Noel Hickey remembered as legendary horse trainer, breeder, owner at Arlington International Racecourse

During the 1990s, thoroughbred trainer, breeder and owner Noel Hickey wrote one of the most memorable chapters in the storied annals of Arlington International Racecourse.

In the rich history of the track that opened in 1927 and was shut down by corporate owner Churchill Downs Inc. in 2021, he was a rare individual with a body of work characterized by excellence in all three phases of the racing game.

A man who was both an Arlington racing icon and an iconoclast who feuded with the track’s late former owner, Dick Duchossois, Hickey died at age 94 on Aug. 8 at a nursing home in Ocala, Fla.

“Noel died in his sleep,” said Margaret Ann (Bobby) Hickey, his wife of 67 years. “He was suffering from Alzheimer’s and he was in quarantine because of COVID a few weeks before he died. After he came out of quarantine he started therapy, but the COVID took a lot out of him. His time had come.”

Bobby Hickey was the overseer the couple’s Irish Acres Farm near Ocala that they moved to in 1971 while Noel focused on training at racetracks for the next 32 years. His greatest accomplishments came at Arlington but he also was successful at Hawthorne Race Course and (now defunct) Sportsman’s Park and at Gulfstream Park in Florida.

Hickey, who lived in Arlington Heights during his years on the Chicago circuit, said his success was due in large part to the fact that he owned the vast majority of the horses he trained.

“When I was the track coach for the West Isle Track and Field Club in Montreal parents were the difficult ones to deal with not the kids (because) the parents overestimated their teenagers’ abilities,”” he told the Tribune in 1991. “By the same token, a lot of owners overestimate their horses and don’t run them where they belong. That gives me a great advantage over a trainer who may be a better trainer than me.”

In 1990 Hickey’s stable won the first of his three straight Arlington training titles and all 49 of his conquests came with horses he bred and owned, an unprecedented feat. It also was the first of four consecutive owner titles for Hickey’s Irish Acres Farm, which collected a record $683,804 in purse money.

The following year Hickey outdid himself, setting track records (later broken) by training 62 winners and depositing $1,068,442 in the Irish Acres bank account. He seemed to bring out the best in his horses when they set foot on the grass course and that year they captured 49 of their 100 starts on the turf for a winning percentage of .490, a feat akin to Ted Williams becoming Major League Baseball’s last .400 hitter in 1941 with an average of .406.

The lord of the lawn and Irish Acres remained atop the Arlington trainer and owner leader boards in 1992 with 54 winners and $984,270 in earnings.

In 1993 he yielded the trainer title to another great name in Arlington racing, Harvey Vanier, but Irish Acres remained the leading owner with earnings of $705,691.

Hickey’s best horse was Buck’s Boy, a gelding he sold to George Bunn of Pleasant Plains, Illinois, at age 3 following the second outing of his racing career.

In 1998, at age 5, Buck’s Boy won the richest, at the time, and still the most prestigious grass race in North America, the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Turf at Churchill Downs.

Buck’s Boy has the distinction of being the first of only two Illinois-bred Breeders’ Cup winners in the history of the annual fall championship series that dates back to 1984, and Hickey is the only individual to be both the trainer and breeder of a Breeders’ Cup winner.

In the year-end Eclipse Award balloting Buck’s Boy was voted North America’s 1998 champion male grass horse.

He also was selected Illinois Horse of the year in 1997, 1998 and 1989.

Buck’s Boy was Hickey’s second Illinois Horse of the Year, following the trail blazed by his mare Lady Shirl in 1991. A winner of major races in New York and Canada she was the first Illinois-bred female racehorse to earn $1 million.

Twice during the 1990s Hickey was honored as the Illinois Breeder of the Year by the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders’ Association, a national organization.

The son of a U.S. citizen who served with the American armed forces during World War I, P. Noel Hickey was born and raised in County Cork, Ireland where, as a boy, he “ate, slept and dreamed horses to the exclusion of all else.”

“We dealt in horses and had all kinds,” he said in the 1991 Tribune story. “In the area of West Cork, where I grew up there were all those little meets. I rode in those meets when I was 14, 15, 16, 17 years of age.

“The only years I wasn’t immersed were the seven years of my life when I was competing in track.”

Hickey excelled in 800-meter and 1,500-meter races and was good enough to receive scholarship overtures from Villanova when Coach Jumbo Elliott was mass-producing NCAA champions, thanks in large part to Irish imports.

