He Sees His Hopes Take Wing

The sea gulls are flapping and thunder is clapping. The birds are right on time. On schedule the way commercial airlines only purport to be, the gulls come swooping, ominously, like something out of Daphne du Maurier, every afternoon at a little past 4, circling and dive-bombing from directly above the horses.

A lightning bolt crackles. Peering out, and upward, from beneath his black baseball cap, a man with shoulder-length hair, faded denim jacket and jeans is standing near the Santa Anita paddock, animals whirling around him like a carousel. The birds have descended. The sky has turned dark. Jim Buss is pleased to see both.

He extends a palm to feel for rain, and says: “This is exactly what I ordered on the phone. I dialed 1-7-11-HEAVEN.”

A wet track would enhance the chances of Major Launch, a horse he trains, a longshot who is minutes away from the trumpet’s call to post of a juicy stake, Sunday’s $250,000 San Antonio Handicap. This is by far the most meaningful race to Buss, 33, since earning his trainer’s license in the summer of 1991 and saddling his first winner a year later. He flips his hand, palm down, and says: “Look how nervous I am. I’m actually shaking.”

Major Launch is a gray beauty foaled in 1988 who is owned by World Champion Stables and Jerry Buss, also the owner of the Lakers. There was a time when Jim’s father was also his only client. More and more, though, other stables have come to entrust him with their thoroughbreds, have acknowledged Jim as a hard-working trainer and not as some son-of-a-rich character who maybe took up horse racing the way some millionaire’s boy at Christmas might ask for a pony.

Gradually, owners appreciated his dedication. They saw Buss laboring in the barns, morning after morning, pre-sunrise. Some knew he rose at 4 a.m. to make the hour-plus drive from his Dana Point home to the Arcadia sheds. Many understood that he had been something of a track-rat since he was 6, that he once went to jockey school, that he worked as an exercise rider and even for a brief time as a jockey’s agent, that as an adult he toiled at San Luis Rey Downs learning his trade at the side of John Ellul, a wise and veteran trainer.

Once Buss reached the winner’s circle a few times, he began getting superior horses to the ones he had trained at first. Top jockeys expressed a willingness to ride for him. He might not necessarily be established, but he came to be accepted.

“That’s what is so great about the backstretch,” Jim says, alone in a private box an hour before Sunday’s race. “With 99 out of 100 down there, there is no prejudgment. You are what you are.”

What might have thrown a few along the way was Jim’s appearance. He shares his father’s aversion to starched shirts and silk suits. If the Busses ever appear on “Family Feud,” they might be mistaken for the Grateful Dead.

“Wait until you see me down in the paddock with all the suits and ties,” he says. “Yeah, I suppose there was some second-guessing about me at first, the way I dress, the way I wear my hair. Fortunately, the horses almost never judge you by how you look.”

One of the things that has amazed Jim most about the business has been his ongoing discovery that horses do have distinct personalities, that no one is like another. Jim knew that the competitors who worked for his father could be as different in nature as Magic and Kareem, but it wasn’t until after the Major Indoor Soccer League folded and Jim no longer worked for the Lazers that he returned full-time to horses and really got to know them.

“It intrigued me that the horses each have their own personalities, which I didn’t know before,” he says. “I thought it had a name, it was a four-legged animal and it runs. What became so intriguing is that you get to know your horse so well that you also get to know what’s wrong with him, so you can change him whichever way he needs changing. The horse can almost tell you how he feels.

“That rapport with the animals, that’s what really got me hooked. That’s when I said: ‘This is for me.’ ”

There’s a cute story about the day that it became clear how much Nature’s creatures mean to Jim. There was a race at a mile and a 16th at Santa Anita one day, late in the afternoon, and, the instant the horses broke from the gate, the sea gulls came kamikaze-like from the sky. One of the gulls changed direction in mid-air and flew smack-dab into a galloping horse.

The bird fell to the ground and began hobbling and wobbling.

“I felt really bad,” Jim remembers, “because the horses were still going around and he’s still on the race track and the horses’ hoofs are just missing him. I said: ‘He’s got a broken wing for sure. I’ve got to go do something.’ ”

What he did was spring from his box, find some help and a trash can and trap the frightened bird, which attacked him with its beak. Buss took the bird to a vet, who taped its wing and advised two weeks of rest. That night, Jim checked into a nearby hotel, carrying the bird through the lobby, still banging against the inside of the trash barrel. To his amazement, no one stopped him. Then he took it home for two weeks, fed it through an eyedropper and eventually set it free.

“Oh, I cried,” he says. “But it was sort of hilarious. You always think the bird is looking at you when he leaves, like, ‘So long,’ when the truth is, he was probably checking me out, calling me names. He just took off without looking back. Maybe he’s here today.”

If so, he was an albatross. Jim’s horse, Major Launch, broke to the back of a six-horse pack, and couldn’t come back. Last time out, with Gary Stevens riding, Major Launch won an allowance race by five lengths. The horse had come a long way since Jim and Jerry Buss claimed him from Bruce McNall. Before that, the horse had won once in 22 tries. Jim took off the blinkers, gave him new shoes and watched him fast-break.

This day, with Alex Solis aboard, the best Launch could do was run fifth. Jim Buss didn’t mind. He knows what his father knows. Sometimes, you win. Other times, you try.