‘I Loved That Man’: Huey Barnes Gives Emotional Eulogy For Barry Abrams

Family, friends and race trackers spanning three generations paid their final respects last Monday to Barry Abrams in a graveside service at Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills.

The popular former trainer passed away on Oct. 9 at 66 after a courageous 15-year battle with cancer, never showing a hint of self-pity.

Amid the emotion, Santa Anita horn blower Jay Cohen, in traditional fox hunt regalia, gave Abrams his final call to the post.

Huey Barnes, an 87-year-old African American who came to California to work as an exercise rider for Charlie Whittingham in the 1950s when racial discrimination was still a sty in America's eye, with public restrooms and drinking fountains for “Colored Only,” delivered an impromptu and moving eulogy.

Barnes is still going strong today working at Santa Anita as an assistant starter.

Abrams was born of Jewish ancestry in Russia where his father, Lev, earned his living as a butcher, but a darker skin pigment and a disparate faith didn't prevent Huey and Barry from becoming fast friends, each an ardent fan of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Their relationship was based on what matters most: character, values, loyalty, honesty, trust and respect, not skin color and religion.

In his final years when it was no longer safe for Barry to drive, Barnes picked him up at home and drove them to Laker games.

“When they were over Barry would always find some hole-in-the-wall spot to eat, one I never heard of, and I been out here for a long time,” Barnes said.

“Then next game he'd take me to another spot and I'd ask him, 'Where do you keep finding these places?' He loved horses, the Lakers and food, and it made him feel good when he could share them with me.

“I loved that man.”

Common interests and an absence of prejudice nurtured their uncharacteristic and unyielding bonding of more than four decades, this black man from Brooklyn and this white man from Russia.

Race was never an issue.

The word only came up when Barry had a horse running in one.

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Services Set for Barry Abrams

Funeral arrangements have been scheduled for longtime horseman Barry Abrams, who passed away Friday, Oct. 9. Services will take place Monday, Oct. 19, at 3:00 p.m. PT at the Hollywood Hills location of Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

Abrams, best known as a trainer but also a successful breeder and owner, succumbed to throat cancer at the age of 66 after a long battle.

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‘A Good Heart And A Good Soul’: Trainer Barry Abrams, 61, Dies;

Racing hasn't lost its greatest trainer, but arguably its greatest fan.

Barry Abrams died peacefully Friday night at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Arcadia, Calif., after he was taken off a ventilator following a recent fall at home that injured his back. He was 66. Services are pending.

Abrams had courageously battled throat cancer for 15 years. A bear of a man at 6-4, 315 pounds before he was stricken, Abrams bared his soul in a story I authored about his ordeal that appeared in the October-November 2015 issue of North American Trainer Magazine, excerpts of which follow in this item.

Barry Abrams never smoked. He got cancer anyway. Side effects from the treatment over a 10-year period caused him to lose his taste buds, prevented him from swallowing (he used a feeding tube), he couldn't eat, run, go in the ocean or a swimming pool.

“I'm just functioning and happy to be alive,” he said. “I can eat cookies as long as they're liquified and made pudding-like. I can't swallow anything else because I have no salivary glands that create saliva.”

He lost half his voice box during surgeries, reducing his  speech to a whisper, but he never complained.

“Ordinarily, you talk about things like saving for the future and making plans for this and that, but facing this, you realize that there could be no future,” he said in the 2015 article.

One of Barry's dearest friends was trainer Richard Baltas, who assisted in the barn operation during Abrams' five-month recovery in 2011. “He's very kind with a good heart,” Baltas said. “Years ago, I wanted to leave Louisiana and come home to California, but I needed a job.

“Barry didn't quibble. He simply asked me, 'How much do you want to make?' and that was it. He came to my wedding on Feb. 26, 2011, when he was sick with cancer. He's done many kind and generous things for me.”

Said Abrams' wife, Dyan: “Barry is so kind and helpful. If you needed the shirt off his back, he'd give it to you. … He's one of the good ones. He's got a good heart and a good soul.”

Trainer Peter Miller was looking forward to winning the Breeders' Cup Mile with a horse Abrams owns in part, Mo Forza. “Barry and I have known each other probably 25, 30 years,” Miller said several days ago. “Barry's a great guy. Everyone loves him, and this horse really helped keep him going.”

A highly accomplished conditioner of both Standardbreds and Thoroughbreds, Barry Abrams will forever be associated with Unusual Heat, a horse he claimed for $80,000 on June 10, 1996.  The son of Nureyev would go on to become one of the greatest stallions in California racing history.

