Kentucky Derby’s Lucky Losers: Groovy (1986)

Jul 25, 2025 Jennifer Kelly / TwinSpires.com

Groovy beats Turkoman in the 1986 Forego Handicap at Saratoga (Photo by Coglianese Photography)

What horse had five owners, eight trainers, and one Eclipse Award? A Groovy one, that’s who. Bred in Texas by a Canadian Hall of Famer and out of a mare who never won a race, Groovy took a meandering path to greatness, trying a multitude of distances before finding his specialty, which definitely was not 10 furlongs.

Though Groovy’s turn in the Kentucky Derby may not have been a winning one, once he landed in the barn of the right trainer, this sprinting star became a record-breaker.

A Little Bit of Back and Forth

Winner of two of the three Canadian classics, Norcliffe had the pedigree that matched his career on the racetrack: his sire Buckpasser was a Hall of Famer, and his damsire Northern Dancer, also a Hall of Famer, had taken two of the three American classics. Standing stud in Florida, he produced At the Threshold, the Grade-1 winning sire of 1992 Derby winner Lil. E. Tee, and a colt out of the mare Tinnitus. Breeder Marshall T. Robinson had bought the mare for $65,000 after her winless five-start career was done and paired her with Norcliffe to produce the chestnut foal with a triangle of white on his forehead.

At the February 1985 OBS Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale, Tinnitus’s colt, named Groovy, hammered down to Lion Crest Stables for $81,000, his quarter-mile workout in :23 2/5 catching the eye of R. Robert Libutti, who purchased the colt for his daughter Edith’s stable. However, Libutti had been banned from owning horses since 1968, but said he was acting as an agent in this case. He then turned around and sold the colt for $250,000 to Ted Kruckel. Originally slated to debut in the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga, but when the track came up muddy for that race, trainer Jack Adams instead sent Groovy to the Meadowlands and the Forever Casting Stakes for his first start.

The red chestnut colt cruised to a 1 1/2-length victory, rewarding his connections’ confidence in his quality that he could win first time out and in a stakes no less. The rest of his two-year-old season, four more starts in all, including the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Aqueduct, was winless, his best finishes seconds in the Futurity and the Champagne Stakes, both at Belmont Park. His inconsistent finish to that season reflected the chaos going on behind the scenes.

Groovy started in the Florida barn of Eddie Yowell, but the horse had pharyngitis, and Yowell could not do much with him. Then Kruckel sent him north to New York and the barn of Mervin Marks, but that stop did not last long; next Heliodoro Gustines had charge of Groovy for just over a week before the owner moved him back to Marks’s barn. A disagreement then sent Groovy to Saratoga and Yowell’s barn again. However, when Yowell returned to Florida, Kruckel instead hired Jack Adams, for whom the colt ran the rest of his 1985 season. The thing was, as Adams identified early on, the owner wanted Groovy to be a classic distance horse, and that was not what the colt wanted to be. “I’d say to them, ‘This horse don’t want to go too far. He’s strictly a sprinter,’” the trainer told Sports Illustrated’s Bill Nack in 1987.

After his turn in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, Kruckel shipped Groovy to trainer Howard Crowell’s farm near Ocala, Florida, for the winter. In early January 1986, the colt was shipped to Gulfstream Park for the Spectacular Bid Stakes. Groovy was on the Derby trail, whether trainer Jack Adams liked it or not.

The Right Place and the Right Time

After Groovy won the six-furlong Spectacular Bid, Kruckel sold half of the colt to his friend, Texas real estate developer John Ballis, for $1 million that February. After that, Adams was out as trainer, so Kruckel and Ballis sent their colt north to Pedro Peters, who prepared Groovy for the New York trail to the Louisville, the Bay Shore, the Gotham, and then the Wood Memorial Stakes. He was second in the Bay Shore, fifth in the Gotham, and then third in the Wood Memorial, nursed along by rider Craig Perret to the point that he was able to stay in the hunt toward the end of the nine-furlong test. 'We really thought he was qualified to run in the Derby,' Ballis told Nack. 'He had run well in the Wood.”

But Groovy was not a good fit for the Kentucky Derby. With Laffit Pincay, Jr., in the saddle, he broke from post 14, had a one-length lead by the first quarter, and then stopped at the three-quarters mark, eventually finishing last of all behind Ferdinand. His Preakness experience was much of the same: Groovy sprinted out to the lead early, followed by eventual winner Snow Chief, and then held on until the field turned for home and quit, finishing sixth of seven. Finally, Kruckel and Ballis got the message: they hired Jose Martin, son of Hall of Fame trainer Frank ‘Pancho’ Martin (who trained Sham, rival to Secretariat), to condition the Norcliffe colt.

“When Dad got Groovy in the barn, he told me he was going to make him a champion,” Carlos Martin told Karen Johnson in 2019. “I said, ‘Dad, he just got eased in the Kentucky Derby!’ He said, ‘I will make him a champion sprinter.’” Martin was right. He started eight more times in 1986, winning four, including the Grade 2 Forego. After a fourth in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Santa Anita and then Sport Page at Aqueduct, x-rays revealed the culprit: a bone chip in the colt’s right knee. Surgery fixed that issue, and then seven months later, Groovy was back and good as new.

In June 1987, he won the Grade 3 Roseben and then the Grade 2 True North, both in sub-1:10 times, including a track record in the True North; both wins also earned him the highest Beyer Speed Figures ever awarded, 133 for the Roseben and then 132 for the True North. He won two more times in July and then returned to Saratoga for the Grade 2 Forego that August, notching his second win in that race. He also got new owners that summer: Ballis had brought out Kruckel for $950,000 in late 1986 and then sold the colt to brother Jack, Art, and J.R. Preston of Prestonwood Farm for $4 million. Groovy won the Grade 1 Vosburg in the Prestonwood silks and then trekked out to Hollywood Park for the 1987 Breeders’ Cup.

The field was large, 13 total, with Groovy breaking from the rail. Angel Cordero, Jr. knew that the colt ran best on the lead, but the filly Very Subtle beat him to it, and the favored Groovy could not make enough progress to get close to her. He was beaten four lengths in his final start, unable to go undefeated and perhaps earn Horse of the Year. The Prestonwood colt did earn an Eclipse Award for sprint champion, and then later would become part of the Texas Horse Racing Hall of Fame for his time on the racetrack.

The son of Norcliffe, who by the end of his career was well known for his affinity for doughnuts, went to stud first at Prestonwood in 1988 and then remained there after Bill Casner and Kenny Troutt bought the farm and renamed it WinStar. He passed away in January 2006 after the infirmities of old age caught up with him. Best remembered for his speed on the racetrack, Groovy is one of those horses who tried the Kentucky Derby and found that the country’s biggest race may not have been the right fit. Once he dialed back to sprints, this champion became such a star that his trainer named a restaurant after him. A Groovy guy indeed.