After Move to be Closer to Family, McCarthy Hits Stride

The reason Michael McCarthy went out on his own took his hand as he walked back to Barn 16 in the Gulfstream Park barn area Jan. 24.

McCarthy was following Mr. and Mrs. William K. Warren Jr.'s City of Light  after a morning gallop in preparation for the Pegasus World Cup Invitational Stakes (G1), and the 47-year-old trainer's partner for the walk was his 8-year-old daughter, Stella.

She eventually shook free, and McCarthy affectionately palmed his daughter's head covered with blonde hair. His wife, Erin, looked on, a few paces behind.

"She loves him so much. He works so much—any time with him is precious time," Erin said. "It's all 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.' I'm chopped liver."

Flash back about five years, and McCarthy was working in his dream job, but 3,000 miles away from Erin and Stella for much of the year. As super trainer Todd Pletcher's assistant in the East, McCarthy was handling some of the best horses in the world on a daily basis, he had financial security, and he thoroughly enjoyed going to work every day.

But with his family in California, he had missed all three of Stella's birthdays.

"After her third birthday, he called and said, 'I can't do this anymore,'" Erin said. "'You can either move to New York City, or I'm coming home.'"

The pros and cons were weighed, and it was decided. It was time to come home.

Home for McCarthy is Arcadia, Calif., where Santa Anita Park sits just below the San Gabriel Mountains. He was born in Ohio but raised in Arcadia, close enough to the racetrack to hear the race calls from his front lawn. Erin also grew up in Arcadia, a few blocks away from Santa Anita's hillside turf course. McCarthy's parents weren't all that interested in racing, but his father, Terence, was a sportsman, and McCarthy was involved in athletics, but the allure of the track called with significant volume.

He went to Santa Anita with friends from horse racing families, and that led to hanging around the backside.

"I had always been attracted to it—the excitement, the horses," McCarthy remembered. "And over time it became more and more about the horses than anything else."

His first job was working for trainer John O'Hara, but he bounced around and had gigs working for a veterinarian and clocking horses. He went to college for a while at Cal Poly Pomona and sought a degree in Animal Science, but he eventually decided his time would be better spent at the track full-time. In his mid-20s, he spent time working at a training center in Japan and also had a stint at The National Stud in England.

"I was working at the racetrack during the day, going to school at night, burning the candle at both ends, and decided working at the racetrack was what I really wanted to do," McCarthy said. "There is a maturity level that goes with working on the backside. There are no days off. Starting from the ground up, the pay scale is not as attractive as a 9-to-5 job, but if you are willing to go ahead and put forth the time and sweat equity, and you want to learn, it was all part of the process."

Ambitious and eager to move along in his career while serving as an assistant for Southern California trainer Ben Cecil, McCarthy found himself in a conversation with jockey agent Ron Anderson, who suggested he make a call to Pletcher.

A few calls were made over a couple of months. They didn't go all that well.

"I called him once—he said he was fine. I called him again—he was fine. I called him a third time, and he made it pretty clear that he was fine," McCarthy said, stressing the last word with intensity. "So I said, 'Forget about it.'"

Pletcher doesn't remember those interactions all that well, but the door opened for McCarthy when Pletcher assistant George Weaver went out on his own to start a public stable.

"The first thing I remember was Ron Anderson, a mutual friend, told me this guy in California might be a good fit, but those things are all about timing," Pletcher said. "We're blessed to have good assistants, so it was never a question of his ability."

So McCarthy flew out to Belmont Park to spend some time with Pletcher, but he couldn't get a read on how the interaction went—at least from Pletcher's perspective.

"I went to Belmont in July and spent some time with him. We didn't say much, and at the end of the morning, he got out of the car and said, 'Thanks,' walked one way, and I kinda just stood there," McCarthy said. "A couple days later, he extended an opportunity."

"The one thing I remember telling him, because he's a good golfer, is that if he came to work for me, his handicap would probably go up," Pletcher said.

McCarthy remembers the exact date he went to work for Pletcher—Aug. 25, 2002—because it's a day that changed his life.

"Some people remember anniversaries," McCarthy said. "Some people remember the day they entered the service."

He started as a foreman of sorts, and as an assistant to the assistant, but Pletcher said it quickly became clear McCarthy could carry more weight.

"You could see right away he was reliable, confident, and capable," Pletcher said. "But it was a different system than what he was used to—more horses, more co-workers, more moving parts. It was a volume level he wasn't familiar with yet, but he quickly fit right in."

McCarthy dived in, did his best to absorb all that goes into Pletcher's massive organization, and by November 2002 he was traveling with Texas Glitter to Hong Kong. McCarthy worked more than a decade for Pletcher, and the decision to leave was not something he took lightly.

