Barbara Enjoys Good Start to Season

When Robert Barbara was a 10-year-old growing up in Canarsie, N.Y., a Brooklyn neighborhood that borders Jamaica Bay, his teenaged brother bought a horse to ride at a nearby stable in Mill Basin.

Before long, it was the younger brother who had taken his place in the saddle. His talent evident, Barbara was soon competing at the riding academy's shows, and within two years, he said, "I had more blue ribbons than you could shake a stick at."

By the time he was 15 he was on racehorses, taking them to the beach at low tide for quarter-mile races, and it was there that a local trainer spotted him.

"He saw me racing Quarter Horses," Barbara remembered, "and he brought me to Aqueduct."

Barbara's career as a jockey didn't last long; he won 11 races while under his apprentice contract, but when he couldn't keep his weight down, he tried on a saddle of another sort, that of an outrider at New York Racing Association tracks from 1973 to 1983.

Turning to training, he was still a familiar sight on horseback, riding his pony to and from the track. His first graded stakes win came in 1990 at Monmouth Park when She Can won the Post-Deb Stakes (gr. II, now the Reeves Schley, Jr. Stakes).

Other graded stakes followed, including the 2003 Garden City Breeders' Cup Handicap (gr. I) with Indy Five Hundred and the 2009 Joe Hirsch Turf Classic Invitational Stakes (gr. IT) with Interpatation.

In 2011, Barbara thought he had his next big horse when J C's Pride broke his maiden with a sharp victory at Saratoga Race Course. Purchased by long-time Barbara client Joseph Bucci for $200,000, the son of Henny Hughes was the third choice in the Three Chimneys Hopeful (gr. I), but was pulled up coming into the stretch.

Though the colt showed no sign of injury, he soon developed a throat infection that moved swiftly through him, resulting in his being euthanized in December.

"When he got sick on me, a couple of days went by, then a couple more days, I started getting really nervous," Barbara said. "I knew he was in trouble. It just got into his system and ate him up. It was really sad."

In a bit of a slump when he lost J C's Pride, Barbara also ended up losing Bucci as a client.

Now he hopes the tough times are behind him. He got off to a good start this year with three wins in January, including two Jan. 17. One of those wins came with Majestic Jessica, owned by J and M Racing Stables, for whom Barbara has been training for eight years.

He's got about 15 horses in his barn, but, he said, that number changes regularly because of the ferocity of the claiming game this winter.

"You run a horse that fits in a race, you're going to lose them," he said. "They claim like crazy up here. You run the favorite, he's gone."

No longer gone is Joseph Bucci, for whom Barbara is again training.

"He's a really great man, and we had a lot of success together and a lot of fun," he said. "It really upset me, losing him, and I kind of lost my desire for a while. Doing this seven days a week, 5 in the morning—something like that goes wrong, you kind of say, 'Wow.'

"But right now," he went on, "I feel great about everything. My barn is filling up as we speak, and things are good.

"To live this dream—I didn't expect it to last as long as it has. I've had a wonderful career."