Page 46 - New Mexico Horse Breeder Summer 2018

A MOMENT IN TIME
Frank Burns (far right) in 1939 with his World Champion Relay String
yards or so, the cowboy had to be standing, one foot on each mount. Around the track they’d go, riders bouncing on their horses, maybe one arm windmilling in the air to help keep bal- ance. Then came the rush to the finish line, surely one of the most exciting spectacles in rodeo; four or five hat-waving, war-whooping cowboys standing on 8 to 10 straining, lathered race horses churning for the finish line! That was Roman riding, and Burn’s success at it helped keep the pantry stocked during those long San Luis Valley winters in the 20’s and 30’s and beyond. He got so good at it, felt so comfortable standing atop his hardcharging horses that he could afford to play a bit to the crowd – shutting both eyes, standing on one foot, dancing, etc.
But there came a time in the forties when the championship trophies, belt buckles, saddles and the like began to come harder, and the time intervals between them began to stretch. Burns remembers, “I found that in rodeoing there just isn’t any substitute for youth. Experience counts for a lot, but ... I’d rope a calf fine, then look up and see that it had taken me four or five sec- onds longer than I’d thought. I thought at first maybe they were cheating me!” Slowly, without any dramatic change, he began to move on to other things. He actually continued to rodeo
at a reduced pace for another twenty years. He won his last saddle in a calf-roping competition at the Monte Vista Mile-High Stampede in 1963, when he was 57 years old. That was his
last competition. Like the champion he is, he decided to quit winners.
With the gradual withdrawal from rodeoing, Burns began to concentrate more and more of his time and energy on other pursuits, particu- larly horse training. He had never, of course, been very far away from the horse and racing. As a boy riding for his dad and then for C.B. Irwin, he had developed basic expertise as a horseman and a love for the racing game. His years as a rodeo performer had obviously been closely linked to the horse and just a step or so away from traditional flat-racing. Consequently, Burns in the late thirties began consciously to develop and hone his skills as a horse trainer. He remembers well the pace of those transition years: “There was many an afternoon when I’d compete in a Roman Riding race on the track, then they’d call me over to the arena to rope a calf, then I’d rush back to the track to saddle a horse for some race.” With the passage of time the training became the central focus of his life and with the exception of one interlude has remained so ever since. When the old Governor passed away, however, Burns returned once and for all to the horse and the race track.
The spectrum of his activity as a trainer is
a broad one. It stretches from quite modest beginnings, running his own pick-up stock at bush tracks all over Colorado and northern New Mexico, to handling Triple Crown caliber animals at major tracks in the Southwest. (In the winter of ’82, for example, he took care of
and raced Bold Ego at Turf Paradise in Phoenix for trainer-of-record Jack Van Berg and pre- pared Bold Style for his Triple Crown effort.) The chronological span of his career as a trainer is similarly broad, extending almost fifty years from the last of the 1930’s to the present – with no end in sight. It can be said that he began his career as a professional owner/trainer in New Mexico at the first State Fair in Albuquerque
in October 1938. He had gained a great deal
of knowhow out on the bush tracks to supple- ment his horseman’s skills earned through
years on the rodeo circuit, but he remembers the New Mexico State Fair of 1938 as the first pari-mutuel race meet in which he competed. He didn’t do especially well in that first meet, but it was nevertheless a baptism by fire which convinced him he could make a decent living in the horse racing business while staying close to the life-style he loved.
He was right. He’s made a decent living ever since and in the process carved out a niche as one of the Southwest’s most respected horse- men. While focusing his racing efforts on the Arizona/New Mexico/Colorado/Nebraska circuit, he has on occasion ranged out to tracks in Southern California and elsewhere in the West, even up into Canada a time or two. In forty years of traipsing around the Southwest and sometimes beyond, he’s made human (and equine) friends which constitute a Who’s Who of the last half-century of Southwest racing. His work last year with national champion trainer
44 New Mexico Horse Breeder