Jack Fisher: Daredevil kid turned champion trainer.
Good Night Shirt’s Eclipse Award is latest career milestone for 44-year-old Maryland-based horseman.
by Joe Clancy Jr.

John Fisher offered his 17-year-old son a deal: “I’ll let you ride some races this spring and you’ll work harder in school, get better grades, stay out of trouble. Okay?”

Enrolled at the prestigious Brooks School near Boston in 1981, Jack Fisher jumped at the chance. “Sure Dad, you got it.”

John Fisher replaced himself on *Juggernaut, one of the best timber horses in the country, and Jack won the Mid­dle­burg Hunt Cup and the Virginia Gold Cup, becoming the young­est jockey to win the latter.
Six weeks later, Brooks School called: “Dr. Fisher, Jack’s on the way home.”
Thus ended the deal.

“ I didn’t understand how it was possible,” said John Fisher nearly 27 years later, thinking back on the phone call. “Of course we were furious. Jack and I had talked, but we were not communicating. That was not the deal. His mother and father and he were on different pages. It’s very funny, now. At the time, it wasn’t.”
In some ways, the young Jack Fisher was a parent’s nightmare. He struggled in school. He ran with a fast crowd. He drank. He did drugs. He stayed out late. He stuffed a V8 engine into a Datsun 240Z and drove 120 mph in a 20 mph zone with the police on his tail. Other parents in Unionville, Pa., warned their kids to stay away from him. He risked life, limb, reputation, relationships—all the time.
He also sobered up enough to lean on his family, check himself into an alcohol and drug addiction facility as a college student, spend six months in a halfway house, admit his problems, and rebuild a life.

Today, at 44, he’s a three-time National Steeplechase Association (NSA) champion trainer who steered Good Night Shirt to an Eclipse Award as champion steeplechaser in 2007. Fisher’s jumpers won 24 races in 2007 and earned just shy of $1 million. Horses from his barn won four of the six open Grade 1 stakes on the NSA calendar. Fisher’s horses have earned $6.8 million in a career that began with three starts and $440 in 1987. He trails only Jonathan Sheppard and Janet Elliot on the career money list and looks poised to be part of the sport for decades.

But he takes little credit. “I’ve always said that training is luck, or the success is luck,” he said this past January. “My first horse was Call Louis and he won six in a row [in 1989], was unbeaten, won timber horse of the year. It feeds upon itself. I was lucky to have good owners from the beginning. They keep feeding you good horses or giving you a chance to buy good horses, and as long as you’ve got the good horses, you can be leading trainer.”

Dumb luck does not explain the continued run of success, however. Fisher does something right in his 24-stall operation based at Locust Hill Farm, the property belonging to his in-laws, Rufus and Sheila (Janney) Williams, in Butler, Md. He just missed the leading trainer’s title way back in 1994, finally broke through with his first championship in 2003, and has now won three of the last five.

Beyond the barn, he’s become a leader and a spokesman for horsemen through posi­tions as president of the Stee­ple­chase Owners and Train­ers Association, NSA director, a force behind the Shawan Downs Races and more. He has satisfied owners in Maryland, Virginia, Tennes­see, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
“ I was never going to be one of those guys on the board,” he said. “I did the board and SOTA for eight years. I spoke up, tried to do the right thing, made some progress. I care about it, so I’ll always be involved. You’ve got to be involved, because it’s bigger than you are. There’s more to it than winning races.”

family ties
Jack Fisher grew up like children in most horse-oriented families. He watched his father ride races and train winners. Jack and older brother Rush shared ponies Jill, a Connemara with a disposition from heaven, and Little Pal, a superstar who jumped anything, foxhunted like a hound and competed in pony races at steeplechase meets in Pennsylvania, Mary­land and Virginia.

The farm in Gum Tree, Chester County, had everything horse-crazy kids could want—animals, space, time. Their mother, Dolly, foxhunted. Their father was a veterinarian who trained steeplechase and flat horses. Rush, Jack and younger sister Katharine soaked it all up.

