When the Jockey Club released its 2006 Experimental Free Handicap ranking, it was not a surprise that horses from the barn of Todd Pletcher led the list. Nor would you be shocked to learn that prominent trainers such as Bob Baffert and Doug O'Neill also had multiple representations.
But the fact that three horses trained by Bill Kaplan made the list had people scratching their heads and asking, “Who's Bill Kaplan?” With all three having been purchased by Kaplan at the 2006 April OBS training sale, also poses the question: “How did he do that?” Of course, individuals looking for a glimpse of the future are now asking: “What’s he going to do next?”
Kaplan has been called a professional’s professional, and the description is apt. His first profession, which took him out of Brooklyn and halfway around the world to Vietnam, was as a Second Lieutenant in the Army. Kaplan recalls being drafted in 1966 and quickly recognized that the only way out of guard duty and kitchen patrol was to attend officer training school. He made it to ‘Nam just in time for the Tet offensive where he led a platoon of fifty men and eight tanks in the Central Highlands. Shot in the foot during battle, Kaplan remained at his post and for doing so while wounded, received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
After recuperating and serving out his tour in Fort Polk, LA, Kaplan took advantage of the G.I. Bill to obtain an accounting degree at Long Island University, one he put to good work as a CPA for Arthur Anderson working in Manhattan. He was good at it... and he was bored. “I had kept the books in the Army so it was a natural,” he recalls, “But I couldn’t see myself doing it forever. So I went looking for a business.”
He found it - or it found him - in about 1976 when Kaplan came to South Florida, rented a plane and using the pilot’s license he had obtained “for kicks” while working in New York, took his mother and sister to Disney. Out of the experience grew Air South, and that operation grew into 15 pilots and 10 airplanes, flying routes throughout the Southeast. For four tremendously successful years, Kaplan was Air South, picking passengers up from their South Beach hotels, flying them in six passenger planes and then coming home and doing the company’s books.
When airline deregulation came in 1981, though, he was through: the Pan Am Air Bridge was offering $29 fares on the same routes that Air South was charging $99.
Still, all was not lost. Kaplan’s Uncle Hy - “‘Unc’ we called him” - had turned him onto horse racing as a youth in New York and now with a cash flow able to support it, convinced him to buy a racehorse. The horse was named Brash Doctor, who won for Bill the second time he saddled her as trainer. “I was thinking how easy this is,” he smiles at the memory. “It took me six months before I won my second race.”
"This is my Derby horse," Kaplan recalled of Seacliff. While he didn’t exactly make it that far, Seacliff put Kaplan on the map in a big way, becoming the first horse since Smile, 11 years before to capture the Florida Stallion Stakes series while undefeated. His average winning margin in his four Calder juvenile starts was over two-lengths. “He was clearly the best pure sprinter I’ve ever been around,” said Kaplan, even though the colt’s richest win came at 1 1/16 miles in the $400,000 In Reality Stakes of the FSS. “He was just always a nice horse to be around.”
Shortly after his salad days, Kaplan opted to reduce the size of his stable and focus more on quality runners, especially 2-yr-olds picked from the sales. Attending the March 1999 OBS sale of training horses with Elkins, Kaplan spied a massive daughter of Montbrook, which both he and Elkins fell in love with. Though it was more than he wanted to spend, Elkins went to $97,000 for Castlebrook and knew immediately after the hammer fell he had done the right thing when, under-bidder Sonny Hine shook his hand and said, “You got yourself one hellava a horse.” Sonny Hine trained Skip Away, the richest horse to ever race.
Castlebrook captured seven stakes between 2000 and 2004, even as any number of overnight stakes failed to fill due to her mere presence. “She was amazing,” Kaplan recalls. “Over 17 hands and a nice fluid stride.” His fondest recollection came when Castlebrook set Calders’s still-standing 1 1/16 mile track record, winning the Noble Royalty Handicap on September 15, 2001, with jockey Eibar Coa aboard.
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Mr. Livingston
winner of 7 stakes and $429,285 |
During that same time frame, Kaplan enjoyed great success with Mr. Livingston, a colt whose career parallels Castlebrook’s. He, too, won seven stakes – stretching from 2000 to 2004 – earned about the same amount of money, $429,285, compared to Castlebrook’s $445,700. Mr. Livingston was extremely durable, winning stakes from Gulfstream’s Palm Beach S. –G3, to Calder’s Carterista H. four years later.
The intervening years have seen many stakes horses pass through his hands, but Kaplan reached his pinnacle at the OBS April auction in 2006, where, for three different clients, and a total less than $100,000, he took home three of the best colts in the sale. My specialty is picking reasonably priced 2-yr-olds in training, then trying to make champions out of them,” Kaplan asserts. “You have a chance to get a good 2-yr-old; it’s a lot harder to catch lightening in a bottle.” Recognizing he doesn’t have the budgets to come close to the sales-toppers, Kaplan focuses instead on athletic ability. “If they have athletic ability, they can overcome a lot of other things.”
The three colts have developed differently, as you would expect, but in total they have put Kaplan in a place where few if any Calder-based trainers have ever been; all three are routinely mentioned by name in any discussion of Triple Crown hopefuls. At $48,000, Drums of Thunder, purchased for the Elkins, was the most expensive and is probably the most accomplished, having scored in the $100,000 What a Pleasure Stakes in December, then cutting back to the one-turn mile in Gulfstream’s Holy Bull –G3, he was a closing second to Nobiz Like Shobiz, the current top-ranked Kentucky Derby hopeful. “He moves like poetry and has blossomed at a route of ground,” Kaplan said of the son of Concerto.
But not like Imawildandcrazyguy, who Kaplan describes as a “powerhouse” and a “distance runner from the get go.” The son of Wild Event now races for Lewis Pell and Michael Eigner. All he has done so far is run the fastest 1 1/16 mile by a juvenile at Calder in 2006, winning a December allowance by ten lengths in 1:46.1, before running second to the highly regarded Notional in the grade three Risen Star, a major prep for the $600,000 Louisiana Derby.
Storm in May is another terrific story. When Kaplan called David and Teresa Palmer, the owners of Mr. Livingston, and told them he had an outstanding gray 2-yr-old for sale for just $16,000, they couldn’t resist. “He’s gray,” Teresa said with a smile. “That was all I need to hear.” Storm in May has not failed to hit the board in his first ten starts, including his win in the $250,000 Sunshine Millions Dash at Gulfstream. A versatile colt Storm in May has been stakes-placed going long and short, on dirt and on turf.
Kaplan is in the enviable position of having three sharp and talented 3-yr-olds in a season when they’re as valuable as water in a drought. “I can’t separate these three,” he beams with pride. “Every time one does something great, the other two follow. I truly don’t know how they would do if I put them in the same race.”
What he does know is this: Buying three horses who are legitimately on the Triple Crown trail, out of one sale and for less than that sale’s median price, is simply not supposed to happen.
Taken from Scott Davis at The Florida Horse