With Barry's passing, two questions will forever remain unresolved: did racing love Barry more, or did Barry love racing more?

Call it a dead-heat.

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‘One of the Good Guys’: Barry Abrams Dies at 66

A towering presence of California horse racing in both stature and sheer strength of character, trainer, owner and breeder Barry Abrams has died at the age of 66.

“He really looked into the soul of a horse,” said David Abrams, Barry Abrams’s brother. “He had horses run that didn’t run for anybody else.”

Abrams had battled throat cancer for more than 15 years.

“He never once complained about what he was going through,” said trainer Richard Baltas, Abrams’s former assistant. “He helped people who were less fortunate than him and was one of the good guys at the track.”

From hard-scrabble beginnings–“One of the underdogs. The little guy with a small stable,” said David–Abrams left an indelible stamp on the sport in the Golden State. From just over 6,000 individual starts, he secured 688 victories and more than $30 million in prize money.

His top-tier prizes included Famous Digger (Quest for Fame {GB})’s win in the 1997 GI Del Mar Oaks, the 2008 GI Las Virgenes S. with Golden Doc A and the 2010 GI Hollywood Turf Club S. with Unusual Suspect–the latter two by Unusual Heat, the remarkable lynchpin stallion of the California breeding industry who Abrams also conditioned.

“He was brilliant with his claims,” said David, of his brother. “He claimed two horses from Richard Mandella. One became a Grade I winner [Famous Digger], the other one was Unusual Heat. He saw in Unusual Heat what other people didn’t–they thought he was crazy claiming a 6-year-old with potential bowed tendon. He said, ‘the horse is worth what I’m claiming him for as a sire.'”

Abrams remained a minority owner of Unusual Heat, who stood at the Harris Ranch in Coalinga, and eventually became the all-time leading sire in California through his offsprings’ earnings.

“Barry was a remarkable horseman and a real horse whisperer. He was also a master at navigating the racing office, which I think is a lost art in trainers,” said Harris Auerbach, managing partner of the Unusual Heat Syndicate.

“He taught me an awful lot about horsemanship, about gamesmanship and about life,” Auerbach added. “He was just a giving, caring, remarkable man.”

Over the years, Abrams hewed closely to the ethos, “you don’t get paid for workouts,” becoming synonymous with moderately bred horses who earned their supper on the track.

“I remember a horse called Bengal Bay, one of the first horses we were successful with. He ran it three times in nine days,” said David. “Even [trainer] Roger Stein, who Barry worked for, criticized him for doing it. The horse won by six lengths at Hollywood Park on the third trip. That horse just loved to run.”

Beyond Abrams’s chronicled deeds that are now stamped into the dust of racing posterity, many point to a largesse and generosity of spirit that encompassed all, the less fortunate and the blue collar everyman that constitute racing’s rank and file.

“Anybody could walk up to Barry and be part of the family,” said David. “At Del Mar he had an area where he sat–it was a table around which sat a bunch of guys, just the common gambler. Folks just having fun. There’s Barry with a Grade I horse, and he doesn’t go to the director’s room. He sat back down there and made sure his family was all taken care of.”

Whether it was gamblers or racetrack patrons or those he’d known for years, “Barry felt obligated to help them out when they needed it,” said Auerbach. “He would give anybody the shirt off his back–he was that kind of guy.”

Abrams’s father was a Polish holocaust survivor, his mother a Russian economist. The family emigrated to the U.S. in 1963. “We came with nothing,” said David.

If their mother had her way, Abrams would have charted a course into the less exotic realms of certified public accountants. But he caught the gambling bug early. “My mom almost had a heart attack when he quit school, laid carpet, then became a groom,” said David.

Abrams took out his training license in 1975. “When he first started, he only had I think four horses, and didn’t have a groom. He did everything himself. He lost 28 pounds that first summer he trained on his own,” said David. “He just had a passion for horse racing.”

He also had a passion for the Lakers and wasn’t shy about advertising it–the stakes-winning Lakerville, who he part-owned with the Auerbachs, would go on to earn more than $300,000 on the track.

“We asked the nurse last night to put the Lakers game on,” said David. “Ten minutes after they lost he passed away.”

“He was a fighter,” David added. “He knew. I saw him two days before and he knew. He wanted to tell everybody how much he loved them all, and how much we all meant to him.”

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