In 1977, under his guidance, Seattle Slew became only the 10th thoroughbred in history to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes.
Billy Turner, the trainer of Seattle Slew, the 10th thoroughbred to win horse racing’s Triple Crown, died on Friday in hospice care at his home in Reddick, Fla. He was 81.
His wife, Patti, said the cause was prostate cancer that had spread to his lungs.
Mr. Turner began training the two-year-old Slew in 1976 and soon had a hunch that he was a special horse.
“Even before his first start, Billy told me, ‘You know, this horse has such unusual abilities, the main thing is that he stays sound,’” Jim Hill, a veterinarian who owned Slew with his wife, Sally, and Mickey and Karen Taylor, said in a phone interview.
Slew won his first three races in 1976, all at Belmont Park on Long Island, including the Champagne Stakes.
“If he doesn’t win the Triple Crown, I haven’t done my job,” Mr. Turner told a reporter. It was an audacious thing to say, given the rarity of Triple Crown winners. Secretariat won all three races — the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes — in 1973, but it had been 25 years since the previous winner, Citation.
In early May 1977, after three more victories, Slew overcame a slow start out of the gate to win the Kentucky Derby, defying the skeptics.
“I was afraid when he broke so early,” Mr. Turner told reporters after the race. “After that, he did what he had to do to win.”
Slew won the Preakness Stakes two weeks later, leading Mr. Turner to say: “Horses will fall out of trees to race against him. People probably still won’t believe Seattle Slew is a heck of a horse. I don’t think he has run his best race yet.”
Seven other horses challenged Slew in June at the Belmont Stakes, which he won by four lengths in 2 minutes 29 ⅗ seconds — well off Secretariat’s spectacular record time of 2:24 four years earlier, but close to the times of most winners of the race.
“We knew up front that this wasn’t a track for record breaking, and this isn’t a record-breaking horse,” Mr. Turner told reporters. “He does what he has to do. If something presses him, it’s like this first race this year when he destroyed the track records. But it’s hard to find a horse to press him.”
William Hutt Turner Jr. was born on Feb. 29, 1940, in Rochester, N.Y., and grew up in Towanda and Unionville, Pa. His father worked at Eastman Kodak; his mother, Esther (Allyn) Turner, was a homemaker and bred dogs.
Mr. Turner began his horse-racing career in his late teens as a steeplechase rider for the trainer William Burling Cocks. “The falling off part isn’t too bad; it’s hitting the ground that hurts,” Mr. Turner told Sports Illustrated in 1977. “I had broken ribs and collarbones, things like that. But you can tape up a broken collarbone and ride with it.”
After becoming an assistant trainer for Mr. Cocks, Mr. Turner started training thoroughbreds in the mid-1960s. In 1969, he began working with Dust Commander and other horses for Robert E. Lehmann, a retired contractor. But sometime before Dust Commander won the 1970 Kentucky Derby, Mr. Lehmann fired Mr. Turner for not winning often enough.
Mr. Turner — whom Mr. Hill said was a skilled raconteur who “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” — got a second chance at the Derby when he took on Slew. But his association with the horse ended several months after Slew lost his first race (finishing fourth at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, Calif.) in July 1977.
Slew’s owners and Mr. Turner called it an amicable parting, but the break was initiated by Mr. Turner’s excessive drinking.
“For more than a decade,” Mr. Turner told The Baltimore Sun in 2010, when he said he was 20 years into sobriety, “I’d been literally living on alcohol.”
In 1978, Mr. Turner sued the Taylors and the Hills for 10 percent of the $12 million for which Slew was syndicated as a breeding stallion, plus the right to breed him to one mare a year.
“I can lock Slew up until this thing is settled,” Mr. Hill told The New York Times. “He will not be able to be bred to a single mare until the courts decide on this case.”
Mr. Taylor countered by saying, “You can’t train a horse when you spend more time in a bar than at the barn.”
Mrs. Hill said the suit was settled.
Mr. Turner — whose horses won 533 races out of 4,314 started, according to the Equibase website — trained other successful horses. One of them, Play On, finished second in the Preakness Stakes and fourth in the Belmont Stakes in 1984.
Overall, Mr. Turner’s horses earned $17.5 million.
A GoFundMe page that was posted on Dec. 27 had raised nearly $40,000 for Mr. Turner’s medical and living costs.
Mr. Turner met Patti Rich, a former exercise rider and jockey, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in 1988, and they married three years later. His two previous marriages had ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Nelle Durizch, from his first marriage; a son, Liam, from his second marriage; and four grandchildren.
In 2010, after Mr. Turner’s name did not appear on the list of nominees for the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame, Paul Moran, a columnist at ESPN.com, made the case for his inclusion in the Hall. Mr. Turner hasn’t been on list of finalists in at least a decade.
“Turner is somewhat milder than low-key and would never say this about himself,” Mr. Moran wrote, “but no American trainer living or dead not already in the Hall of Fame deserves induction more than the trainer of Seattle Slew, Czaravich, Gaviola, Punch Line and many other stakes winners.”
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