Longtime Owner Mamone Has Gift of a Lifetime in Imperial Hint

Few owners can argue that their horse pulled off the most impressive effort at Saratoga Race Course this summer. Ray Mamone can make that case. After 42 years in the game, he has his first top-level horse in Imperial Hint (Imperialism), who might be the nation's top sprinter.

Mamone is watching poetry in motion. After winning the GI Alfred G. Vanderbilt Handicap at Saratoga July 28 by sweeping by the field, Imperial Hint was sent to the lead by jockey Javier Castellano in the GI Vosburgh S. at Belmont Park and never looked back. In each race, he finished full of run through the lane with a rare fluidity of motion, while under wraps.

“I'm on cloud nine right now,” Mamone said. His eyes are set on the Nov. 3 GI TwinSpires Breeders' Cup Sprint at Churchill Downs, where he could get a rematch with last year's winner Roy H (More Than Ready). “I think we can beat him this time,” he said.

A Somerville, New Jersey resident who just turned 86, the Brooklyn-born Mamone has reached this point with a horse he calls “a freak.” His horse is in the capable hands of Luis Carvajal Jr., who has trained for Mamone the last decade. He was a longtime assistant to the late New Jersey trainer Robert Durso, who also trained for Mamone.

Mamone calls Imperial Hint “a natural” out of a mare he raced named Royal Hint, who was two-for-six lifetime. Mamone almost didn't get to race Imperial Hint as he gave his dam to Shade Tree Thoroughbreds when she had trouble producing foals. Luckily, Shade Tree Thoroughbreds bred her to Imperialism and Mamone bought the offspring at two for about $25,000. At the time, Imperialism was standing in Florida. Imperialism stood at Esquirol Farms in Alberta, Canada this year for a $2,500 stud fee. Imperial Hint has earned more than $1.4 million so far.

“I said, 'You gotta be kidding me,'” Mamone recalled after first seeing Imperial Hint. The colt was small but Mamone liked him. “He was wide in the front, nice in the chest, well mannered.”

Mamone got his first taste for racing when he won a bet as a teenager at Monmouth Park with some friends.

“I won $14 and thought I was a millionaire,” he said, adding that he enjoyed the gambling aspect of the game. The success of his auto body business allowed him to enter horse ownership in 1976.

In his first year as an owner, he claimed 22 horses with New Jersey-based trainer Mike Vincitore.

“He said I was crazy claiming all of those horses,” Mamone said. “I made money–that's why I've stayed in the business 42 years…You can't go crazy man.”

He also had horses in New York with trainer Steve Juliano in the 1980s. For about six months in the late 1970s, Mamone gave a stab at training horses himself, but found it was too difficult to do while running his auto body shop.

“It knocked the hell out of me,” he said.

In the early 1980's, he privately purchased a New Jersey-bred mare named Castles Gift, who was trained in New York by John Campo. Mamone took the horse back to Jersey and had success with her on the racetrack. As a broodmare, she delivered Ray's Gift, who took the filly division of the 1986 New Jersey Futurity. Ray's Gift had a granddaughter named Royal Hint, which makes Imperial Hint a fifth-generation Mamone runner.

It hasn't been all roses for Mamone. His dad lost most of his money in the Great Depression and went to work for the WPA. Their family lived near Ebbets Field and Mamone remembers sneaking into games with his friends as a child to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers, and being chased away. The family moved to New Jersey, he quit school at 14 and went to work delivering ice.

Mamone left his ice route to take a job picking tomatoes for 10 cents a bushel.

“I worked my [butt] off,” he recalled. He lied about his age to take construction work, then found a job at an auto body shop but was fired due to his inexperience. He wound up setting pins at a bowling alley for three cents a game. Eventually, his old boss offered him his job back and Mamone took it with the provision that he would be taught the auto body profession.

After a decade there, he opened up his own shop. He and his wife Bernadine were married for 61 years until she died in 2012.

“She loved every part of [horse racing],” said Mamone, who has two children.

Now his focus is on winning the Breeders' Cup Sprint.

“I want to win that race so bad,” he said.

With all of the energy his little rocket has been able to store through the ease of his victory in his last two races, Mamone believes he is ready for lift off.

“You're going to see a surprise,” Mamone said. “That's what we're waiting for.”

The plan is to get Imperial Hint acclimated at Churchill Downs for two weeks before the Sprint. He has run twice there but without success. His first try was a 12th-place finish in the 2016 GIII Pat Day Mile S. in his third career start. Earlier this year, he set the pace over a rain-drenched track in the seven-furlong GII Churchill Downs S. before tiring. Mamone believes the distance of six furlongs at the Breeders' Cup suits Imperial Hint best.

“He's perfectly sound. He doesn't have a pimple on him. He's got a lot of heart,” Mamone said.

Mamone said Imperial Hint gives him confidence when he goes to visit him at their Parx Racing base to deliver mints and carrots. The effortless manner in which he works gives him goosebumps.

“I'm just so proud of him. When I look at him, he's looking at me like, 'Don't worry about it.'”