Great writers such as Red Smith and Damon Runyon always maintained the best stories were on the backside of racetracks. If they had known Djuro “Max” Maksimovic, they would have pointed to him as proof. Arguably (or maybe inarguably) Max was the most unusual man ever to walk a backside shedrow.
I came to know Max through a phone call from David Schneck, racetrack representative for the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association, whose office on the Churchill Downs backside was next to the 12 foot by 12 foot tack room that was home and hearth to Max.
David called me to tell me about a clay sculpture Max created of jockey Isaac Murphy astride 1884 Kentucky Derby winner Buchanan. The hope was that a story in The Blood-Horse would generate interest and funding for a bronze casting. The goal was to see the casting displayed permanently in the Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs or even the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
There may have been an ultimate and ulterior goal, however, that was far more important: to see a gifted man find what he had lost on the backside.
I met Max, at the time a groom for then-trainer Steve Penrod, in David's office after morning work for barn workers, which ends around 11 a.m. and begins at anywhere from 4 to 5 a.m.
Max's lined, goateed face was quintessentially Slavic, and he was a Serb from what was then Yugoslavia. If you were casting extras in a movie about Lenin-era Russia and the Russian Revolution, Max would be an easy choice.
His goateed face was also that of an artist and an intellectual. His eyes were squinted, like many whose work is outdoors, and they shone and flashed as he spoke. His tanned skin was acquiring the sags and wrinkles that await most of us in old age. He was 60 at the time. If you saw a photo of Max with a neutral background or in an environment away from the racetrack, you might place him mentally in a museum gallery or an artist's studio. A backside of a racetrack is the last place you'd expect to find him.
You most definitely would not have placed a former Fulbright Scholar there.
Giftedness with sculpting was manifest early in his life through a literally crafty means of subterfuge to avoid finishing meals as a child. He described himself in childhood as a “bad doer,” racetrack parlance for a horse that doesn't eat well.
“I would take pieces of bread and form small animal figurines. My parents would be so taken with what I had made, they would forget I was supposed to be eating the bread,” he recalled with a laugh.
An early interest in horses may have come from his father's position as chief veterinarian in a still horse-drawn Yugoslav military after World War II.
His father's position also brought him before Marshal Tito, president of Yugoslavia, when he was hospitalized as a child, and the legendary national leader visited the hospital for the kind of appearances heads of state make for photo opportunities.
“When Tito came to visit I was introduced to him as 'our little sculptor,'” Max recalled. “Tito asked if I needed anything and I said, 'Yes. I don't have any clay.'
“He snapped his fingers and one of his aides wrote something down on a pad. I was teased by the other kids that Tito would forget. Then the clay arrived from Italy.
“It was the best clay there was.”
In Max's accented English he became, in his words, “some kind of child prodigy.” Entered in a competition for art students in Max's native city of Belgrade, his entry was declared Best in Show, but he almost didn't collect his award. The judge called his mother to tell her work entered under Max's name was indeed, the most outstanding, but there was a problem: they didn't know if Max had really sculpted it. After all, he was only nine years old competing against the best Belgrade art students, some who were twice his age.
“My mother called this lady and sent me to see one of the judges with some clay,” he said. “I told this lady I'd make her anything she wanted me to make and I made her a cow. I did it in two minutes with ears, split hooves, tail, and horns.
“She said, 'That's all I need to see.'”
Max received the award.
Max's first experience with horses was when his father was assigned to duty with a Yugoslav military detachment in Burma. It was there that a teenaged Max joined a riding club and wound up driving trotters in harness racing. Returning to Yugoslavia after his father's posting, Max was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Max related how he never really tried at his studies although finishing at the top of his class. This was a precursor of things to come in his life — “My mind was on horses.”
It was on completion of academy studies that a Fulbright Scholarship became part of Max's story. It took him to Boston University to study sculpture, but only for one year. Iron Curtain Yugoslavia blocked customary two-year tenures for nationals receiving a Fulbright in fear that they would not return home.
