RON GAFFNEY
The game changes. It always has and it always will. Thankfully, not every trainer tries to keep up. There are trainers like 71-year-old Ron Gaffney, a transplanted New Englander now in South Florida who still gallops his own horses and has never stopped believing that the horse comes first. WORDS: BILL HELLER PHOTOS: HORSEPHOTOS.COM
T RON GAFFNEY The horse comes first
HAT’S why, though he had no horses in New York, Gaffney was saddened by the freaky number – 18 – of fatal breakdowns during Aqueduct’s inner-dirt winter meet. “These horses are running yearround,” he said. “They’re taking shots at those purses without caring for the horses or for the riders. That’s not good. That’s sad. Someone is not paying attention.” Gaffney and his wife/partner Emmy have spent a lifetime paying attention. “You don’t find trainers that take care of their horses the way they do,” owner Scott Savin, the former president of Gulfstream Park, said. “They’re old school.” Savin, whose grandfather owned Mr. Prospector, is old school, too. “We used to be on the Monmouth/Gulfstream Park circuit with Sonny Hine and Jimmy Croll,” he said. “We live down here now, so we keep horses in Florida. When it came to picking someone to train horses at Calder, there was only one person on my list. It was Gaff. Gaff is the best.” Abby Fuller, the 52-year-old jockey Gaffney helped lure out of retirement, is also an ardent admirer. Fuller will forever be linked to champion three-year-old filly and Hall of Famer, Mom’s Command, who won the New York Filly Triple Crown in 1985 for Fuller’s dad, Peter, who owned and bred the filly. After Fuller rode Stone in Love to a second place finish in the “Lady Legends for the Cure” on Preakness Eve, in 2011, Gaffney convinced her to return to riding full-time after a nine-year absence. “What happened was when she came from Pimlico, her father’s horse, A.J.’s Hot Mambo, was a little bit of a
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