But just one of them went as far as to put blinkers on the pony to make him faster (like putting a V8 in a Datsun). Only one schooled the pony over the racing hurdles—backward. Only one took everything to an extreme.

A Fisher family tale involves a neighbor driving past the farm’s gallop one day and seeing Little Pal zooming along with a young “jockey” in the stirrups. The scene looked so pastoral and sweet, until Little Pal made a quick left turn to get at some grass. The jockey went flying to the turf and landed in a heap, only to rise again, flip the reins back over the pony’s head, kick the pony in the belly as a reprimand, climb back aboard, and try it again. The youngster was Jack Fisher, all of 10 or 11 years old, and the scene is probably what prompted the blinkers.
“ Always, always Jack would linger longer around the horses,” said John Fisher. “He was always more interested. Rush was interested; Katharine was interested—but more superficially. For Jack, it was part of his personality from day one.”
Dolly Fisher blames Jack for most of her gray hair, but also called him the easiest child of the three to raise.

“ We always got along real well; he was the simplest, the kindest, the easiest to deal with, even when he was little,” she said. “Although we’ve had our times. . .”
As a 5-year-old, Jack Fisher became separated from his mother at the 1969 Maryland Hunt Cup, which John Fisher won with family horse Landing Party.
“ The horses were going to the start, and there was no Jack,” recalled Dolly Fisher. “Rush, who was 8, never left my side but I couldn’t find Jack. I figured he knew to stay out of the way, so I went out to the 12th fence to watch. Afterward, still no Jack. As we were waiting to get the trophy, Jack appears.”

Like any worried mother, Dolly Fisher immediately shifted to interrogation mode and asked, “Where the hell have you been?”

Her unfazed son answered simply, “I see Landing Party and Dad every day, so I went into the paddock to watch the other horses. When they left, I couldn’t find you.” Smile for the cameras now, Jack.

The Fisher kids attended Upland School in Unionville, which went to ninth grade, and headed for boarding school afterward. Rush went to St. George’s in Rhode Island and Dartmouth, the first steps toward becoming a surgeon. He foxhunts and rides for fun (usually on Jack’s retired jumpers), but professionally he reconstructs spines. Rush and wife Phoebe live in Unionville, Pa., and have four children. Kath­arine also went to St. George’s, and then graduated from the University of Pennsyl­vania, the first strides toward a job with Illinois Senator John Porter (R) in Washington. She rose to chief of staff before Porter left office.
Now Katharine Maroney, she lives in Chadds Ford, Pa., stays connected to horses through her family, and works at Ecos Corporation (which does environmental consulting for large companies) when not chasing two children with her husband, Whit.

Their brother started down the same path—going to Brooks as a potential ice hockey star, among other things—but never graduated, never made it to a profession beyond horses, never had children. After Brooks, Fisher went to Dela­ware’s Sanford School and flunked out. His high school diploma came through a GED program.

“ The mistake parents make is we think they are cookie-cutter children, that a certain plan for what they are going to do is going to work,” said John Fisher. “You know best, you’re the parent. Our plan was for them to go away to school, go to college, go to graduate school if they wanted, go do whatever, but go do something. That was never part of Jack’s agenda; we forced the issue and he struggled mightily in school.”

Jack pulled things together well enough to get into Texas A&M University, where he pursued agriculture and animal husbandry. His parents felt he was on the right path at last. Well, he seemed to be. Actually, Fisher was doing all the wrong things and came clean with his father in a telephone call.

“ We had our call, like we would do, and with Jack everything is always all right. But there wasn’t something right about this call,” said John Fisher. He called his son back. “It sounded like everything is not as okay as you’re saying it is,” said the parent. “Actually, it’s not,” replied the son, who went on to describe a life ruled by drugs, alcohol and the legal problems that come with it.

“ The bottom he hit was tough enough,” said John Fisher. “He finally realized he was going nowhere. The drinking and the other stuff hits pretty hard. He’s the one who said, ‘I’ve hit bottom.’ That’s a hard thing to do. You’re 20 years old. To say, ‘This isn’t where I want to be in my life’ at that age is hard.”

