Page 27 - New Mexico Summer 2022

Pockatu after winning the All American Futurity Dash 2 in 1972.
horse in the 1960s. I went to Los Alamitos in 1966 with some horses for Constance Ehmke. She wanted her horses kept fit and healthy over the long haul, and she was impressed by the way I did that.
“I walked into Ed Burke’s office and told him I needed a trainer’s license. He looked at me like I was crazy and told me I had to groom for two years. After that, he said, he’d think about the license! I went to Bay Meadows, where Curly Smith refused to give me a license. I put the horses in someone else’s name, but before I moved to Sacramento, Curly called and said I could get a license. That was a relief.”
Back then, California didn’t have a slot for three-year-old maidens. Well, James had some so he loaded up and moved to Pike’s Peak in Colorado. He arrived at night and the track’s caretaker assigned him stalls.
One of James’ all-time favorite horses was a 1970 Palomino mare named Pockatu (Truly Truckle TB-Royal Bonbon, Royal Bar).
“Pockatu was beautiful, and she was fast,”
he recalled. “She broke her maiden at Bay Meadows and finished third in the Golden State Futurity. She won the Kindergarten Futurity
at Los Alamitos in 1972, and then moved to Ruidoso for the All American trials. She won her heat with the 11th fastest overall time, and then won the Consolation by daylight.”
The Wilken and the McArthur families
knew one another for quite some time but
James and Donna were seldom face-to-face. The four McArthur brothers – James, Oscar, Bill
and Richard - each made contributions to the industry, including racing, training and breeding.
James and Oscar were considered a formidable team when it came to selecting race prospects. Oscar could look at a pedigree page and gut it to the smallest detail. Then James looked at the horse in the flesh, zooming his focus in and out like the lens of a camera. That combined process put many of the Champions in the McArthur Racing Stables.
“I was born in El Paso,” James said. “When I was eight, dad took a job managing 60-sections for the Reynolds Ranch (as in Reynolds Aluminum Foil). I did a lot of roping and dad loved match racing. He taught us a lot of valuable lessons and some of them were a little tough.
“I remember one day we were moving cattle. Dad was in the lead, with me and Oscar in the back. Only problem was
Oscar was walking and leading his horse, Yellowjacket. Dad looked back and saw it. He rode to where we were, saw Oscar crying and asked him what the problem was. Oscar said Yellowjacket bucked him off. Dad told him to get back on. Oscar said no. Dad got off his horse, fanned Oscar’s butt pretty good, and lifted him onto the saddle. Oscar rode!”
James attended 2 1/2-years of college at Fresno State in California, studying animal husbandry. The only problem was all he really wanted to do was rodeo. He was on the school’s rodeo team in roping, bulls and bareback.
He met up with a lot of racing people, with several of them encouraging him to get his trainer’s license. “That sounded darned good to me,” he chuckled. “I started my first
That’s when they both rush simultaneously into the headlines. How does that happen? Did the trainer take a mediocre, bottom-of-the-barrel bred horse, wave a magic wand over him, and suddenly step into a winner’s circle with his hand resting on the butt of a barn-burning son-of-a-gun? No.
Instead, somebody looked down on that trainer and decided to give them a chance. He sent an owner to their barn with a well-bred two-year-old, one of those colts with a different look in his eye. A flash in the corner. A sparkle, like tiny points of fire shooting out of the pupil. He didn’t exactly walk across the dirt. It was more like he floated above it and, when he did make contact, it was with a strut rather than a common step. A blind person could lay hands on the colt and feel the energy sizzling through him from head-to-tail and know with certainty he was headlines in the making.
Now the trainer enters the picture. They teach the colt how to break, how to run straight, how to control his energy, when and how to turn on his speed. It’s impossible to teach a horse how to use his speed if he has no speed! And those naturally slow ones never get sore or hurt ‘cause they never use themselves enough. There’s not a trainer on the globe who can reach out with a scoop and shovel speed into a slow horse. In other words, a trainer must have some good, well-bred, promising stock before he can lock on to those headlines. Then, when those two elements hook up, the most sublime magic in the universe happens.
“I don’t care what anybody says,” James McArthur insisted, “a trainer can’t make it without good stock. Is there anybody who doesn’t know the name D. Wayne Lukas? Even D. Wayne recently said people are starting to overlook him because
of his age. ‘I guess they think I’ve forgotten how
to train,’ he said. Well, let me tell you, people
like Lukas don’t forget anything when it comes to training a horse,” James insisted.
“I don’t care what anybody says, a trainer can’t make it without good stock.” – James
James placing second in Sr. Working Cow Horse event in 1968.
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