Jack Carava saddled the last horse of his training life Sept. 7, 2020, at Del Mar. How it ran hardly mattered, because win, lose, or draw, that was a wrap. After 34 years in a career he loved, in spite of its wild swings of chance, those days would be in the rearview mirror, along with 1,107 winning memories and the Thoroughbreds that went with them.
Four years later, as the 2024 Del Mar season came to a close, Carava was putting a bow on a summer to remember as agent for jockey Kyle Frey (pronounced "fray"), the 2011 Eclipse Award-winning apprentice who has survived an Old Testament's worth of trials and tribulations to secure a foothold in the Southern California colony. Together, Frey and Carava finished fifth in the standings in winners and purses, while second only to the tireless Antonio Fresu in number of mounts.
Best of all, Carava's jock nailed two of the most coveted prizes of the meet on an Aug. 31 that henceforth will be celebrated as Frey Day, sweeping up both the $300,000 Del Mar Handicap (G2T) with Gold Phoenix and the million-dollar Pacific Classic Stakes (G1) aboard Mixto. For added bling, both winners earned a fees-paid berth to Breeders' Cup events to be run at Del Mar Nov. 2.
Carava gives all credit to his client, a morning workhorse who would drive the tractor during renovation breaks if they'd let him. Frey can be found often during early hours atop the horses of Phil D'Amato and Doug O'Neill.
"They have large barns and we work a lot of horses for them that he doesn't ride," Carava said. "But Kyle is willing to put in the extra mile, and they're very fair with rewarding us with mounts. Luckily, we landed on a couple of good ones at Del Mar."
Frey and the Irish horse Gold Phoenix first teamed for an allowance win at Santa Anita Park in April of 2022. As these things go, other riders landed the mount on the son of Belardo before Frey was back in the picture last spring following a poor comeback effort for D'Amato under Juan Hernandez in the American Stakes (G3T) at Santa Anita. Frey and his old pal promptly won the Charles Whittingham Stakes (G2T) and have been inseparable, morning and afternoon, ever since.
"Mixto was more a last-minute thing," Carava said. "There was some jockey musical chairs, riders out of town, that sort of thing. We had kind of a soft call on Reincarnate for Bob Baffert while he was waiting on Kazushi Kimura. I got a call a couple days before entries from Doug O'Neill asking if I was open. I checked with Bob. He was covered. So I called Doug, and we landed in the lucky chair.
"I'd like to say I was camped out at Doug's barn," Carava added with a laugh. "But I was never far from my phone."
With that, Mixto, a son of Good Magic owned by Calumet Farm, gave Frey and Carava the biggest victories of their careers. In Carava's case, he was settling for a smaller piece of the pie, but he has become comfortable with the trade-off.
"An agent only needs a nickel pencil," the world-class iconoclast Pete Wilson once said. "The condition book is free."
In relations with trainers, Carava does have an advantage most agents lack: a shoulder to cry on. And in the age of Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority regulations and superstable dominance, there have been a lot of justifiable complaints.
"I don't think people would complain the same way to a regular jock's agent who hadn't trained horses before," Carava said. "They know I can sympathize. I understand their reasoning. You are battling a lot of barns with a lot more firepower, and it's hard to run a small to medium-sized barn anymore and be financially successful. If you have any business sense at all, and you're not in denial, you see what it takes to live and what it takes to run the barn, and if those numbers don't line up, it's time to look for a new job."
Carava came up under trainers who took pride in an intimate knowledge of every pimple or pain. The onslaught of inspecting veterinarians patrolling the backstretch these days has been, for some, difficult to swallow.
"The men and women doing those jobs are doing the best they can, but they're following directions from higher-ups," Carava said. "I always fancied myself as a guy who basically lived at the barn, spending 12 hours a day, months and months, with these horses. When somebody comes in for five minutes and tells me all about a horse, it's almost like someone doing the same thing about your child."
Carava closed shop a little over a year after the disastrous 2019 season at Santa Anita, when dozens of equine fatalities at the winter meet were bookended by the catastrophic injury suffered by Mongolian Groom that fall in the Breeders' Cup Classic (G1). The imposition of stricter prerace inspections and workout protocols ensued, first as house rules, then state regulations, followed by the federal HISA requirements.
"I believe it's become even tougher than it was three or four years ago," Carava said. "I do wonder sometimes if I could train right now. One thing is for sure—you need a lot of horses. And I've seen the paperwork involved in following all the rules and regulations. You almost need to be able to afford a secretary just for that."
So there sits the question. If someone asked Carava about joining the training profession today, what would he say?
"If a young guy came to me right now, if he had never experienced when things were different from the way things are done now, with a fresh young mind I think they could adapt," Carava said. "But if it was a trainer who'd been in a time capsule for 10 years and said, 'Hey, I just came out of a coma and I'm thinking about getting back in training,' I'd probably tell them, 'Uh, no.'"