With help from his father and fellow horseman Paddy Neilson, Jack entered a treatment center and changed the course of his life. He spent a month there and six more in a halfway house. His parents went through a family program, and learned plenty.

Though far from a model recovering alcoholic, Fisher checked the addiction and started over.

“ I came to a point where it wasn’t fun anymore,” he said. “I wasn’t having fun, everything was falling apart. You look at a lot of people in life that kept going and they stayed that way. They messed up their whole lives. You can’t just be a screw-up your whole life.”

starting at the bottom
Jack Fisher the screw-up returned with little or nothing and went to work for legendary Maryland horseman Mikey Smithwick. Fisher could ride horses. He could work. And that was pretty much it. He had no real plan, no big future.
But he had an ally.

Fisher’s grand-aunt Polly Riggs insisted he move into her Monkton farm rather than live at the Smithwick establishment in Hydes. In her 70s and a widow with no children, Riggs wanted the company and probably someone to help keep her 26-acre property going, but she knew her grand-nephew needed something too.
“ At that point he was the guy nobody wanted. He could ride races, but that was it. People said he got lucky and got on a good horse,” said John Fisher, referring to *Juggernaut. “Nobody believed in him, but she did. Mikey was going to put him up down there, and Polly was having none of that. That began a 20-year relationship. He really respected her. She was great with him and great for him, and he was extremely thoughtful with her.”

Riggs gave Jack a home, a friend, a start. His racing stable began there, in the afternoons and evenings. In turn, Jack gave her someone to care for, something to think about. They talked horses, they talked life. Jack fixed things on the farm and in the house, bought her a big-screen television, infused some excitement into an otherwise ordinary life.

“ The poignant part of it is Jack doesn’t wear his emotion on his sleeve so you don’t always see how much impact something has on him,” said John Fisher. “Polly really had a huge impact on him because of what she did for him. But he made her life, too. What was she going to do at the end of her life?”

Like most people who meet him, Riggs got more than she bargained for when she took in Jack Fisher—including time at the controls of a John Deere. On hot summer days, it was common to see Riggs (by this time in her 80s) on the tractor mowing the fields and Jack sitting on the porch sipping iced tea in the shade. He had worked hard all day, she told him. And, besides, she liked mowing.
“ That’s the kind of relationship they had,” said John Fisher. “It was very Polly and very Jack too.”

Riggs died this past Nov­em­ber, nine days before Good Night Shirt clinched the Eclipse with a Colonial Cup win. She was 95 years old. The longest-serving member of the Elkridge-Harford Hunt, she left behind many friends and admirers but few as steadfast as Jack. As part of her funeral, the Elkridge hounds met at Riggs’s farm and her ashes were spread at the base of a jump on the property.

“ When she was sick the last bit of her life, and waiting to go, Jack would go talk to her,” said John Fisher. “They would sit down and talk about anything. She’d say how much he brought into her life, and he had. He brought excitement and fun. How many people would really care? Well, Jack cared.”

no stranger to hard work
Fisher left Smithwick’s to take a position with Tom Voss in Monkton—starting another important relationship and beginning the path to being a trainer himself. As Voss recalled recently, there was no job interview.

“ Mikey needed some telephone poles to make jumps out of or something, and I needed a guy, so we traded,” said Voss. “Mikey got the telephone poles and I got Jack.”

Fisher stayed two or three years and took on various responsibilities as polo manager, race track groom, exercise rider, whatever. He worked all day. Voss tried to improve the younger man’s riding, but eventually gave up.

“ He didn’t ride very well,” said Voss. “Had these funny little things about him when a horse would jump. It used to scare me to death watching him.”

Fisher would never win a style contest for his work in the saddle, but he did go on to win 53 jump races and purse earnings of more than $855,000. Major victories came in the Mary­land Hunt Cup, Virginia Gold Cup, International Gold Cup, Grand National, My Lady’s Manor, New Jersey Hunt Cup, Radnor Hunt Cup and Genesee Valley Hunt Cup. As a rider, Fisher holds the record for number of Virginia Gold Cup victories; he’s won nine, one more than runner-up Joe Aitcheson.

