Fires to be Feted March 5 as Living Legend at HBPA Conference

Some 30 years ago, Arkansas businessman Bob Yagos asked around about finding a horse trainer after getting into racehorse ownership. The answer over and over: William “Jinks” Fires.

“I knew nothing about horse racing,” said Yagos, who in 2011 would team with Fires to win the Grade 1 Arkansas Derby and earn a spot in the Kentucky Derby with Archarcharch, “and his name came up every time: ‘If you want to start with someone who is going to steer you right, that’s going to tell you the truth, that’s the person to go to.’ We talked, and I told him, ‘I’m starting at the bottom, with $5,000 horses and hopefully one day we’ll look up and we’ll go to the Derby.’ And that’s what we did. A lot of people spend a lot more money and do it a lot longer and don’t ever get there.”

Stories such as that are among the reasons why the 85-year-old Fires — in racing since he was 19, winner of more than 1,500 races and a decades-long member of the Arkansas HBPA board — will be honored as an HBPA Living Legend on Thursday March 5 at the National Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association’s annual conference March 3-7 at Oaklawn in Hot Springs, Ark. The next day, Fires and his wife, Penny, will celebrate their 48th wedding anniversary.

“Living legend says it all right there,” said Fires’ daughter Krystal Fires. “He is a living legend. Everyone in the horse business, if you mention Jinks Fires, they’ve come in touch with him somewhere. He just loves the game so much, loves being around the people and the horses. I think that’s his drive. He likes to help everyone when he’s out there. He’ll do anything for you, but he doesn’t take a lot of help from anyone else.”

Fires has trained horses for the past 50 years without a gap — a racetrack fixture on his stable pony virtually every morning except for a brief spell in 2024 when a deployed airbag fractured his sternum in an otherwise minor car accident. In addition to that durability and excellence at his craft is Fires’ long service to his fellow horsemen, serving on the Arkansas HBPA board so long that no one seems to remember when he first was elected. No one can remember him missing a board meeting, either.

“The HBPA Living Legend has to be, first, the number of years that he represented the Arkansas HBPA — and still does — as a member of the board,” said Arkansas HBPA president Bill Walmsley, a horse owner persuaded by Fires to join the board in the mid-1980s. “And secondly, the fact that in his training career he’s won 1,500 races. Either one could make you a living legend. But the first one is very, very important as far as I’m concerned.

“Jinks has just been the picture of racing. He’s the epitome of what is good about the HBPA.”

Fires officially has 1,501 victories and $28.4 million in purse earnings, according to industry data-keeper Equibase. That includes $60,000 yearling purchase Archarcharch’s Arkansas Derby for Fires’ lone Grade 1 triumph and $35,000 yearling Colonelsdarktemper taking the 2017 West Virginia Derby (G3) for A.J. Foyt Jr.

However, those totals shortchange his record. Equibase’s database reliably goes back to 1976, though efforts have been made to go through previous years for select trainers, including Fires. But those aren’t necessarily conclusive because the American Racing Manual, the bible of North American racing stats until Equibase, used to have a cutoff for starts or wins before a trainer was included. While Equibase has Fires’ training career starting in 1968, a Sportsman’s Park photo chronicles his first victory as being April 22, 1967, with Hidden Pocket (with R.L. Baird, father of veteran jockey E.T. Baird, aboard).

“A horseman; that’s all he is”

“It’s amazing what he’s done, just the longevity of it and with no gaps in the deal,” said trainer and fellow Arkansas HBPA board member Steve Hobby, who has known Fires since Hobby first came to Oaklawn in 1985. “A horseman; that’s all he is, that’s what he is.

“He’s still riding the pony every morning. He really, really does love training horses. When it gets to where you run out of the better horses, it gets a lot harder to want to get up and go out there. But I tell you what, he’s amazing. He’s always the same, always in the same mood. Always friendly to everybody. He’ll help anybody. In fact, he really loves helping other people. He’s the most consistent man I ever met in my life. Always the same Jinks.”

After landing in racing, Fires subsequently brought seven of his eight brothers to the track, including Hall of Fame jockey Earlie, as well as their cousin Perry Ouzts, who has ridden in more races than anyone in history.

The Fires family grew up in tiny Rivervale (2020 census: 46 people) in northeastern Arkansas. In his teens, Jinks began giving horses their earliest education in wearing a bridle and saddle, as well as riding bulls and bucking horses at rodeos across the region. It was that ability to handle the meanest, most ornery broncs that caught the eye at the MidSouth Fair rodeo of a Memphis attorney who owned racehorses. The attorney sent his chauffeur down to fetch Fires to get him to handle his young horses before they went to the track. That led the 19-year-old Fires to Oaklawn Park, where he started as a hot walker for Lyle Whiting (1992 Kentucky Derby-winning trainer Lynn Whiting’s dad).

He began galloping horses for Frank Kirby and ultimately went to New Mexico, where Fires got a chance to ride in races some of the horses he got on in the mornings. As he tells it, Fires’ riding debut came on a notoriously rogue horse who was always trying to run off, whether in training, in the paddock and even ducking into the barn.

“I hadn’t done that much with him. I’d had him to the gate once, and next thing I know I was named on him in a race,” Fires recalled. “I said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I kept him in the pack of horses until I got past the gap and the paddock and then I let him run. He came on and won and set a new track record. Then I never got to ride him back because the jockey who was leading rider figured if I could ride him, he could ride him.”

