Offield Saddles a Final Winner–from the Hereafter

Statistically speaking, Northern Rose (Northern Causeway), a 6-year-old chestnut mare with a 4-for-32 claiming-level record, was hardly the star of the stable for trainer Duane Offield, who died Sept. 29 after a long fight with cancer. But the 82-year-old conditioner took an outsized shine to her anyway. A homebred for one of his most dedicated clients, Northern Rose had been in Offield's care since she began her career 3 1/2 years ago, and she enjoyed a prime stall under Offield's Golden Gate Fields shedrow, not far from his office so he could keep a watchful and prideful eye on her.

Offield, a kind-hearted and soft-spoken mainstay on the Northern California circuit for parts of seven decades, chiseled out a reputation as an old-ways trainer who preferred to let his horses do the talking for him. He probably would have downplayed it had he been alive to witness it, but the performance of Northern Rose in the third race at Golden Gate on Saturday spoke volumes in terms of good karma.

Northern Rose had been entered by Offield in the Oct. 1 $5,000 claiming route prior to his passing. He wasn't able to make it out to the track near the end of his life, but still looked forward to managing his horses. So when the darling of his barn charged home from the back of the pack to win by two lengths at 17-1, her score put a spiritual exclamation point on Offield's life as a horseman by giving him one final official victory after his death.

You could say that Northern Rose sent Offield out a winner. But those who knew him had long ago figured out Offield was all class, regardless of where his horses finished.

“I don't know that I've ever met anyone so selfless. He was a man from a different time. He just was the epitome of somebody who never put himself first,” Rozamund Barclay, Northern Rose's owner and breeder, told TDN a few hours after Saturday's emotional win.

“With Duane, everything was about the horses. It didn't matter if it was a $2,500 claimer or a stakes horse. They all got lots of attention. He felt very privileged that he got to make his living doing what he loved to do. He never forgot that. He was so grateful that his entire adult life, he got to do what he wanted–being with horses,” Barclay said.

“He loved his crew, too. That was his family. The same people worked for him for years. We were talking [Saturday] about an exercise rider, who, when he was 15 or 16, Duane helped him get special permission to gallop horses at that age. That exercise rider has got to be close to 60 now. Duane had that quality about him that made people want to work for him, and people stayed loyal and wanted to keep working for him.

Duane Offield | Vassar Photography

“He got so many young people to go through his barn. John Sadler worked for him. So did Kim and Sean McCarthy. There are probably a lot of people that worked for him that I'm not aware of. It's a rare person where nobody has anything negative to say about him,” Barclay said.

Barclay lives not far from Emerald Downs in Auburn, Washington, and also owns Northern Rose's sire, Northern Causeway. She keeps racetrack retirees at her home and her broodmares and Northern Causeway at Rancho San Miguel in California. She first began sending horses to Offield in 2014 after her previous California-based trainer took sick and recommended Offield as the person he'd want to look after his stock. Since then she's kept a stable of between 10 and 15 horses with Offield, and Barclay said they meshed well as owner and trainer because Offield treated her horses as individuals with their own development timetables.

“He liked the old-school ways. He liked horses to be hand-walked, a lot of hands-on attention, that kind of thing. And it's getting real hard to do that, as you well know. Trainers' expenses are going up and up and up, and owners can only afford to pay so much. So it's a lot to hand-walk all your horses, do them all up every day, all of that. But Duane seemed to manage to do that.”

Originally from Prosser, Washington, Offield studied animal husbandry at California State Polytechnic University prior to embarking on a racetrack career in the late 1960s, first with Quarter Horses and later Thoroughbreds. His lifetime statistics predate Equibase records that go back as far as 1976, but since that date Offield amassed 722 winners and just over $10 million in purse earnings.

Offield went nearly two decades into his career before he trained and owned a piece of a horse that might break through on the national scene as a Triple Crown candidate. In 1989, a raw speedster named Restless Con (Restless Native) won three of his first four races as a 2-year-old in NorCal. But the colt developed a life-threatening virus shortly after turning three that knocked him out of contention for the GI Kentucky Derby preps.

