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Blane Schvaneveldt
happened to be the guy talking to Danny. I told him who I was, and that Red had sent me, and he said, ‘If Red sent you, that’s good enough for me.’”
Kenny’s plan was for John to split his time between Russell Harris and Wayne Lukas, but when John reported for work the next day, Kenny came back and told John that Blane wanted him to come to his barn to work.
“I said, ‘Wait, I like these guys; I don’t want to leave,’” John says. “But we went down to Blane’s barn and oh, my God, that’s when he was smoking them cigars; he was in his prime and he was a very loud man, to say the least.
“Every morning I’d gallop 15-16 horses, maybe more; I never got off the track. I’d stay down at the chute, and they’d leave the horses down there and I’d hop on, one to the other.”
Blane evidently noticed that John was still sleeping in his truck, so he told Kenny to set him up with a place to stay. Kenny took him down to the Army surplus and bought him a cot and settled him into the room across from Blane’s office, where John stretched some baling wire across the room to hang his clothes on. “It was a little rough,” he says, “and back then, they paid me $135 a week.”
A ROCKY RELATIONSHIP
John says of all the people he worked with in the race industry over the years, Blane most influenced him in a positive way. “Absolutely,” he says. “Once I came back to work for him as his assistant, we became very, very close.”
Yet John’s perception of Blane at the outset was clouded by Blane’s gruff manner.
“He was not my kind of person — too loud, too growly, and he’d get mad about nothing,” John says.
One night as he lay in his room, John decided to go up and watch the races. “Blane ran seven or eight races in a row and won every race,” he says. “It got down to the last race and he had a horse called Jet Duck. He was Blane’s favorite. Blane loved that horse. He ran second by a nose — just a nose — and they claimed him.
“I was walking back to the barn that
night thinking about Blane. I said to myself, tomorrow’s going to be a good day; that guy is going to be so happy!
“The next morning, I hear him in there about 5:00. I walk in — the coffee pot was in his room — and he was at his desk with his head down working on stuff. I walked in there real meek and timid and poured myself a cup of coffee and said to him, ‘Well, you had a good night last night.’ He didn’t say a word.
“All he could think about was losing Jet Duck.”
But once Blane had had time to think things through, he usually was able to see another person’s side.
“The winter it rained 20-something days in a row at Los Alamitos. The mud was so deep we were having to haul horses to Cerritos and out to a ranch to breeze them,” John says. “Those older jockeys didn’t want to get out there in that and they’d take off, so people started paging me. Then we went to Bay Meadows.
“Kenny Hart and David Mitchell had gotten hurt that winter, too, so I got to ride a lot. I’d been able to ride two or three horses a night and several stables were asking me to gallop horses. But I was loyal to Blane.
“I called him one day and asked, ‘Do you think you’d give me a chance to ride some horses, because they want me to go to Utah and ride trials and all that,’” John says. “Blane never said a word. It made him mad that I even asked him.”
“Then one day he comes up to me and says, ‘I’m sending 30 head up to Fresno. If you want to go up and ride all those horses first call for me, you can get it.’”
FACING ADDICTION
After stints at Los Alamitos and in Texas and Florida, John found himself deep into drugs and alcohol. “I said to myself, ‘If I can’t be one of
the best and ride the best, I just won’t do it,’” he says. “I’d see all the guys around the track, ex- riders and all — just drunks — and my greatest fear was turning out to be one of those guys.”
John started training a few horses and faced with the possibility of two years in prison, he went into treatment. “I got sober, opened up
Kenny Hart and Danny Cardoza.
52 SPEEDHORSE July 2021