Max Hirsch,
Healer and Winner

We’re not quite sure why Max Hirsch ran away from home to become a horse trainer. He was already working with and riding horses on the Morris Ranch near his hometown of Fredericksburg when something got into him and he decided to cast his fate with some horses bound for Baltimore, Maryland.

Born Maximilian Justice Hirsch in 1880, Hirsch grew up in a time of covered wagon and died just a few months before the first moon landing. As a youngster he watched the wagons making their way across the Hill Country and looked for dogs with sore paws that were lagging behind the wagons. He would bandage the hard-traveling dogs’ paws and send them on their way in hopes that they would be able to catch up to the wagons. This sympathetic nature of a healer would serve him well on the Morris Ranch and beyond.

The Morris Ranch was owned by Francis Morris, a wealthy New York broker who also owned the fancy Morris Park racetrack in New York City. Hirsch had a way with horses, same as he did with dogs, and he found work at the Morris Ranch when he was still a boy. It’s sometimes assumed that Hirsch learned all the tricks of the horse trade at the Morris Ranch but that’s not the case. For reasons that he could never explain, he decided one day when he was 12 years old to hop a freight train bound for Baltimore.

“It was a hot day, and I was barefooted,” he recalled several times over the years. “Suddenly the urge hit me. I had to go with the horses. So, clad in blue jeans and without a word to my parents, I climbed aboard a freight car with the horses and was off to Baltimore.”

In Maryland he went to work for R. Wyndham Walden, trainer of seven Preakness and four Belmont Stakes winners. Hirsch arrived in Baltimore as a wee lad, about the right size to be a jockey. He rode Morris’ Gutta Percha to his first victory in 1895 and would go on to ride 123 winners before he outgrew the profession. He became a groom and eventually a legendary trainer.

Hirsch spent much of his career working for the King Ranch in a part of Texas known as the Wild Horse Desert, historical birthplace of the finest quarter horses in America. The only Texas horse to win horse racing’s Triple Crown, Assault, was born on the King Ranch. Robert Kleberg, Jr., who could judge human talent as well as horses, hired Hirsch to train Assault.

Though he was sired by Derby winner Bold Venture at the King Ranch, Assault turned out to be a rather unpromising colt. He was described as having a “delicate” look about him. That was before he stepped on a surveyor’s stake and split his hoof, effectively crippling him.

Kleberg was advised to put the horse down and out of its misery but Kleberg instead turned the horse over to vaquero Lolo Trevino and a veterinarian to rehabilitate the horse. Hirsch devised a steel spring for the hoof that allowed Assault to run without stumbling. Even with all this support, Assault finished 12th in his first race as a two-year old. He won his first three races as a three-year old but entered the Kentucky Derby as an 8-1 underdog.

Richard Kleberg, Sr. listened to the 1946 Kentucky Derby on a car radio with some King Ranch vaqueros, who took a break from branding cattle to listen as the “Club Footed Comet” won the Derby by a record eight lengths. At the Preakness, Assault charged from sixth place to take a four-length lead but barely held on to beat a furious charge by Lord Boswell down the stretch. Assault stumbled out of the gate at Belmont but recovered to win by three lengths in a race where, despite the Derby and Preakness wins, he still wasn’t listed as a favorite.

Assault, who lived 28 years and was buried on the King Ranch in 1971, is one of just 10 horses to have ever won the Triple Crown and the only one from Texas .

Horses that Max Hirsch trained won 1,933 times over his 60-year career and earned more than $12 million. Hirsch was elected to the horse racing Hall of Fame in 1959 and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1970.

Asked the secret to his longevity at the age of 87, Hirsch said, “Being in this sport keeps you young, because there’s always another colt, another filly, to train…You always look to tomorrow. There are always more races to run, and you live in hopes of winning your share of them.”

Max Hirsch did.


© Clay Coppedge August 8, 2011 Column
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