Trainer Chris Grove counts blessings
With son Noah’s serious illness behind him, young Bowie-based horseman has had a superb season with two stakes-winning mares.
by Lucy Acton.

When she stepped into his barn as a 2-year-old in the fall of 2003—with her gentle spoon-face and heart full of run—it was love at first sight for trainer Chris Grove. Silmaril had been named for the precious jewels in the J.R.R. Tolkien works of fiction and was destined to sparkle against one of the best race mares of her generation.

Then came Lexi Star, a close relative to the year-older Sil­maril, yet slower to develop. Angular and statuesque. Quiet around the barn, but a handful on the race track. “She likes to throw her head around when I’m leading her out to the track in the mornings,” says Grove, not quite forgiving the mare who led off the season with back-to-back stakes wins. “She means it when she does it, and she has a big head.”

Silmaril and Lexi Star—like jealous sisters in a bout of one-upmanship—have all but dominated Maryland’s distaff handicap division this season, pushing their combined earnings to more than $1 million for local breeder/owners Stephen and Sue Quick, and Christopher Feifarek, a partner in Silmaril.
The two mares—defying all odds as products of a relatively small-scale breeding operation—have provided a feel-good story in a time when many people are not feeling good about the fortunes of Maryland racing. But in many ways, the key to it all has been Grove, a 37-year-old horseman who, despite a well-established career on the race track, was until recently better known for his family than his horses.

In February 2005, Mary­land’s racing community rallied in a huge and unprecedented show of fund-raising support for Grove’s young son Noah, who was battling bone cancer. Noah, just turned 8, is today bright and athletic—with no apparent remains from the disease, except for the prosthetic device on his left leg.

“We can start out talking about anything,” observes Grove, standing in the chute while one of his less-famous charges gallops around the oval at Maryland’s Bowie Training Center, where Grove trains about two dozen horses for eight different owners. “But the subject always comes back to Noah.”
Noah, who participates in at least three sports not typically associated with an 8-year-old—namely flag football, skiing and golf—has inherited the strong competitive drive that Chris has identified in himself, and in his own father, Phil Grove, a onetime leading jockey on the Charles Town/Maryland/Delaware circuit and now a steward at Maryland tracks.

It’s an overarching urge to be the best that brought Chris Grove to the race track after an unrewarding fling at college. . . that propels him out of bed every morning at 3:30 for his hour-long commute from his home in Frederick to Bowie . . . that has set him on course as one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s top young trainers.

A racing family
At 5’8”, Chris Grove stands several inches taller than his father. Consequently, following in Phil Grove’s boot prints as a jockey was never a serious possibility for Chris—although that might once have been his ultimate goal.
“He was my hero when I was growing up,” says Chris of his father, who retired in 1994 with 3,991 career victories (a 14 percent win ratio) and a place in the Maryland Sports Hall of Fame. “We would go into the grocery store, and people he didn’t know would recognize him, and come up and speak to him. That makes quite an impression on a kid.”

Phil Grove, now 59, born and raised near Frederick, where he and his wife, Chris’s mother Sandy, have always made their home, had not received such glowing support from the generation that came before him. He recalls that his father, a Frederick County businessman, declared him “the black sheep of the family” after he became a jockey. “I was one of five boys,” says Phil, “and my father’s ideal was for each of us to have a business.”

Meanwhile, the teenage Phil and his pals were visiting (now-defunct) Shenandoah Downs race track every weekend. Inevitably, Phil heard the words that have been a siren call for many of the sport’s finest: “With your size, you ought to be a jockey.”

“Someone introduced me to trainer Frank Smith Jr.,” Phil remembers. “I showed up at the race track at 6 a.m. the next day and never left.”
Phil Grove was the leading apprentice rider at Charles Town in 1967, and went on to earn riding titles at numerous meets. In 1994, he received one of his profession’s highest honors, the George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award that recognizes “high standards of personal and professional conduct, on and off the race track.”

Chris’s drive to compete is especially strong when it comes to his father, both men freely acknowledge. “Anything Chris does with me, he wants to beat me,” says Phil, repeating an oft-told family story that describes how he spent hours on the driving range polishing his once meager skills—only to hear Chris proclaim himself too busy to play golf with his father.

