Buzz Chace: Agent to the stars.

New Jersey-based bloodstock agent selects auction buys for some of the biggest—and most successful—racing stables in the country.
by Sean Clancy

In hockey, they’re called rink rats. In horse racing, track rats. You know the ones—kids who can’t get enough of the track. They work in the morning to earn money to bet the daily double in the afternoon. They get jobs doing anything they can at the track—mucking, riding, walking, raking, anything. Most often, the infatuation is born in them. And if it isn’t, well, it sure can’t be trained into them.

Most of these kids go on to other things, attracted to weekends off, job security and rising with the sun instead of before it. Their stint at the track? Nothing more than a diversion on the way to adulthood. The ones who make it —their time represents a perfectly designed arc.
Meet Baden P. (Buzz) Chace, race track rat turned agent to the stars. His is the arc of success. Chace, a 63-year-old resident of Little Silver, N.J., selects and purchases weanlings, yearlings and 2-year-olds for some of the biggest racing stables in the country. His list of clients includes Aaron and Marie Jones, Charles and Marianne Hesse, Ernie Paragallo, Barry Schwartz, Norma Hess, West Point Thoroughbreds and Bill Poston.

In the sales world, there is only one Buzz Chace, one of the few agents who can compete with international giants Coolmore or Sheikh Mohammed. When Chace looks twice, a horse has something. You can be sure of that.

A high school dropout, Chace discovered horses at Gage Hill Stables, a riding school next door to his childhood home in Fall River, Mass. His father died when Buzz was 8 and his mother supported her six children by working in the textile mill. Chace immersed himself at Gage Hill—mucking stalls, riding horses, giving lessons. Eventually, Chace’s experience at Gage Hill morphed into a job working on Muriel Vanderbilt Adams’s farm in Newport, R.I. Yes, those Van-der-bilts.

There, Chace got involved in all aspects of the sport: preparing yearlings for sales, galloping horses and working with stallions. At 20, he advanced to the race track, working for Adams’s trainer Joe O’Shea, rubbing three horses and learning how to do things “the right way.”

It was there that Chace met the man who would change his life—Dr. Ed Devine. Chace took a job as Devine’s assistant. It was like a free ride to Harvard. Devine ran one of the biggest Thoroughbred veterinary practices in the Northeast. Chace, doing anything from mixing worm medicine to taking blood, was suddenly around the best horses in the country.
Chace was just a kid really, a vet’s assistant walking down Ed Christmas’s shedrow at William duPont’s Bellevue Training Center near Wilmington, Del. There was a ruckus in one of the stalls. A horse jumped and kicked the walls while a groom tried to knock the horse off.
“ Mr. Christmas, that’s a tough horse,” Chace said.

“ Son, he ain’t a tough horse. All he needs is a man and I ain’t got the man,” Christmas said.
The horse’s name was Am-ber--nash. The next time Chace saw him was at Aqueduct in the spring when Ambernash won his first start easily, nearly breaking the track record.
Another time, Devine wanted Chace to go with him to Lady Thouron’s farm in Penn-sylvania to worm some horses. Back then you had to mix up the worm medicine, four gallons of green stuff.

“ Doc, I don’t want to go over there; I want to bet on this horse today,” Chace said.
“ What horse?” Devine asked.

“ That little horse Sunshine Calvert has, in the first stall,” Chace said.
Devine left Chace at Monmouth Park and handed him $100 to bet on that little horse, $50 to win and $50 to place. In Reality won by eight lengths and paid $49.80. First time out.
Then there was the day Steve Brooks got off a horse at Monmouth Park. Brooks rode the best horses in the country for Calumet Farm. This one was different.
“ This is the fastest horse I’ve ever been on in my life,” Brooks said.
Chace took it to the bank, the horse’s name was *Turbo Jet II, and he won his next start and paid nearly $17. Kelso, Buckpasser, Mongo, Seven Thirty, Ring Twice, Ambernash, In Reality, *Turbo Jet II. . .

“ I had a chance to look at good horses because he worked for the best people at that time—Erdenheim Farm, George Widener, Walter Jeffords. . . They had the best horses,” Chace said. “I had a shot to look at and get my hands on real good horses, and that intrigued me. Real good horses. Something’s got to sink in your head over the years. What a good horse should look like.”

Chace worked for Devine for nine years and learned to float teeth. He worked as a race track dentist before trying his hand at training. Chace married his wife of 41 years, Mary Lou, and had two sons, Baden III and Mark. Along the way, Chace was always buying horses. A horse here, a horse there. The sales captivated him.

