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SHERRILL WARD. WardsBackground Turf Success Tale Second Generation Trainer Began Working for Father Doing Every Stable Chore By BOB HORWOOD Staff Correspondent Like Bill Winfrey, who guides the destinies of Native Dancer, Sherrill Ward is one of the younger generation of trainers with another generation of valued experience behind him. The trainer of Mrs. John W. Galbbreaths Summer Tan quite literally grew up on the racetrack and was born at the very heart of the American thoroughbred world in Lexington, Ky. His father, the late John H. Ward, was a "trainers trainer" for some 30 years, and in the course of his long career developed Dodge and Wise Counsellor, among other fine animals. It was not just a question of his fathers experience "rubbing off" on Sherill. In his formative years, Summer Tans trainer went through the complete schooling required of a good horseman, starting in by mucking out stalls and cleaning tack, rubbing them lor more than two years, and also exercising his fathers charges in the morning. In 1929, the elder Ward decided to retire and turned over the care of the Everglade Stable horses to Sherill. This retirement was not permanent, however, and John H. Ward took out a license again in New York in the summer of 1937. Fitzsimmons the Difference If Sherrill Ward has a fault that could in any way hinder the development of Summer Tan, it is his deep-rooted modesty. In discussing the Heliopolis colt last winter in relation to Nashua and their impending classic encounters Sherrill declared that he felt that the chief difference between the two colts, so far as he had been able to estimate, was the vast experience amassed by Jim Fitzsimmons. "After all," he aid at Hialeah at the time that Summer Tan was just taking his first steps on the comeback trail, "Mr. Fitz has been training Derby horses almost as long as Ive been alive, and there is a difference between training a really good horse for races like that and getting the most out of an unsound ordinary horse.* When it was suggested that, in addition to the knowledge and experience he had gained from his father, Sherrill had also been able to profit by the advice of the veteran Max Hirsch, a very close friend for many years, he replied: "Thats true and I owe a great deal to older people,-but there still is no substitute for first-hand experience in these things. When you have done a thing yourself and found that it worked or did not work, you know exactly what you did and what to do again, or what to avoid. When you are going on someone elses advice, there is always the danger of being too timid, or too bold." * As said above, Sherrill Wards danger seems not of being either too timid, or too bold, merely too modest. Certainly, he has not made any detectable mistakes with the colt thus far in his sophomore campaign, • and the consensus of trainers who studied him from every angle in the Jamaica paddock the day that the handsome chestnut returned to action was that here was as perfectly conditioned a horse as one could ask to see. And when you recall that only five months earlier this same colt had been at deaths door, fighting for his life .while suffering acute physical agony, Wards achievement in bringing him this far along the rugged comeback trail must be recognized as one of the great training feats of the time. While Summer Tan is far and away the best horse that Sherrill has trained, he is by no means the first good horse he has had. Deliberator, Wise Daughter, Royal Palm and Whirlabout, while not quite champions, were good horses in his care.