Voss helped Fisher acquire Call Louis, claiming the future timber champion at Delaware Park. He even gave Fisher a place to put his horses. Voss owned a shed he no longer wanted and offered it as a gift with the caveat that Fisher had to move it. Nail by nail, board by board, Fisher took the shed apart, moved it and put it back together on Riggs’s farm. The shed is still there.

“ He really impressed me when he started setting things up at Polly’s, because he worked at it,” said Voss. “It took him forever to get that shed moved, but he did it. Anybody who will work that hard is going to make it.”

With Voss’s old shed, Riggs’s farm and some horses from here and there, Fisher started training. Three winless starts in 1987, five more in 1988 and he was off. Call Louis fueled a nine-win season in 1989. Fisher’s father sent quality prospects Caronee and Keene Turn, and Tim Schweizer’s Nenow registered a rich maiden victory at Far Hills.

Owned by Sheila Williams (soon to be Mrs. Jack Fisher), Call Louis won the timber championship that year. Two years later, Gus’s Boy repeated the achievement. Push and Pull won the Virginia Gold Cup for Williams’s parents in 1992. Saluter, owned by longtime Fisher client Henry Stern, came along in 1992 and won six Gold Cups and four timber championships.

In 1994, Fisher rode his mother’s Revelstoke to victory in the Maryland Hunt Cup— adding to a long family history in that coveted race. John Fisher won it with Landing Party in both 1969 and ’71. Dolly Fisher’s grandfather John O’Donovan owned the three-time winner (1901, ’02 and ’07) Garry Owen. Her father, Jack O’Donovan (Jack’s namesake), had Myrmi­don finish second in his colors in 1940. Her uncle Hugh O’Donovan rode in the race five times and won as an owner in 1956 with *Lancrel.

While dismounting after Revelstoke’s win, Fisher joked that now he “could get on with my life.”

In fact, he already had. He married Sheila in 1992 and set up the training operation at Locust Hill, with 24 stalls, a high-speed treadmill and the various trappings needed to run a stable. Soon, active race horses spilled over to Riggs’s farm and Jack and Sheila Fisher’s home property in Monkton.

The horses won 30 races in 1994, and Fisher still finished second to Sheppard in the standings. A year later, Fisher again checked in second behind Sheppard—this time denied by a single victory. Boosted by quality horses from Stern, Fitz Dixon, Irv Naylor, Rufus and Sheila Williams and others, Fisher made a place for himself in the top 10—and never left.

He produced fit horses who won wherever he took them: race meets, race tracks, timber, hurdles. Older horses, flat converts, 3-year-olds—they came to the races prepared, ready to run and win.

Only big names (other than Saluter) and individual championships (near-misses he had down pat) eluded him. He watched Voss and Sanna Hendriks win their first titles. He broke through with training championships in 2003 and 2004, and hit a home run in 2007. Before last season, just two Fisher-trained horses (Darn Tipalarm and Saluter) had earned more than $300,000 over jumps. Just one (To Ridley) had won a Grade 1 stakes.

The breakout season included three Grade 1 wins and the Eclipse Award by Good Night Shirt. Footlights won a Grade 1. Salmo took the Virginia Gold Cup, the first $100,000 timber race in history. Good Night Shirt earned more than $300,000 in a single season—breaking Grabel (GB)’s single-season mark in the process.
A trainer’s career will always rise and fall with the horses in the barn, but Fisher admits he’s learned plenty and modified his approach.

“ I run them,” Fisher said of his training strategy. “The problem other people have is they try to have them too perfect. They try to have everything just right. And I was that way. I used to do that. Now, if I think most of it’s right, I’m going to run.”
Good Night Shirt went to Keeneland for the Royal Chase-NSA1 as a 20-1 longshot. He fit the two and a half-mile distance and the race track setting but little else when taking on top-level horses for the first time. Fisher gambled, shipped to Kentucky anyway, and nearly won the race.

The lesson from the past is not to be too precise, to trust your instincts, and run the horses. In 2007, the lesson was not to over-train them. In 2008, it might be something else.