"He came to a crossroads. You could tell it was tearing at him," Pletcher said of McCarthy's bicoastal family situation.

Picking up and starting anew in racing, even at a place you consider home, is not easy. And when it's not easy, doubt can creep into the mind. The one-horse outfit in 2014—with a Florida-bred named Battier—was a far cry from the sprawling Pletcher operation.

"To forgo all that and start on your own, there's only one way you can think. And starting off, you can endure some long days," McCarthy said. "You're back to grooming, you're back to hotwalking, you're back to being your own night watchman. All the while you're hoping the phone will ring. And there's a lot of questioning.

"Here I am. I can do this. Does nobody else see it? I just didn't think it was an option for me. I was not willing to accept not (succeeding). I put too much time into it."

Battier was owned by Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, which was founded by Aron Wellman, whom McCarthy knew personally from his younger days at Santa Anita and through business with Pletcher when Wellman was vice president of Team Valor International.

Eclipse had just started, too, and the timing worked out again. Eclipse sent McCarthy a handful of 2-year-olds that first season in 2014, and one of them was a Pennsylvania-bred named Illuminant. She wasn't an immediate hit, though, and it took five starts and almost a full year for her to break her maiden in October 2015.

Seven months later, she crossed the wire first in the Gamely Stakes (G1T) at Santa Anita. It was the first grade 1 win for McCarthy (although he technically was the trainer of record for Rags to Riches when she won the grade 1 Las Virgenes Stakes in 2007 while Pletcher was serving a suspension).

McCarthy's management of Illuminant was striking to Wellman because of the patience that was required for her to reach her best.

"What was most impressive about Illuminant—and it was clear early that she was a very talented filly, but she had a lot of idiosyncrasies from a mental perspective and physical issues that required superb horseman skills to get her through," Wellman said. "When you know you have your hands on a top-level talent, I would jump to the conclusion that a lot of young trainers that are really champing at the bit, knowing they have a filly with that ability, probably would've rushed and made tactical errors along the way that may have prevented this filly from showing her ability at the top level.

"For him to be short on horse stock, needing to win races and make a name for himself, it spoke volumes about his composure and poise. He knew his animals (and) knew how to execute to deliver results. That's indicative of a trainer who is capable of separating himself as a man among boys. He did it, and he did it against all the variables working against him.

"It was a turning point in the relationship, where we thought, 'We can do this.'"

Illuminant's success—she also won the Wishing Well Stakes and Monrovia Stakes (G2T) in 2017—was immensely gratifying for McCarthy, even if others still may have had doubts.

"I felt like it had taken me a while to feel my way, but after winning something like that—I don't know that it proved anything to anyone else, but it gave me the satisfaction that what we had been doing all along was working," he said.

Since then, McCarthy has won nine graded stakes, and 2018 was undoubtedly his breakout year. City of Light won the Oaklawn Handicap (G2), Triple Bend Stakes (G1), and Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile (G1), but McCarthy also started four other horses in Breeders' Cup races and won graded stakes with four other horses—The Lieutenant , Axelrod, Paved, and Liam the Charmer. His horses earned nearly $4 million in purses from just 191 starts and won at a 17% clip.

"Bottom line is you have to keep showing up and enjoy the process," McCarthy said. "Sometimes it's not real pretty. Just keep showing up—keep filling stalls. It's kinda strange to think that five years ago—I mean, we've been blessed to have some quality along the way."

The easy comparison to make with Pletcher and McCarthy is related to their intensity. During morning training, McCarthy and Pletcher are laser-focused and are not to be trifled with.

"Between 5 and 10 o'clock, you've got little time to get your ducks in a row," he said. "It sets the tone for the rest of your day."

But back at the barn at Gulfstream, things settled down a bit after 10 a.m., and that intensity waned a touch. McCarthy relishes the time with Erin and Stella but still wants to keep some distance while he's working. Big racing events, however, have become a special treat as a family affair.

"To be able to share something like that with her—she sacrifices a lot," McCarthy said. "Any racetrack family sacrifices quite a bit. She's 8 years old. Any vacation we've ever had has revolved around going somewhere with a racehorse.

"It's one of those deals. It's a selfish kind of industry, doing what we do. I can't expect someone to come here and do everything if I'm not willing to pull the weight myself."

That intensity, attention, and care have served McCarthy well, and his ascension has been swift—although maybe not as swift as he would have liked it to be. But that level of production doesn't happen without support behind the scenes, a detail not lost on the partners closest to him.

"(Erin and I) will joke about Michael's intensity," Wellman said. "Her thing is, she gets it. She'd rather have somebody who's totally devoted to his craft than to punch a clock and be miserable. He loves what he does."