When a man has two perfectly serviceable Christian names, yet is billed on the racecard as “Bubba”, it is odds on that his state of origin is Texas — and quite probable that he has forgotten more about horses than most people will ever know.
When further research reveals that Charles William “Bubba” Cascio recently celebrated his 70th birthday, has a real chance of glory with his first runner at the Breeders’ Cup on Saturday and his home track is Lone Star Park, the unlikely venue for the 21st running of the World Thoroughbred Championships — as the Americans like to call the richest single day’s racing in the international calendar — the imagery becomes so blurred it’s as though John Wayne had swapped his gun-belt for a magic wand.
Cascio can no more believe that, at the end of only its eighth thoroughbred season, Lone Star Park will host the cream of world racing than he can envisage Gold Storm, his well- travelled chestnut colt, demolishing a high-class field in the Sprint within a gentle trot of his own barn. But money and land have always talked loudly in racing, and in the expansively named Grand Prairie, in the centre of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex where Lone Star Park was built, there is plenty of both.
It is still a curiosity that the Distaff for fillies and mares, which opens the eight-race extravaganza on Saturday, will be the first Grade One race ever run in the state of Texas, a reflection more of the lengthy prohibition on state gambling through the post-war years than a lack of expertise or enthusiasm for racing in those parts.
By late afternoon Texas time, the 51,034 spectators (every ticket has been sold) crammed into an arena that generally houses no more than 15,000 will have watched eight Grade One races, and through horses such as Six Perfections, Azeri, Ouija Board and Pleasantly Perfect, they will have been granted a kaleidoscopic survey of a century of refined breeding on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Breeders’ Cup committee has stretched its policy of encouraging outback tracks to the limit in nominating Lone Star Park as a suitable venue, but if characters as richly drawn as Bubba Cascio come as part of the package, the rewards are far greater than the risks. Cascio has been around horses since he was 12, hot-walking quarterhorses (a muscular type of stock horse bred in the Midwest) in his father’s stables in East St Louis. When the old Epsom Downs track in Houston closed after the Pari-Mutuel (America’s equivalent of the Tote, was banned in the state in 1956) Bubba’s father bought the old weighing-room quarters at the track and turned them into his home.
“He was caretaker at the track and when it closed he just stayed on,” said Cascio. “Other trainers would ship their horses down when the weather turned cold in the north. He kept the track open and we ran a few races, but I can remember the smell of the jockeys’ quarters to this day. I rode quarterhorses until I ate myself out of a job and then I thought it would be better to train them.”
With betting banished from Texas, anybody wanting to earn a living from racing headed to New Mexico, where the tracks attracted a colourful assortment of chancers, drifters and apprentice horsemen. “We’d leave one racetrack and head for another, driving an old wagon with a horse and matching another horse along the way to race,” Cascio recalls. “We’d be at the track at first light and leave at dark , and then do the same the next day. When we weren’t buying or selling or training horses, we’d be matching horses with anyone that came along. It was a hard way to earn a living, but they were good days. There’s nothing like the old days.”
In New Mexico, Cascio met another larger-than-life figure hustling his way through the ranks. D Wayne Lukas went on to become a legend of the American tracks and they still keep in touch, but if Gold Storm gives Cascio a winning Breeders’ Cup debut, the Texan will be able to boast a double unmatched even by the most successful trainer in Breeders’ Cup history.
After New Mexico, the two went separate ways, Lukas into training thoroughbreds on the swanky big city tracks, Cascio reverting to his father’s passion for training quarterhorses out of Texas. Cascio won the All-American Futurity, the Kentucky Derby of quarterhorse racing, twice but his big star was Dash for Cash, who won 20 races over a quarter-mile and went on to become an influential sire.
“He was a unique horse,” Cascio recalls. “A big, beautiful gentle horse, about 16.1 hands with a big stripe on his face and a good brain. But the best thing about him was he beat good horses bad. He won all those races and there was never a photo finish. There was no sweating with him. He was the best quarterhorse I’ve known.”
Nobody, not even D Wayne Lukas, has won a Breeders’ Cup race and a Futurity. “I was joking about it with him the other day,” Cascio said. “The good thing is that he’ll be as tickled for me as I will be for myself.”
Not until the mid-1990s, when the plans for creating Lone Star Park were unveiled and Cascio realised a racetrack run by men with broad horizons was going to be built in his back garden, did he turn back to training thoroughbreds. “Any good horseman should be able to train both types, quarterhorses and thoroughbreds,” he said.
“The only difference is that you have to get quarterhorses awful right on the day, because there’s no time for them to get rid of any soreness. A thoroughbred can warm up a little in the race; a quarterhorse is being pushed from the start, so there’s no time to be sore. And if you miss one race you might wait a long time for the next one.”
From a stable of no more than 40, Cascio has established himself as a dangerous operator on the Midwest tracks, an area dominated for the past five years by Steve Asmussen (the brother of jockey Cash) who looks set to become the first trainer in America to break the 500-winner mark in a season. Cascio does not aspire to such heights, but in Gold Storm, like Dash for Cash, a chestnut with a white blaze, he has unearthed a worthy defender of a heritage first laid down by Assault, the Texas-bred horse who won the Triple Crown in 1946.
The determination to do things his way, the Texan way, lies equally at the heart of the decision to stay true to regular jockey Larry Taylor, a journeyman even in his home state.
“He’s not a Pat Day or a Jerry Bailey, but the boy rides the horse real good,” said the trainer. “At Lone Star, the turns are tight and speed holds up. Larry knows the track, so it would be as big a mistake to take him off it as to leave him on.” Cascio, who reckons on having seen most things in his time, still can’t believe the Breeders’ Cup has come to him and that, in this very season, he has a horse good enough to qualify.
“I mean, I’ve been around horses all my life,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t know about much else. I can’t fix the electricity or the roof. I can put gas in the car, that’s just about it. But on the matter of horses, I really don’t claim to be dumb and yet I never imagined the day there would be 50,000 people in this place for the Breeders’ Cup. It’ll be the greatest day in the history of racing in Texas.”
Hell, it might even prove to be the greatest day in C W “Bubba” Cascio’s career.