Still, as a teenager, Chris wasn’t much interested in the race track. An all-state soccer player in his senior year at Frederick High in 1987, he pursued that sport at Elizabethtown College near Lancaster, Pa., where he became, in his words, a star bench-warmer. The college did happen to be conveniently close to Penn National, however. And Chris and his friends found themselves spending more and more time at the track.

After a year, he switched to a less demanding academic program at Frederick Community College, and took up a career as an exercise rider.
He acquired the basic skills while working for Kevin Potts at Cabin Branch Farm near Woodbine—at that time one of Maryland’s busiest training facilities.
Far from an overnight success, Grove vividly recalls the shock he felt when he was fired from his first race track job, with Pimlico-based trainer Dickie Small. “I was really green,” he says, “and after the first month, they let me go. It was the first and only job I’ve ever been fired from.”

Typically, that setback encouraged Grove to try harder. He moved on to Bowie, where he was employed by a succession of trainers—Robbie Bailes, Steve Moyer, Dale Capuano—before finding a niche with Donald Barr’s stable, where he remained for six years.

Barr was then in his heyday as one of Maryland’s top trainers, developing one good horse after another, including the likes of stakes winners Richie the Coach, Who Wouldn’t, Merengue and G. O’Keefe.

Maryland-based owner/breeder Milton Higgins, a partner in many of those star performers, says Grove’s skill as a horseman was by then well-apparent. “I’m not surprised at the success Chris is having,” comments Higgins. “I felt personally that all my horses were better for having Chris on them. He had a great sense of horses and what they needed to do. He deserves particular credit for G. O’Keefe [a graded winner of $267,170], who would never have developed into what she was without Chris.”

Once he began riding, Grove kept up a relentless pace. His daily schedule frequently involved early morning hours at Bowie, followed by a stop at Upper Marlboro (exercising horses over the old Marlboro race track) and an afternoon “breaking babies” at Joanne Hughes’s farm in Sykesville.

Still, not long after becoming an exercise rider, Grove had cast about for something else to satisfy his competitive cravings. Reducing down to professional jockey weight was no longer even a remote possibility; the muscle mass he’d developed from galloping horses saw to that.
Amateur riding? Now that promised real opportunity.

Grove had his first winning ride—in a non-sanctioned event at the Camptown Races in Ashland, Va., in 1989. “It was,” he says, “like somebody lit me on fire.”
He joined the Amateur Riders Club of the Americas (ARCA), the international program then gathering steam under the direction of its founder, famed racing cartoonist Peb (Pierre Bellocq). For more than five years, Grove was an amateur star. He ranked as the leading amateur rider in North America for three seasons, from 1993 to ’95, and his career took him to 35 race tracks in North America and Europe.

“It was a tight-knit group of riders, and we had a lot of fun,” Grove says. Getting down to his riding weight of between 130 and 132 pounds was still a constant struggle, though. “You can picture what it was like to be out running the roads near a race track in my rain suit and stocking cap, lathered up with baby oil. . . People would stare.”

Grove says he quit riding races “before I started losing.”
It was about that time that he and his wife, Rachael, were seriously considering a future together. Married in July 1996, Chris and Rachael had met in a “country bar in Frederick on quarter draft night” less than a year earlier. “When he told me he had race horses, I thought he was kidding,” says Rachael, who, at the time, had rarely seen a horse, let alone ridden one.

Brought up as a foster child, and since adopted by Eugene Zebovitz, a Ph.D. microbiolo­gist, and his wife, Marion, Rachael (one of nine children in their household) had joined the work force at the age of 17, searching real estate titles for a firm in Frederick. She has built a successful career of her own, and four years ago, along with two partners, founded a company, United Title Service LLC, that now has seven employees. In 2006, the company was honored by the Frederick County Association of Realtors.

Chris—noting the many evenings his father spent riding races at Charles Town—typically set out to do better as a family man. He and Rachael waited three years to welcome their firstborn, Noah, who arrived, perhaps prophetically, on the first Saturday in May, 1999. It was Kentucky Derby day, of course, and Noah actually entered the world just as the winner, Charismatic, was making his move around the turn.

