Tortora adjusting to retirement after long career as trainer

Nearly a month into his retirement, Manny Tortora already is pretty bored. But at least he still has some of the earnings for which he worked his entire adult life in the racing business.

“I was going to go broke if I kept going the way I was,” said Tortora. “I was losing $5,000 a month. The workers’ compensation was about to kill me.”

Speaking by phone from Ocala, Fla., where he and his wife, Jackie, will soon be moving, Tortora, 78, recently reminisced about his career in racing. Tortora started his last horse Dec. 31 and since then has dispersed the handful of horses who remained in his once-flourishing stable.

“My best horse was Mecke,” he said, referring to the stretch-running earner of almost $2.5 million in the mid-1990s. “He won the Arlington Million, the Super Derby, a lot of nice races. I still think he should’ve won the [1995] Kentucky Derby.”

Mecke was owned by James R. Lewis Jr., who died in 2005 and was foremost among Tortora’s longtime clients. They were a formidable team at Calder (now Gulfstream Park West), where Tortora is easily the all-time leading trainer with 2,025 wins and was inducted into the track’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

Born in nearby Pembroke Pines, Tortora rode Quarter horses in his youth in Palm Beach in his teens before working on several farms in the Ocala area. He began training on the racetrack in the early 1970s.

“My first year of training was the last year for the old Tropical Park [1972],” recalled Tortora. “I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do in racing. It gave me a good life.”

Tortora was based at Calder throughout his career and did not often venture elsewhere; according to Equibase statistics, he won just 131 races at other tracks. Including Mecke, he trained seven graded stakes winners, most notably Hollywood Wildcat as a 2-year-old.

His peak was in 1996, when his horses won 95 races and more than $3.2 million, both career highs. In 2013, however, with his stable dwindling, he won just six races for earnings of $138,881. His final winner came last month at Gulfstream, where Sweet Miri captured a $20,000 maiden-claiming race Dec. 19.

Tortora said he is in relatively good health, but the difficult economics of racing forced him out of the game.

“We’ve got a couple of double-wide trailers on 20 acres up here in Ocala,” he said. “I’ll miss a lot of things about the track, but we’ll be fine.”