“ I learned that you don’t need to train that hard because we couldn’t train that hard this summer and fall,” he said. “The ground was too hard. We jogged or galloped on the treadmill a couple days, went to Pimlico and easy galloped a day, and then went to Fair Hill to work. They were pretty easy days for the horses and they ran as well as they ever have. You learn by making mistakes, watching people, watching the horses. You’re always learning.”

Voss, who won NSA championships in 2000, ’01 and ’02, laughed when searching for a reason why his former pupil became such a success.

“ He’s a good trainer because he worked for me. He paid attention, saw the mistakes I made and the things I did right,” Voss said, poking fun all the way. “He pays attention, reads things, tries stuff. He’s not afraid to run a horse, but he gets the mileage out of them too. Too many people want to win every time, and he was that way in the beginning. He was obsessed and he wanted to overtrain them. If you’ve got some kind of smarts, you learn that’s not the best way, and he’s a pretty smart guy.”

Fisher’s sister, Katharine, sees the same big brother who harassed her while riding ponies (undoing a girth was a favorite trick) and once tied her to a bedpost, but also admires the knack he has for success.

“ He got it together and found something he likes, something that makes every day fun,” she said. “He’s got the interpersonal skills; he’s very talented with the horses; he has the personality; he has the thoroughness and the ability to connect all the dots. He’s still a big kid; he hasn’t changed, but it’s pretty remarkable when you think about it.”

spousal support
Sheila Fisher, Jack’s wife of more than 15 years, knew all about her future husband before she met him. She worked in the barn for Dolly and John Fisher, lending an ear to their tales of woe about bad grades, wrecked cars and trouble along the way. The couple’s first meeting came at the Fishers’ farm as Jack returned from rehab on his way to the job at Smithwick’s.

“ I heard all these horrible stories about him, and I didn’t really want to know him,” she said. “I’d be riding out with his mother and she’d be horrified. I heard every bad story, but I knew his parents for so long and I knew Katharine and I knew Rush. I felt like I knew him before we actually met.”

The relationship bloomed over a horse. Sheila kept Free Runner at Betty Bird’s farm in Unionville, Pa., in hopes of pursuing a timber career. Those plans stalled when Sheila was sidelined by a head injury and couldn’t ride. In 1986, she sent the horse to Smithwick, where Fisher worked.

Fisher rode a few races (his first action since the *Juggernaut rides five years earlier) that season and took Sheila with him.

“ I was pretty sick and couldn’t do much, but I’d go watch the horse school at Mikey’s and Jack would pick me up and we’d go to the races,” she said. “It was a couple of months before we had a date or anything. We were friends first.”
Fisher got a leg up on Free Runner at Great Meadow in October 1986, and fell off while in front. That inauspicious moment aside, Sheila and Jack hit it off. She returned to Maryland, took a job with Voss, started living with Fisher and played a big part in the early days of the stable. A granddaughter of the late Stuart S. Janney Jr. and Barbara Phipps Janney, Sheila has deep roots in Maryland horse country as well. She appreciates where her husband fits.

“ He works really, really hard, always has,” she said. “Every­body sees the outside that’s carefree and just going along like a goof, but he takes everything to heart. We all do it, but he doubts whether he’s worthy of the success and the things he’s gotten. He’s very conscious of that stuff. He deserves everything he’s gotten.”
Jack never intended to have a big stable; the process simply snowballed from part-time afternoons at Polly Riggs’s farm to full-time training at Locust Hill. Now, three farms hum with some sort of Fisher racing operations. The active horses live and work at Locust Hill, with turn-outs, foxhunters and layups at Riggs’s farm or the Fishers’ home farm in Monkton.

“ It just progressed,” Sheila said. “At first, we had five horses at Polly’s and worked there after we got done at Tom’s in the morning. You don’t talk about things like that; we just got more horses and here we are. We’ve got three farms going, which sounds crazy because there is constantly something to do. But it works.”
beyond the limelight

Jack Fisher the trainer, the guy on the horse, the guy driving the van, is well known in steeplechasing and in the Maryland Thoroughbred community.