“Hey. . . look. . . I’m over here,” Rachael remembers telling Chris, as both he—and the obstetrician, Dr. Gerrit Schipper, also a race horse owner—stole sideways glances at the horse race on the television screen.
But that was not Chris’s only dilemma. After getting his trainer’s license in 1997, he had gradually been building up a side business, training for a few clients. That morning, owner George Digon had unexpectedly sent him six horses, doubling the size of his stable.

“It was a tremendous coincidence,” says Grove. “I needed to be with the horses, but Rachael had gone into labor—early—and I had to rush home from the track.”

Grove stayed with Rachael at the hospital, and relied on someone else to take care of the horses. However, that day was a turning point in more ways than one. From then on, he no longer exercised horses for Donald Barr. He was both a parent and a full-time horse trainer.

Hard work has rewards.
One of Grove’s first, and best, clients has been William R. Harris, a heating and plumbing contractor in Virginia who has bred and raced horses in Maryland for more than 40 years.

Grove also credits Harris with serving as his mentor in the early years of his training career. “Mr. Harris and I talked a lot,” says Grove, “and he reinforced the idea for me of putting extra [fitness] into them.

“A lot of times we don’t have the best-bred horses in a race, so we try to make up for that by having the fittest,” Grove explains.

He considers himself a tougher trainer than most. “I work a lot of horses a mile, and gallop them a lot farther than anybody else would—even the fillies,” he says.
Years on horseback had given Grove something akin to a sixth sense when it came to designing a regimen for an individual horse. But in his early days as a trainer, Grove found himself struggling to develop a different skill set, one that would help him deal successfully with owners. “I try to be honest—saying, ‘This is my opinion of this horse,’ ” he explains. “It isn’t always easy. There’s a saying: You can tell a man that his son is stupid, or his daughter is ugly, just don’t say his horse can’t run.”

Diplomacy was apparently not a serious issue, however, because owners sent horses to Grove in ever-increasing numbers. By 2002, he had climbed onto the list of Mary­land’s top 15 trainers, and in 2004 he ranked fourth in wins for the year (behind Dale Capuano, Jerry Robb and Mark Shuman—the latter two training for the mega-stable of owner Mike Gill). Major clients, in addition to Harris, have included Charles Moneypenny and Harry Hog­lander.

The first stakes winner to come out of Grove’s barn (and one of three on his resume so far) was Deer Run.

Owned and bred by Harris, Deer Run, a Maryland-bred son of Deerhound, took his time developing his potential, and then won two stakes as a 5-year-old in 2002, including the Maryland Million Sprint. He had five additional stakes placings that season, highlighted by a strong runner-up performance to D’wildcat in the Grade 1 Frank J. De Francis Memorial Dash. In 2003, he added three stakes placings. Campaigned for a total of seven seasons, Deer Run retired after 51 starts, with earnings of $404,750.

In a roundabout way, it was Harris who brought Steve and Sue Quick—and their homebreds Silmaril and Lexi Star—into Grove’s life. Harris is a longtime client of Allen and Audrey Murray’s Murmur Farm in Darlington, Md. (which, incidentally, once was home to Deer Run’s sire). The Murrays became acquainted with Grove through Harris, and recommended him to their good friends, the Quicks.
Silmaril was the first horse the Quicks sent to Grove. “She went right to him from Middleburg [Training Center, where she got her early education with Jean Rofe],” recalls Sue Quick. “Chris told us she’d be a nice one. So far, everything he’s told us has been right.” While the Quicks are well aware that “all horses can’t be like those two,” as Sue puts it, they now have four horses in training with Grove, and employ him as their only trainer in Maryland.