Fires continued to rodeo, gallop at the track and ride sparingly until drafted into the Army in 1963, serving in the Korean War and getting out in 1965.

“When I got out of the Army, the guys all wanted to get on unemployment,” Fire said. “I got in line with them but said, ‘Not me’ and got out of line. I went home, got in my car and headed to Chicago and went back to galloping horses the next day.”

Future Hall of Fame trainer Phil Johnson talked him into going to New York, where on the side Fires became the exercise rider for turf champion T.V. Lark for Paul Parker, who had been promoted from groom to oversee the horse’s training.

“He asked Phil Johnson if he had anyone who could gallop a tough horse,” Fires said. “Phil pointed at me and said, ‘He can gallop anything.’”

Rebounding after early career derailed by barn fire

Fires’ training career started in the mid-1960s in Chicago, with that first victory coming in 1967. But just as he was really starting to roll, he lost his entire stable and about $20,000 in tack he was still paying on in an overnight fire believed to have been caused by a cigarette butt in April 1970 at Washington Park.

It was back to galloping horses at the track and breaking babies at the farm. “I kept trying to come back (to training) in Chicago,” Fires said. “But they wouldn’t give me any stalls because they said I didn’t have any older horses. I told ’em, ‘I’d have had old horses if they hadn’t burned in your fire.’”

He finally got in by borrowing stalls from friends, Fires said, his luck changing over Sportsman’s Park’s bull ring.

“The horses ran their eyeballs out,” he said. “Of course, I’d broken them on a half-mile track, so they knew how to make the turns. Cowboy Jones, he was riding over there; he said, ‘I could pull the bridle off and win on these kind.’”

Fires had to rebuild again after the death of his major client, going back again to galloping and breaking, including working about three years for Doug Davis, a close friend of prominent veterinarian Dr. Alex Harthill, both being among the founders of the National HBPA. Harthill got the young trainer in with Arkansas owners Patricia and Buddy Blass, for whom he trained for three decades.

He rose into prominence in Chicago and Kentucky. Fires says his stable maxed out at about 75 horses when he had 25 apiece at Arlington Park, Churchill Downs and Canterbury Downs before giving up his Minnesota operation. He won 95 races in 1986 and 98 in 1987 before scaling back.

“I hated it, because I felt like I wasn’t able to look at every horse every day,” Fires said. “I liked it when I had 25-30 horses. I could always keep up with them and felt like I was doing a 100-percent job. But when you’ve got that many horses and you’re on an airplane most the time, it didn’t work out for me. I won a lot of races that one summer, but I said, ‘This is not for me.’”

Arkansas has been Fires’ winter base and home throughout his training career, his 47 consecutive years with at least one Oaklawn victory a record that ended in 2024. His 479 victories rank No. 4 in track history, his 30 Oaklawn stakes sixth all-time.

Archarcharch’s Arkansas Derby a lifetime achievement award

Archarcharch’s Arkansas Derby served as something of a lifetime achievement award and family affair: owned by longtime clients, with then son-in-law Jon Court the jockey, daughter Candice Fires the pony person and Court’s son Aaron the exercise rider while a couple of the trainer’s brothers were involved in developing the racehorse.

“I think everybody who ever met him was in the winner’s circle,” Val Yagos, Bob’s wife, said of the neck victory at 25-1 odds over next-out Kentucky Derby runner-up Nehro. “It was surreal.”

“They finally had to stop people coming into the winner’s circle, because there were too many,” Bob added.

Fires couldn’t have scripted a better scenario to earn his first Grade 1 stakes. Unfortunately, the dream ended one stride out of the Kentucky Derby starting gate.

“I got to do it for local people I trained for a long time, and with a horse they let me buy at the sale,” he said of the Arkansas Derby. “Of course, here at home with family and friends, so many people in the winner’s circle. I felt like we had the horse that year to win the Kentucky Derby that year. He was doing so good. He drew the 1 hole, and that’s when they had half the gate strung out. That track got banked a little bit out from the 1 hole; he stepped down and landed on one leg and got a condylar fracture. Jon rode the whole race trying to pull him up, and he still beat four horses.”

Archarcharch never raced again, but the memories haven’t dimmed.

“That was an experience of a lifetime for him,” said Krystal, who has referred to her dad as a “gentleman’s cowboy.”

“Everyone strives in the horse business to get those Grade 1s, and Dad is one of the hardest workers at getting there,” she said. “He just never before that really had that special horse like he did in Archarcharch. It was special for him to finally get there and make that big Grade 1, and for everyone to get to see that. We all kind of lived vicariously through that.”

Today Fires trains seven horses, most of them Arkansas-breds, while stabling in Arkansas year-round, thanks to Oaklawn Park’s ownership of a near-by training center. He believes his training career will wrap up at the end of the Oaklawn meet on Kentucky Derby Day, though Fires says he’ll stay involved with horses and remain a presence at the track.

Allow plenty of time to walk anywhere with Fires

Look for the Living Legend to continue to help others.

“I’ve seen him help people knowing he was never going to get paid back,” Bob Yagos said. “And he’d help them over and over again. It’s just what he does.”

Added Val: “He’s really hard to walk through a racetrack with him, because everybody knows him. So everybody stops him. He’s always the gentleman and will never ignore somebody.”

Concluded Bob: “It takes 30 minutes to make a five-minute walk with Jinks.”

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