“ As a kid, I used to ride the horses at the auctions, up and down, up and down. We would go to auctions in Blue Hills, Mass. I was always around the sales. It just intrigued me,” Chace said. “I was buying horses, I guess, all the time. Keene-land, Ocala, just buy one or two horses. I always liked the sales; I always liked looking at young horses.”

In 1984, Chace went to the Ocala Breeders’ Sales August yearling auction to buy some horses for a friend. Chace picked out My Mom Ginny, a filly by Wardlaw, and two others.
“ He gave me $100,000 to buy some horses for him. I spent $17,000 of his money. I came up with My Mom Ginny, another horse I bought for $3,000 who died the next day, and another horse that was worth about $25,000. He had a good go,” Chace said. “My Mom Ginny won a stakes as a 2-year-old and we operated on both knees and an ankle and sold her for $150,000. He never bought another horse. He bought United States Savings Bonds.”
The Chace-trained My Mom Ginny was a success story, but he would wait almost a decade for the breakout horse.

In 1993, trainer Jim Ryerson asked Chace, who was buying less than a dozen horses a year, to find a horse for Leonard Pivnick. Chace was at the OBS 2-year-old sale and already had the horse in mind. A big bay horse by Meadowlake. Pivnick bought the horse for $105,000 (about $65,000 more than he planned to spend). Named Meadow Flight, the horse would win the Pennsylvania Derby-G2, Flamingo Stakes-G3 and Long Branch Breeders’ Cup Stakes, and earn more than $500,000.

Meadow Flight caught the attention of Ernie Paragallo, a New York investment banker and computer software exec-u--tive. In 1994, Chace sat between Pivnick and Paragallo at the Sara-toga select yearling sale. In front of them was the great-est horse Chace had ever laid eyes on.

“ I couldn’t get my eyes off him. I kept going back, I must have looked at him 20 times,” Chace said. “Pivnick didn’t know how much he wanted to spend, so I told Ernie that [Pivnick] had the first chance at him. When he stopped, I think around $150,000, I told Ernie just go on and buy him. He did and the rest is history. That’s how he became Ernie’s horse. Ernie did the bidding, I was doing the coaching. I loved that horse.”

That horse was Unbridled’s Song, who won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile-G1 by a neck and added the Florida Derby and the Wood Memorial on his way to being favorite for the Kentucky Derby. After suffering a quarter crack and other foot problems, he faded to finish fifth in the Derby. Purchased for $200,000 and an earner of $1.3 million, the son of Unbridled is now a top stallion, commanding a $125,000 fee.

“ He had a beautiful walk, a long beautiful neck. Of course, people would say he’s too close behind and he didn’t vet out for other people, but it was minor stuff,” Chace said. “Like I say, you can’t find the perfect horse. He had a beautiful way about him. His eye—he looked like a race horse. A standout.”

Once Chace had the Unbrid-led’s Song pennant, it was easy collecting clients and buying horses. In 1995, Chace purchased eventual sprint champion Artax as a weanling for $82,000. In 2000, he signed the ticket for Sarava, who would win the 2002 Belmont Stakes. In 1999, he bought the maiden mare Cozzene’s Angel (in foal to Awesome Again) for $200,000 on behalf of Daniel Bori--slow. The next year she gave birth to Grade 1 winner Toccet.

“ We’re all looking for the same thing—the horse that can run, really run. They can come from anywhere. I’ve never seen a perfect horse in my life. Some are just more imperfect than others,” Chace said. “When a horse comes out of the stall, I just look for the way he handles himself. I don’t look if he’s crooked or over in his knees or any of that conformation stuff, I just look at the horse physically and mentally and then I go from there.”
Going from there means making expensive—and highly scrutinized—decisions with other people’s money.

“ My confidence is knowing horses. I’ve always felt comfortable in my decision to buy a horse, to spend someone else’s money and have a good feeling the horse would be fine,” Chace said. “The people I work for make me lucky. When you work for good people, that helps a lot. They leave me alone and let me do my thing. Not every horse works out, but I know the ones I buy have a chance.”

Chace works a sale with deadly charm—part gunslinger, part politician. He’s fair, polite, affable to everybody he comes across, but always means business, never wasting a word. He looks at more horses out of politeness than any agent at the sale. He nods and smiles, says something cordial and moves on without the consignor knowing he hated the horse.

“ The opportunities come when you have people to put the money up, when you have money to spend, but you have to handle it like it’s your money,” Chace said. “Is it difficult? No, it’s pretty easy for me. I try not to guess, so therefore it makes it a lot easier. I can live with a lot of faults with a horse. People make mistakes by trying to find faults with horses, looking at them too closely. Besides, you have to be lucky to buy a good horse.”