ESPN Horse Racing

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Wearing glasses and his ever-present Mill Ridge Farm baseball cap, trainer John Shirreffs rambles down the row of stalls, his gait as relaxed and easy as that of one of his horses out for a morning walk.

He stops to tickle a colt's nose, lets the horse playfully nibble his hand, then exchanges pleasantries with a man and his wife who work for him.

Shirreffs is a man in his element.

The most famous resident of Barn 55 South at Hollywood Park isn't around -- Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo will be shipped from Louisville to Baltimore this week to run in Saturday's Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown.

So that leaves the 59-year-old Shirreffs, Giacomo's trainer, as the most famous face around the barn these days. Pensive and soft-spoken but with a twinkle in his eye and a knowing smile, Shirreffs has been relatively unnoticed and likes it that way, sometimes not even showing up in the winner's circle when one of his horses wins.

He prefers to be back in the barn amid the hay, the tack, the horses and his people.

"This is not a guy that you can get out of the barn very easily," said A&M Records founder Jerry Moss, who with wife, Ann, owns Giacomo. "Dottie (Shirreffs' wife) will tell you that. He really cares about the horses that he's responsible for."

Although Giacomo had won only one race heading into the Derby, Shirreffs had a special feeling about the colt, who finished second to 2-year-old champion Declan's Moon in the Hollywood Futurity in December.

"When you come into a big race like that (the Derby) and he's still improving, hasn't flattened out and there's still more to come, you have to feel good about your horse," Shirreffs said.

So Giacomo might be even better in the Preakness?

"Two weeks really isn't much time, but we'll see," Shirreffs said. "He put it all together in the Derby."

Shirreffs has had a string of considerably quieter successes over the years, including four victories in the Bayakoa Handicap at Hollywood Park.

When 50-1 shot Giacomo came storming from 18th to win the Derby, Shirreffs' cover was blown. Although he doesn't put much stock in fame, he admits he's enjoying the heady ride that comes with winning the world's greatest race.

"Fame? Until the next race, at least," Shirreffs said, chuckling as he sat on a trunk outside one of the stalls, doing an interview in the barn "because the phone will be ringing off the hook in my office."

"It's just been super going back to Kentucky and having all this happen, and it's been so much fun involving all the other people," he said. "For me, it's my family, my mother and sister, all my friends, talking about it, hearing about it.

"A man I worked for a long time ago called -- his wife is very ill -- and he and his wife and their daughter watched the Derby together and it was just so much fun for them to see it and remember me."

Shirreffs has made a number of such friends during his rich and colorful life.

Fresh out of the Marines and Vietnam, he was on his way from the East Coast to Hawaii with the dream of becoming a surfer. But Shirreffs, who grew up around horses on his family's farm in New Hampshire, stopped to visit a friend in California and, in a sense, returned to his roots -- he never made it to Hawaii and instead began working with horses in Northern California.

He tells of how he "played cowboy," emulating an old-timer named Jim Matthews, "who could do things with a rope you wouldn't believe, tie horses up where they looked like pretzels."

Then Henry Freitas, manager of a thoroughbred ranch in Northern California, offered him a job breaking yearlings.

"If there was a really important mentor for me, it would be Henry Freitas," said Shirreffs, who was working for meals before Freitas offered to pay him. "Henry was one of those really good, basic horse guys. Everything he did was fundamentally sound, just took a lot of care with each individual horse."

Michelle Jensen, one of Shirreffs' assistants, said he has a natural feel for horses.

"Real horsemen have that instinct, the intuition about horses, and he certainly does," Jensen said.

Mario Spinoza, one of Shirreffs' workers, said, "He has a good feel for horses and people, and he's good to both of them."

The trainer said he always tries to remember "the horse in race horse."

"Race horses are in a really different environment than they would be naturally, not out in the field, but confined to a stall a lot," Shirreffs explained. "So I think my experience of working on a farm for so many years kind of gives me a good perspective on the horse as a being, not just as a race horse."

While Shirreffs obviously is devoted to his job and is at the barn before sunrise six or seven days a week and often leaves after nightfall, he's not one-dimensional.

"He's a charming fellow. He enjoys a good night out," Moss said. "He has a really wide view of life."

The same day Giacomo won, Victor Espinoza rode another Shirreffs-trained horse, Hollywood Story, to victory in the Hawthorne Handicap to cap quite a day for the trainer.

But his wife, who is also his farm manager, said Shirreffs manages to keep the success in perspective.

"John keeps every day refreshing to me, has such a great outlook on life," she said. "He realizes there are people fighting and dying in other parts of the world, and that we should enjoy what we have."

She recalled their marriage in 2003, when they scooted off to the courthouse between races to get a license, saw other people getting married, so went ahead and got hitched themselves. He tried to take off his Mill Ridge Farm cap -- noting where Giacomo and other horses he trains were foaled -- for the ceremony, but Dottie wouldn't hear of it.

"I said, 'Please, keep it on. It's you, part of your personality, just cute,'" she said.

The newlyweds then hurried back to the track for the next race.

Watch the Preakness Stakes on Saturday, May 21 at 5 p.m. ET on NBC

Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press