Page 20 - The Hunt - Spring/Summer 2023

Joe Davies
won the 2005 Hunt Cup on
the Miller- trained Make
Me a Champ.
“It was Bruce who gave me the instructions to win that day,”
he says. “When Bruce would
say something,
it gave you such confidence. What Bruce would tell you, you could bank on.”
decade. He also trained two other Eclipse winners—2000’s All Gong and 2012’s Pierrot Lunaire. Lonesome Glory was bred by Walter M. Jeffords Jr. of the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company and raced initially by his widow, Kay, who owned a farm in Lancaster County. The longtime foxhunting master there introduced Miller’s father to the horse. “He told me I had to go see this two-year-old,” Miller once recalled. “I’m glad I went to look.”
Lonesome Glory flunked as a flat racer and a show horse. But in the patient hands of Miller and Blythe, the Transworld gelding soon won nearly every major race over hurdles and chase fences in America. He took first in 30 of his 52 starts, including
17 races sanctioned by the National Steeplechase Association, retiring with a then-record $965,809 in earnings under NSA rules ($1.4 million when you include
18 THE HUNT MAGAZINE
spring 2023