Silmaril, who boasts career earnings of $729,153, got her first stakes win in February of her 3-year-old season in 2004, and became a full-fledged local star that fall by winning the Maryland Million Oaks (the first of her two Mary­land Million Day victories). A daughter of former Maryland sire Diamond, who was relocated to Oklahoma for the 2006 breeding season after his first three crops sired at North­view Stallion Station generally failed to live up to expectations, Silmaril ended a long drought for the Quicks’ breeding operation, which had not turned out a noteworthy performer since Silmaril’s granddam Kattegat’s Pride, who won three Maryland-bred championship titles in the 1980s.
In May 2005, the Quicks and Grove lived the dream of every owner and trainer, as Silmaril, performing before a national television audience at Pimlico the day before the Preakness, blitzed past Ashado (the mare ultimately destined to take that year’s Eclipse Award as the nation’s champion older female) and won the Pimlico Breeders’ Cup Distaff-G3.

Silmaril has won a total of nine stakes in her career (two so far in 2007) and was a creditable runner-up to Oprah Winney in this year’s Barbara Fritchie Breeders’ Cup Handicap-G2.

Lexi Star, whose granddam was a half-sister to Kattegat’s Pride, has lived most of her life in Silmaril’s shadow. But with two emphatic stakes wins in her first two starts this season (her first added-money victory came last fall), she gained immeasurable respect. In 15 career starts, Lexi Star has earned $302,624. Lexi Star has added significance for the Quicks, as she was sired by Crypto Star, a son of Cryptoclearance standing at the Murrays’ farm.

Over the rainbow
It struck the Grove family like a bolt from. . . hell. Phil’s wife, Sandy, who once had a high-powered career of her own as a fashion buyer, now works “very part-time” in order to be a devoted caregiver to her grandchildren—Noah, his 4-year-old brother Carson, and the two young children of Chris’s sister, Briana Prosper, who lives in Ashburn, Va.

Throughout his life, Noah (and now Carson) has spent late afternoons at his grandparents’ house, with Sandy driving him there from school. On a gray wintry day in February 2004, Sandy became the first to hear about the pain in Noah’s leg.

“He got into the car complaining about his leg, and I told his mom,” recalls Sandy. Within days after that, the four of them—Chris and Rachael, Phil and Sandy—embarked, along with Noah, on a terrifying swirl of doctor visits, X-rays and scans, tests and more tests, second (and third and fourth) opinions.
Finally, after years of competing, Chris and his father were on the same team. Only this was no game.

Sandy designed the “chemo calendar” that kept the grandparents and parents shuttling between work and home, child care for toddler Carson, and Noah’s room at Georgetown Univer­sity Hospital in Wash­ington.

The surgery was followed by complications, and days in the hospital stretched into weeks. Chris and Rachael fell asleep each night sharing a single cot next to Noah’s bed. At 3:30 a.m., with the halls silent, Chris would tiptoe past the nurses’ station and head to Bowie, where his string of 30 horses still needed his attention.

Then, at last, Noah came home, and the Groves, a deeply religious family, thanked God over and over for their blessings. Still, they had taken on another worry—how to pay for prosthetic devices, which are only partially covered by insurance and will have to be replaced frequently as Noah grows to adulthood.
Enter Fran Raffetto, a Laurel/Pimlico racing office employee and wife of Maryland Jockey Club president Lou Raffetto. The Grove family’s struggles tore at the heart strings of not only Fran, but hundreds of other people who contributed to the “Night for Noah,” organized by Fran Raffetto and held at Laurel.

Live and silent auctions at that event generated well over $100,000. Such was the outpouring that some people contributed by donating valuable horse racing memorabilia to be auctioned—then buying the item back at an inflated price and giving it to Chris and Rachael, whose SUV was packed full of treasures as they drove home that night. As a result of that evening, Noah is now the proud owner of the bit that Smarty Jones wore in his Triple Crown races.

For Chris and Rachael, an especially touching moment came when they unwrapped a painting of Charismatic—the horse whose Kentucky Derby victory will be forever linked in their minds with the birth of Noah. Steve and Sue Quick had purchased the painting (until recently their own) as a gift for Noah. It depicts a famous scene: Charismatic with his leg cradled in the arms of jockey Chris Antley, moments after the horse’s ultimately survivable breakdown in the Belmont Stakes.

The young parents cried when they noticed something they had never paid attention to before: “It was his left leg,” says Chris. “Just like Noah.”