November 6, 2018
He was not only a great horseman, but racehorse trainer J. Willard Thompson also should be remembered as a great gentleman. The horse world lost a much-admired figure when he died Saturday at the age of 83 after a long illness.
A fixture at Monmouth Park for more than a half-century, Willard’s involvement in racing began when he was a steeplechase rider before switching to training in the early 1960s. He dominated the New Jersey racing scene in the 1970s, winning three consecutive training titles at Monmouth Park from 1975-1977 and two at the Meadowlands in the 1980s.
J. Willard Thompson (photo by equiphoto.com)
Willard was back in a big way several decades later, when he took the 2001 Monmouth title and had record earnings that year of nearly $1.6 million for his runners, many of whom raced in the colors of his Quiet Winter Farm. Some his most recent stakes winners included Jenny Bean Girl in the 2007 Jersey Girl Handicap and Pinot Grigio, who took the 2014 Open Mind Handicap.
In 1996, Willard won the first Virgil “Buddy” Raines Distinguished Achievement Award, honoring men and women who demonstrated a continuing commitment to the sport of thoroughbred racing and whose conduct has been exemplary for professionalism, integrity and service to the sport.
“It’s very hard to imagine Monmouth Park, and racing, without Willard,” said John F. Heims, Monmouth’s racing secretary.
“I’ve had the privilege of calling Willard my friend for nearly 20 years. We had spent countless hours in his office, the clocker’s stand, frontside and my office talking horses, politics and everything in between. With Willard, the generation gap just slipped away as age made no difference. He was kind and generous to everyone in this sport and his passing is a tremendous loss for our industry.”
From 17,863 starters, Thompson won 2,137 races, good for earnings of $30.5 million. With his longtime assistant, Sergio “Victor” Rabadan, Thompson’s most recent starter as a trainer was Snowday on Oct. 26 at Laurel and the most recent starter for his Quiet Winter Farm was Arnold Ziffle, who finished third at Laurel as Willard watched on the internet, just a few hours before he died.
Thompson was married to the former Carol Hofmann, a show jumper who rode for the U.S. Equestrian Team and died in 2013. An Olympic alternate in 1968, after the Games Carol accepted an invitation from a friend to “come to Aiken, S.C. for a quiet winter.”
On her second day there, Carol met Willard, and after that, as she always said, “It was definitely not a quiet winter.” But least that gave the couple a name for their Colt’s Neck farm.
Last year, Willard finished a novel, “The Mission,” that he had begun in the 1960s.
As he recalls in the book’s preface, the draft “was lost moving back and forth between Florida, South Carolina, and New York and never finished. Recently, I found the book in the bottom of my desk drawer. Now, at the age of 82, I finally got around to finishing it.”
The book, available from Barnes and Noble and Amazon, centers on a man who has everything, but is bored, and decides to rob the bank where he works.
“Things seemed simpler back then and in other ways, they’re still the same — people still yearn to be successful without really knowing what that is and whether they have achieved it,” Willard observed.
Proceeds from the book will go to the Retired Racehorse Project in Maryland. Here is a link to the book’s website.
Willard’s survivors include sons Glenn and Stewart; daughter Julia and nine grandchildren: Julia, Parker, McKenzie, Wyatt, Mizuki, Taylor, Landon, Shelby and Bradyn.
A celebration of Willard’s life will be held in the spring to coincide with the opening of Monmouth Park’s 2019 racing season.
