Greyhound trainer staying competitive with Dad
By Steven Beardsley
© 2009 Naples News
Saturday, June 20, 2009
A pair of old photographs — in one, dated 1966, a 9-year-old boy in a red shirt stands beside a muscled dog. Both wear a serious expression. In the other, from 1990, a 2-year-old boy leans over a large bowl of dog food he’s about to mix.
Some things never change.
For the Blanchard family, training dogs comes early in life. The two boys in the photographs, now men — Jim, 52, and his son James, 21 — run Jim Blanchard Kennel, one of the most succesful greyhound racing kennels in Bonita Springs. The elder Blanchard learned the business from his father, who quit his job fixing school buses in the late 1950s to pick up the sport.
“He went to the track and liked it, and he got a job there,” Jim Blanchard said.
James, already long with experience in the business, fell into it fulltime about two years ago. He now trains somewhere around 70 dogs, about 30 of which he owns. What began as a weekend job, grew into a way to make money and then something more, he said.
“Then you start to like it and you grow more and more interested,” he said. “And then it grows to be a part of you.”
It was always part of growing up. As an elementary school student, James brought a 94-pound greyhound named Arkansas Red to show-and-tell. He grew close to his dad’s dogs, and he cried when his favorites were adopted out.
Still today, the dogs come first, both say. Training good racers means treating them like the athletes they are — plenty of exercise, and rest when needed. It means beginning most days at 5 a.m. and ending late in the evening, once the final races have finished.
For all that Jim can teach James, some things only come with time. Patience, the father says, is one of them.
“I mean patience by taking — maybe if you’ve got a young dog and he’s struggling, taking more time with him, make sure he develops,” he said.
It’s a lesson James Blanchard learned early from his dad, that he’s in trouble when he thinks he knows everything.
“Something he always tells me,” the son recalled. “He goes, ‘The day you quit learning in this business the day you become a bad trainer.”