encouraging wins at this Fair Grounds meet, makes her stakes debut Saturday in the $125,000 Silverbulletday Stakes.

It’s a step up in class for sure, and the Steve Asmussen-trained Stageplay figures to be the heavy favorite in the Silverbulletday. But Lovable Lyss won her two-turn debut here Dec. 17 by five lengths without ever being asked by jockey Cisco Torres, her ears still pricked at the wire. She has gained weight since then and continues to mature, and she might give Stageplay all she can handle.

Robertson grew up on an east-central Nebraska farm somewhere between Schuyler and Rogers, and if you don’t know the towns, join the crowd. The Robertsons didn’t race horses, but they had plenty around. There are photos of Hugh showing horses when he was 4. A 30-year-old mare named Queenie used to baby-sit him when he was a toddler.

The farm boy had a head for math. At 7, he was playing pinochle and euchre with the grown-ups. Robertson scored a 750 on the quantitative side of the SAT, earning a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, where he studied some prelaw and played a lot of poker. He was not far into his studies when he took a semester off to work as a groom for trainer Robert E. Lee, and that was that.

Robertson spent several years scrabbling on the Nebraska circuit.

“We would sleep in the car a lot because we didn’t have enough money for a motel room,” he said.

With three kids, he wanted a year-round base and found one at Penn National, where he stayed for 10 years. Robertson sold off his stock and went to try his luck at the Birmingham Turf Club when it opened in 1987 but didn’t really get around to training.

“Nobody who was betting there knew anything,” he said. “If you had any idea about racing, you couldn’t gamble and not make money.”

Concurrently, Robertson opened a string in Chicago, and he has been there ever since. His first really good horse was Polar Expedition, a foal of 1991 who won the 1994 Jim Beam Stakes and earned more than $1.4 million. Robertson the trainer peaked statistically in 2004, the only year he won as many as 100 races. The next season, his son, Mac Robertson, went out on his own with help from several of Hugh’s clients, reducing Hugh’s stable size.

But Hugh Robertson the owner has done better and better. All through his training career, Robertson has owned his own, and he’s coming off two very good years. In 2014, his horses went 92-24-16-14, a win rate of 26 percent with earnings of $450,573, and last year, his starters went 62-18-11-7, a 29 percent strike rate for earnings of $366,482.

Robertson goes annually to the sales and pokes around the dark corners far from the heavy hitters. He scours the catalog for off-brand stallions he thinks are better than most buyers understand and focuses on the individual, not the pedigree. Lovable Lyss has some issues that, showing up on a veterinary report at the sale, would scare off many potential purchasers, but most folks buying yearlings didn’t spend a decade training claimers at Penn National. Most folks haven’t done as much with so little as Hugh Robertson.