Instead, Hickey remained in Ireland and studied business at Presentation Brothers College to prepare for a career in banking. Upon completion of his education, he joined the Allied Irish Bank and captained its athletic teams before signing a five-year contract with the Bank of Montreal at age 25 and moving to Vancouver.”

It was there that he met Bobby. She said she was leery about going out with him when he invited her to be his date at a party and asked if she could drive a car.

“I said: ‘No, why?’” Bobby remembered, “and he said: ‘I might be too drunk to drive home.’

“Nevertheless, I decided to go with him and found out he didn’t drink at all.”

The man who during his college days focused on track during the day and devoted many a night to Irish whiskey, women and song had decided to settle down and concentrate on his banking career. He married Bobby, and when his five-year contract with the Bank of Montreal ended, he went on his own, specializing in mutual funds.

The brokerage business became a means to an end — becoming financially independent and getting into thoroughbred racing full-time. Eventually, his firm had 940 licensed employees.

Meanwhile, he’d started moonlighting as a small scale owner/trainer at Blue Bonnets, the Montreal track that then conducted nighttime thoroughbred racing.

In 1969 he made his first substantial investment in racing, buying a 320-acre farm in the thoroughbred breeding country near Ocala and christening it Irish Acres.

Two years later, approaching his mid-40s, Hickey sold his brokerage business and immersed himself in his new career as a thoroughbred breeder, owner and trainer.

He already had made a name for himself by the time he arrived at Arlington. In the late 1980s, he was joined by Hillary Pridham, who came to America from her native England and became his assistant trainer, exercise rider and racing confidant.

“I worked for him for 10 years, and we had a really good run,” remembered Pridham, now the assistant trainer and partner of the accomplished trainer Mike Stidham. “I think what made him more successful than most was by owning his horses he had nobody putting pressure on him not to turn them out when they needed time off. He was a big believer in turning out his horses at his farm at the end of the year, then running them sparingly at Gulfstream and getting them ready for the summer at Arlington.”

Hickey altered his business model in 1994 when he opened his stable to train for other owners. A notable success story was Golden Gear, a horse owned by Barry Golden of Bannockburn. When Golden got into racing Billy Cesare was his trainer and the neophyte owner was excited when Golden Gear showed promise as a 2-year-old but that winter he got a call from Cesare’s assistant in Florida, saying that the colt wasn’t doing well.

“Noel had just started training for other people so I called him and told him my problem,” Golden recalled. “I asked if I could send Golden Gear to him in Ocala. Noel told me to send him to a vet school in Jacksonville (Fla.) to be examined. After the examination, Noel told me: ‘This horse is lame. I’ve got to swim him (to get him back in condition to race). Do not call me for four months.’

“That was in January. I called him in April and Noel said: ‘I think we can send him up to Arlington in May.’ The rest is history.”

Golden Gear wound up with 12 triumphs (most of which came when Hickey was his trainer) in his 26-race career and earnings of $634,009. He won a major race at Arlington, the 1996 Hanshin Cup, and the previous year he set a 7-furlong Remington Park record that still stands.

“Noel took my Golden Gear and made him a star,” Golden said. “Without him I would have been nothing (as an owner). Noel Hickey has a special place in my heart.”

In the late 1990s Hickey had a falling out with Duchossois. Arlington’s former owner was upset because of his unsuccessful attempt to revive the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association (HBPA). He sought to have the HBPA serve as the collective bargaining agent for Chicago circuit owners and trainers, replacing the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, which at the time was a puppet organization with track owners pulling the strings (as opposed to its current role as an aggressive advocate for the best interests of the horsemen).

“Those were changing times in racing,” reflected veteran Daily Racing Form writer Marty McGee. “Mr. D. was often right and Noel was right even more often. He always meant what he said. He was such a straight shooter.”

As a consequence of the feud with Duchossois, Hickey’s applications for stalls at Arlington were denied. He subsequently stopped breeding horses in Illinois but continued to be allotted stalls at Sportsman’s and Hawthorne where he raced in the spring and fall.

In 2004 he left the Chicago circuit to open a breaking and training center in Ocala and he downsized his racing stable, shipping his horses at Tampa Bay Downs and Gulfstream for their races. He retired as a trainer in 2013, and when he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, he got out of racing.

In addition to his wife, Hickey is survived by a daughter, Kathleen, and son, John. Preceding him in death was another son, Peter.

Neil Milbert is a freelance reporter who covered racing for the Chicago Tribune for 46 years.