Van Berg Vows Plenty Left in Tank

Jack Van Berg has lost a lot over the years. A lot of money, a lot of races, his stature and as one of the leading trainers in the sport. But not his feistiness or his confidence.

“Before I die I'm going to win the Kentucky Derby again,” he said. “I will win it. I ain't done.”

That may seem like a Herculean task for a trainer who is approaching his 80th birthday, has no powerful owners backing him up and has a 30-horse stable largely made up of horses with little going for them in the way of ability. But Van Berg has spent much of the current Oaklawn meeting letting it be known that he's not done. While his current numbers may not resemble those he compiled when he was one of the top trainers in the sport, they are a lot better than the anemic stats he piled up through much of the last 15 years.

Entering Friday's card at Oaklawn, Van Berg was eighth in the trainers' standings with 14 wins from 99 starters. And he will have a starter in Saturday's GI Arkansas Derby in longshot Cutacorner (Even the Score). Van Berg last won the race 35 years ago, in 1981 with Bold Ego. He last started a horse in the race in 2006 when sending out seventh-place finisher Film Fortune (Indy Film).

The secret to his recent success?

“I've changed my feed program. I'm feeding faster horses,” he said.

His sense of humor is also in tact, considering what the Hall of Fame trainer has had to endure, an accomplishment in its own right.

Van Berg's career has twisted and turned. He got his trainer's license in 1951 when he was just 15. The son of fellow Hall of Famer Marion Van Berg, he would become the first trainer in the sport to create multiple divisions around the country, winning races in droves at tracks in the Midwest. In 1987, he became the first trainer in history to win 5,000 career races.

But most of those wins had been accomplished with low level claimers at smaller tracks. Van Berg would eventually prove that his ability wasn't limited to claimers. He broke through to a new level when winning the 1984 GI Preakness with Gate Dancer, the best horse he had ever trained and one of the primary reasons he won an Eclipse Award that year as the sport's best trainer. Then came Alysheba, and Van Berg to rose to new heights winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the GI Breeders' Cup Classic.

But in the midst of Alysheba's tear through the sport, the groundwork was being laid for what would be Van Berg's sharp decline. With plenty of money available to him, he invested heavily in real estate. Van Berg said he put up $1.3 million and admits most of the deals were consummated with a handshake. Van Berg said his partners in the venture were disreputable and that his lawyer was incompetent. The end result was that the deals turned disastrous, leaving Van Berg with nothing.

“I got screwed, as plain as day,” he said. “I lost a couple million in lawyer fees alone. I was left with nothing.”

Because Van Berg had owned many of the horses he trained he found it harder to reload year after year. In 1988, the year Alysheba won the Breeders' Cup Classic, Van Berg won 150 races, good for earnings of $6,820,396. He has never come close since.

Yet, Van Berg held his own until 2000. Nobody wants a trainer who is viewed as being on the decline, particularly one in their mid-sixties. In 2000, Van Berg, now based solely in California, won just 25 races and with only six percent of his starters. The numbers just kept getting worse. The same trainer who set a record with 496 wins in 1976, hit bottom when going 1 for 121 in 2013.

“Hell, they gave up on Charlie Whittingham, too, when he got older,” Van Berg said. “He had hardly anything when he passed away. These young guys come along with the texting and the twitter all their b.s. I don't do that. Guy wants me to train a horse, fine. If he don't, I don't ask him.”

In 2013 Van Berg announced that he was leaving California and returning to his roots in the Midwest, focusing on Oaklawn and the Kentucky circuit. It has turned out to be a good decision as he won 28 races last year, his highest win total since 1999, and has continued to build momentum this year.

“I came here three years ago with seven horses, giveaways,” he said. “I can still train. They can't take that away.”

If being irascible and a product of a bygone era means turning off potential owners that's just going to have to be the way it is, Van Berg says. He refuses to change.

“I'm not going to cheat you and I'm not going to b.s. you,” he said. “If a horse can't run, he can't run. I'm going to tell you exactly the way it is. Funny thing in the horse business, I can show you the most successful people there are in outside businesses and then they get into horse business and they'll listen to the biggest b.s.-er around and get sucked in by them.”

Van Berg's honest-to-a-fault attitude led to him making some headlines in 2008 when he testified before a Congressional committee and said the sport had become a game of “chemical warfare.”

“I don't believe in using all those drugs,” he says now. “I believe if you are a horseman, you can take care of a horse and work on his problems. You go around these barns now your liable to not even see any bandages. Used to be when you got done training in the mornings the vets would come by and see if you needed anything. Now the vets are there 4:30-5:00 in the morning treating horses, treating horses before they even go to the racetrack. Then they catch these people with a bad test and they don't do anything to them.”

It's unlikely that Cutacorner will make it to the Kentucky Derby. He does not have any Derby points and will be among the longest shots in the field in the Arkansas Derby. But Van Berg will give it a shot with a horse who was ninth in the GIII Southwest and eighth in the GII Rebel and sees the colt more as a source of pride than a horse that appears to be in over his head in graded stakes company.

“I know what I can do picking horses out,” he said. “I gave $13,000 [at the 2015 Fasig-Tipton Texas 2-Year-Olds in Training Sale] for that horse and he's made $107,000 and he's going to be better on the grass. He's not quite the top notch, but he's coming along. I don't have to give a half a million for a horse or $300,000. I can pick a good one out for $50,000 or $60,000. I know damn well I can.”

So 79-year-old Jack Van Berg says he can get still get the best out of any horse. He says he's going to win the Derby again and that he can get there with a $50,000 yearling. If it doesn't happen, he's not going to hang his head. Anything but that.

“There are some people out there, they might have more money than I have,” he said. “But they ain't near as tough as I am. I will survive.”