Racing will miss the incomparable and irrepressible Fred Hooper

It hardly seems possible. Fred Hooper has been an ageless wonder, involved in the sport longer than most people in racing have been alive. But news out of Florida was that Hooper died on August 4 at the age of 102. With it, racing lost one of its greatest anchors.

A self-made man and rugged individualist with an eighth-grade education who hailed from rural Georgia, Hooper has been an influential figure in racing for more than a half-century. He won the 1945 Kentucky Derby with one of the first Thoroughbreds he ever purchased, Hoop, Jr., whom he bought at the 1943 Keeneland sale. He seemed to have the golden touch, successful at everything he did. What made him unique, though, is that he did everything his way, and in racing exerted a strong influence on all aspects of his operation, from standing the stallion, owning the mare, planning the matings, raising the foals, and overseeing the training. He had generations of Hooper-bred and -raced horses in his stallion ranks and broodmare band, and from his wellspring Hooper Farms near Ocala came such standouts as Susan's Girl, Crozier, Tri Jet, and Precisionist. And he did it without any fashionable pedigrees.

Hooper's contributions were not restricted to the track. He made a lasting impact in the less-glamorous and less-publicized arenas behind the scenes. He was a founding member and the first president of the American Thoroughbred Owners Association, which later merged with a breeders group to become the present-day Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association. For eight years he was president of the Florida Thoroughbred Breeders' Association, stepping down just a month before his 82nd birthday; he worked on committees for the American Horse Council; he served in the 1970s on then Florida Governor Robert Graham's Thoroughbred Advisory Committee; and he was instrumental in establishing the Florida Stallion Stakes series.

A central theme of his life was reaching out to touch other people, helping to develop jockeys, young trainers, and young lives.

As a result of three heart attacks, Hooper became chairman for the Miami Heart Institute, and in the early 1970s founded the Hooper Academy, a Montgomery, Alabama, private school of some 600 underprivileged students of grades one through 12.

He went to Panama at various times and brought back under contract three jockeys-Braulio Baeza, Jorge Velasquez, and Laffit Pincay Jr. All three riders are in the Racing Hall of Fame, and those are the only three he signed. He developed a lot of trainers-a lot of young trainers-because he wanted input into the training process. A skilled horseman himself, Hooper maintained a strong presence in the barn, something he readily acknowledged at a time when trainers openly decried the input of owners.

"One of the reasons I had so many young trainers with me is because I can talk with them," Hooper explained in an interview I conducted with him in 1982. "As long as I pay the bills, I'm going to have something to say about it. Many owners turn a lot of money and a lot of horses over to trainers and let them run the whole thing. The same people wouldn't turn their businesses over to their employees."

This interview came two days after Copelan won the Champagne Stakes (G1) and five days after his 85th birthday. Hooper was thoughtful, passionate, and compassionate.

He was strongly opposed to medication: "I'm strictly against medication. I believe that it is something that you cannot control, and anything that you cannot control is bad. If you open up the gates for a little horse to get through, a big one will come in."

He advocated more education of racing fans, greater promotion of the sport, and higher overnight purses.

At the end of that interview 19 years ago, I asked him how he would like to be remembered.

"I had a talk with a couple hundred people a couple of months back, and I told them that the Miami Heart Institute was my favorite for a long time, but now it was second to Hooper Academy. The difference was that at Hooper Academy we were trying to grow hearts, and at Miami Institute we were trying to save them."

Racing lost one of its biggest hearts in the passing of Fred Hooper.