Offield nursed Restless Con back to health, and after winning two minor Golden Gate stakes and finishing second in the then-GII Ohio Derby, he ambitiously shipped the $17,000 KEESEP roan cross-country to Monmouth Park for the GI Haskell Invitational. Dismissed at 10-1 in the betting as a California speedball in a race laden with classy East Coast contenders, jockey Tim Doocy broke on top but then unexpectedly rated Restless Con off the pace, orchestrating a 2 1/4-length upset.

Restless Con then finished twelfth in the GI Travers S. and ninth in the then-GI Super Derby. Offield brought the colt back to his NorCal base, where Restless Con won only one more race before retiring in 1992. Offield might have pinned his hopes on developing additional top-level talent in the decades to come, but that Haskell win would stand as his one and only graded stakes victory.

Fast forward to this season. With Offield unable to attend to daily doings at the track because of his illness, his record slumped to 4-for-75 for the year going into last Saturday's race. As he knew his life was coming to a close, his concerns shifted from winning races to making sure his racetrack family was positioned to be taken care of once he died.

“That's the kind of person he was. It's kind of hard to explain,” Barclay said. “But one of the things that kept him going was that he had a wonderful crew that stayed in contact with him. He was bedridden towards the end, but he never stopped putting his energy into running the stable.

“Even the day he passed away, he was concerned about the welfare of his horses, especially some of the ones that he's campaigned for a long time, wanting to make sure they all went on to good careers. I think all horsemen try to do the best by the horses they train. But it was his nature to be more worried about the kids that worked for him and the horses than himself.”

Barclay said Northern Rose prefers running outside of horses, so it was a bit of a bummer when she drew the rail for the mile race. She added that Offield was not the type of trainer to over-instruct his riders, but she knew he would have told jockey Armando Ayuso to get to the outside for one clear stretch bid if possible, and those were the instructions given by assistant trainer Jorge Bautista when he gave a leg up to Ayuso on Saturday.

Northern Rose | Vassar Photography

Northern Rose broke to the back, settled on the inside and was content to stalk midpack in fifth before edging closer to the dueling leaders 4 1/2 furlongs out. She quickened her cadence through the far bend, and when Ayuso swung the mare out to the four path turning for home, Northern Rose responded gamely.

What was unfolding might not have immediately resonated with the general public. But Barclay said the backstretch folks watching from trackside knew what was in the making, and a noticeable buzz began to swell on the grandstand apron.

“Northern Rose outside has hit the lead coming to the sixteenth pole!” announcer Matt Dinerman intoned, punctuating his call with enthusiasm in deep stretch. “Northern Rose starting to open up on the competition for Duane Offield! And how about this? Northern Rose at 17-1!”

As Barclay put it, “If you were part of the backside community, you could hear the excitement when Northern Rose was coming down the stretch; even a little astonishment in Matt Dinerman's voice. And I think it just kind of made everybody's day.”

Asked what was going through her mind in the winner's circle ceremony, Barclay said the scene was a bit too emotional for her to put into words. Then she attempted to explain it anyway, her voice only briefly cracking with sentiment before continuing strongly.

“I can't tell you how well loved he was. Everybody on the backstretch knew Duane. Everybody on the racetrack knew if they needed help, that they could go to him. He just had that upbringing that you didn't deny someone any help if you were able to help them,” Barclay said.

While she was processing all of that after giving Northern Rose an affectionate rub on the nose and briefly hugging with Bautista, Ayuso and another member of Offield's team, Barclay said the phone rang near the weighing-in scale. The stewards wanted to speak with her, a racing official told Barclay, who said her first thought was, “What did I do now?”

The stewards, though, simply wanted to express a shared sense of wonderment at what had just transpired.

“The stewards were very sweet,” Barclay said. “They asked me, 'Wow, do you believe that?' And I said, 'No!' What a great sendoff for Duane. I can't think of a better sendoff. He was an extremely private person, but there was always that common thread–he loved the horses and everybody knew that,” Barclay said.