Max left the university after one year — to lead horses in the shedrow of barns on the backside of Suffolk Downs in Boston.
The reasons for this destination rather than a studio or even a teaching position in America or back home in Yugoslavia are open to a lot of speculation among friends and others who came to know Max. He shrugged with a mixture of both regret and resignation over a lifetime spent on the racetrack.
“If I had to live my life all over again, I would try the art way,” as he described it. “I probably would, but…” He never finished the sentence.
Art, however, found Max on the backside. One day at Churchill Downs, a horse owner and client of Steve Penrod saw Max creating a clay horse for a child.
“She watched me and asked if I would be so kind to make her one. Later, she went to an art store and bought me some clay.
“It sat around and I never did anything with it.”
Two years later, the late wife of Steve Penrod told Max that the owner was dying of cancer.
Others in the KTA office looked away and I shut off a tape recorder as Max wept for several minutes. Collecting himself, Max recounted that the owner, before her death, came out to Churchill Downs to see a sculpture of a horse Max created for her before she died. She loved it and paid for two castings, one for her and the other for Max to keep. The cost was easily in the thousand of dollars.
The casting initiated a return, of sorts, to his gift. Churchill Downs commissioned Max to create a bust of Julian “Buck” Wheat that is in the trainer's lounge. But before that, a documentary on Isaac Murphy gave him an idea for the sculpture of the jockey and Buchanan.
I remember well walking the few steps from the KTA office to the tack room where Max was living to see the sculpture. It sat on a wooden table, approximately three feet long and perhaps 18 inches high. Its size dominated the small room but was in strong contrast to clothing hung on hooks around a closet-less room meant for tack–bridles, saddles, the accouterments for an animal.
A closer look at Max's sculpture
I was speechless at the grace, accuracy, and artistry of his sculpture.
The work galvanized Max in a way far different from how he was in the interview next door. He began to talk about the art of sculpting in a kind of soliloquy.
“What sculpting is about is fear of mistakes popping up after it is cast. As long as I can see something that needs correcting, I won't let it go.” He talked about staying away from the work and not even looking at it, which is hard to imagine in the cramped room. “You keep working at it and leaving it till you can't do anything more.”
He used the words “mortally afraid” as he talked about “construction failures” that can cause a sculpture to fall to one side before it is cast.
“I have to make sure it stands right and has balance, then the right proportions–the proper length in the legs, the right-sized head.” With passion and an absence of self-consciousness, he said he was “bound to the suspensory ligaments and the musculature.”
I wrote a 550-word story for the old “People” column in what was the Derby results issue of The Blood-Horse. It is the largest-selling edition annually for the magazine and it was the best chance for exposure and a casting of Max's statue.
For a few of the 12 years that followed, I checked with David on Max's piece. We both gave up on the piece ever being cast after a time, and it still sits in the storage room where David lives.
David texted me last week that Max had died, one of the victims of the coronavirus.
Looking at photos of Max and the sculpture, there is a parallel between the work and this man's life. The sculpture may never be cast; Max's life was never cast into a role befitting his gift.
Neither is finished, perhaps.
The piece remains, as it is now, in clay rather than bronze, a tribute waiting to be made to a black jockey of great historical importance. Recognition of the role of African Africans in racing (and their elimination, largely, at the turn of the 20th century through discrimination) has immense value, particularly in current times of racial strife. Cast and placed in the Derby or Saratoga museums, it could both preserve history and carry a vision of a future for African-Americans in racing.
For Max, it addresses and might answer a question one fellow racetracker had that all of us who knew him asked: “What's a man that talented doing on the backside?”
The answer, perhaps to come with a permanent casting of Murphy and Buchanan, is Max may find himself where we all believed he should have been all along — in a museum, finishing his life, even after death, “the art way.”
Ken Snyder is a Kentucky-based freelance turf writer whose work has appeared in a number of horse racing magazines. He currently is a regular contributor to British-based Gallop Magazine.
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