People probably don’t know Jack does his own billing, makes airline reservations for owners and talks to owners constantly on the phone. Nor do outsiders see the guy working behind the scenes to settle a dispute, organize a fund-raiser, modify the racing hurdles at Shawan to make them more portable.

And few would believe he’s capable of networking. At the Eclipse Awards in January, he met Stonerside Stable advisor John Adger and talked steeplechasing with him. Adger asked Fisher for a business card. Fisher said he didn’t have one with him (truthfully, he doesn’t have one), but that he would be in touch.
After returning home, Fisher surfed the Stonerside Web site for racing prospects and sent Adger an e-mail. Consider it a lesson in how to cultivate clients, from a guy whose surface demeanor might not shout organizational skills.

“ It pays to do your homework and I thought maybe he’d be impressed,” said Fisher, whose prospecting came up largely empty. “You’ve got to do stuff like that, you’ve got to promote yourself. A lot of people are good trainers but they don’t promote themselves. They don’t go out and talk to people like that.”

Henry Stern, Fisher’s steadiest client, joined the stable in 1990 and has campaigned such stalwarts as Saluter, Darn Tipalarm and Paradise’s Boss. He calls Fisher a great friend. Stern sees advantages in an owner having more than one trainer (mainly in the acquisition of talent), but he’s never had anyone other than Jack.
“ I’ve been approached by a number of people but I’ve never varied from Jack just because of the personal relationship,” Stern said after Fisher won the championship in 2004. “He’s honest. I’ve never got mad at him.”

Sonny Via moved his horses to Fisher in 2003, and was rewarded with an NSA owner championship and an Eclipse Award in 2007.

“ With Jack, you know where you stand every step of the way, every minute of the day,” said Via. “He’s the most attentive trainer I know; he’s on top of everything. When you sit down and think about what his job is—he does the scheduling, the hiring, the firing, the management, the training, the dealing with guys like me. It’s some job description.”

Fisher employees swear by the place, even if it’s maddening at times. Chief assistant Mary McGlothlin has been there for years. M.J. Kirwan, Tara Elmore, Willie Dowling—it’s quite a team with quite a leader. Fisher works as many hours as anyone.

“ We start at 6 in the morning and we’re done at 1 o’clock, then I just mess around on the place,” he said. “I’ve calmed down a little bit about the mowing and stuff like that. I try not to be the guy on the tractor all the time.”

He does chain harrow and roll the gallops, because no one else knows where the gallops are precisely. Like most steeplechase trainers, Fisher uses turf gallops and fields (his and others in the surrounding area). The training ground changes frequently, as do the workouts.

“ I lead every set because we don’t have a set track; we go different places all the time,” he said. “Maybe in another 20 years I won’t be able to lead every set. It might be nice if I could tell the riders to go once around a Polytrack or something.”
And that’s about as close as you’ll get Jack Fisher to looking into the future. He plans to “try to do it again” in 2008 though he admits that Sheppard’s stable looks deeper than ever. Trainers don’t retire anyway, Fisher says, so why bother thinking about it. He’d probably love to ski all winter out West, foxhunt more, go hiking a little more often.

Ask someone about Fisher’s potential careers other than horses and the people who know him all agree that he’d be a success. Investment banker? Sure, but he’d hate sitting at a desk. Corporate CEO? He could do it, but there’s not enough work to do inside a building. Mechanic? Now that’s something he could probably do all day—though there’s little public risk or reward.

“ He could be some kind of mad inventor, he’d be good at that,” said Voss. “He likes to build things, bolt things together. He’s like that.”

For his part, Fisher sees himself as a trainer for now and for later. He really is mulling a Polytrack gallop, though he’s not sure he wants to spend the money.
“ I can put all this money into a Polytrack which in 20 years isn’t going to be worth anything or I can leave that money invested and then I can retire and go skiing or whatever when I’m old,” he said. “The problem with trainers is what do you do? Am I going to be happy just foxhunting and skiing? I won’t be happy doing that. Sheppard’s not going to be happy doing that, that’s why he’s still training. That’s why I’ll still be training.”