Laz Believed in Fate, Horses and the New York Yankees

Lazaro Sosa Barrera believed in fate and the Yankees, horses and baseball. He trained about 3,000 winners in the United States and Mexico, six champions and the last winner of the Triple Crown, but Joe DiMaggio was his hero and the Yankees his passion.

“In Havana, when I was a boy, I loved to play baseball,” Barrera told an interviewer during the swirl of 1978 when three champions -- Affirmed, It’s In The Air and J.O. Tobin -- resided beneath his shedrow. “First I was a catcher. No glove. No chest protector. No mask. I couldn’t afford a mask. After a bat hit me, I switched to second base.”

Even his earliest recollection of the racetrack involved a baseball: “I was maybe 4 or 5. It was the Cuban Christmas, and it was celebrated at Oriental Park. The children were given gifts and a man gave me a new baseball. I never saw a new ball before, and I just rubbed it and looked at it like it was something made of magic. Everyone else watched the races, and I played with the ball.”

Baseball, however, was Laz Barrera’s passion, not his fate. He is enshrined not in Cooperstown, but Saratoga Springs, in the Racing Hall of Fame. Fate was generous to Laz Barrera, who died Thursday at age 66 from cardio-pulmonary failure in a Southern California hospital, and he made the most of every opportunity it offered. He tempered his success with warmth and dignity; wore his triumphs proudly, but not on his ego.

Barrera was born in the Havana suburb of Mariano in 1924. He was the ninth of 12 children -- eight of whom would be horse trainers -- born of a quarter horse jockey and the daughter of a Frenchwoman who had come to Cuba as a missionary and midwife. He followed his older brothers to Oriental Park, where there were jobs to be had. One of his first, in 1937, was walking hots for the famed New York trainer, Hirsch Jacobs, who wintered in Cuba as did many Eastern horsemen in those days. Barrera earned $3 a week, kept 50 cents, gave the rest to the family and learned the rudiments of horsemanship. It was during that time that he met Patrice Jacobs, the boss’ daughter and future wife of Louis Wolfson, who sent Affirmed to his barn 40 years later, the year before his allegorical Triple Crown victories over Alydar.

“Absolutely I believe in fate,” Barrera said last year, the year in which he would saddle his last Kentucky Derby horse. He was a Puerto Rican import named Mister Frisky, who would disappoint his trainer in Louisville and become seriously ill weeks later. “Things like that happen too much not to believe in fate.”

As fate would have it, a hurricane hit Cuba soon after Barrera bought his first horse for $50. The track was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. The horse was injured and would never run. Having lost his horse and the only track in Cuba, the young Barrera went emptyhanded to Mexico in 1944. Through friends, he found a patron, took over a small stable and won with the first five horses he saddled before officials discovered he was not yet 21, the legal minimum age for licensing. It was a minor setback. By 1947 he dominated racing in Mexico and his dominance held through into the late ‘50s, when he emigrated to the United States. But as fate would have it, it took a dispute to introduce Barrera to American racing.

As Barrera recalled the story years later: “I had an owner who thought he knew everything. The first five horses I ran for him won. The sixth was beaten a nose on the wire and this crazy man runs down from the stands and wants to beat up the jockey. I told him I wouldn’t train for him anymore and went to the stewards and told them so.” Since Barrera was under contract, however, the stewards sided with the owner. “I said, ‘To hell with this,’ and went to Cleveland and became a jock’s agent for Jorge Nunez. We did good together. In Cleveland, I saw major league baseball games. When the Yankees came to town I’d go into the center-field bleachers for 35 cents. I’d sit behind Joe DiMaggio and, one night when he hit three home runs, I caught one of the balls.”

Barrera, after returning briefly to Mexico, took only a brief setback in stature in this country. By the mid ‘60s, he was tied for third in the Aqueduct trainer standings with his former boss, who is himself a training legend. It was during those days that he met a young Puerto Rican jockey, whom he befriended for life and who rode Bold Forbes to wins in the 1976 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes.

“I came here in ’62 and my father told Laz, ‘You know this kid has never been away from home, so you’re his father now.”’ Angel Cordero recalled Thursday at Aqueduct. “Laz gave me my start here, the first guy to give me a shot. We became good friends. We had our fights like a father and son, but I never stopped talking to him. When my father died, I thought at least with Laz, I still had a father. I always had good communication with him. I loved him and I love his family. They feel like my family. I used to call him papa.”

Many others, who took particular joy in listening to Barrera tell stories or dabble in backstretch philosophy in English that was never much better than broken, have called him the Casey Stengel of racing.

The Casey Stengel of racing ...

Laz Barrera liked the way that sounded.