The seven-year-old son of Artiscape – Hula Dancer is back in New Jersey now but he was among the 43 horses who were lucky enough to winter with Mickey Burke at the Reveille Farm Training Center in Astor, FL.

Those 43 were largely the babies and just turned three-year-olds, representing only a fraction of the 190 horses in the care of Burke, 71, his two sons and one of the three daughters.

“I own my own barns,” Burke said from his office in Florida. “I bought five acres at Reveille Farm Training Center and built my own barns and paddocks.”

Reveille Training Center offers a five-eighths mile clay track and a seven-eighths sand track not far from Burke’s winter home on Spring Garden Ranch Road.

The northern base of operations for the Burkes is Cannon Hill Farm in Fredericktown, PA.

“I tell people that when I spend my next winter in Pennsylvania, I’ll be in a horizontal position not a vertical one,” he said, laughing. “My wife, Sylvia, does all my bookkeeping. She spends about half her time in Florida. You’ll never get her to spend the whole winter here. She’s not leaving her grandkids [eight boys].”

Apparently Maltese Artist shares Mickey Burke’s affection for the warm climate in Florida.

“I bought him at the end of this three-year-old season at the Harrisburg Sale for $146,000,” Burke recalled. “The following year he made a half a million [$463,678 in 2005] for us. Then he had a bad year, the only year we didn’t bring him to Florida, he made $200,000 [$188,299].

“We brought him back to Florida last year and he made a $1,053,000,” Burke noted. “He likes to hang out down here, too.”

Maltese Artist has more than paid his own way to balmy Florida. He is only a few checks away from topping $2 million in earnings. Of his $1,968,716 bankroll, all but $212,000 have been earned since he arrived in Burke’s care.

He has also added 27 wins toward a total of 31 along with 23 seconds and 15 thirds from 111 starts.

The full brother to $850,000 earner Artesian sold before his older brother would be successful and cost $47,000 as a yearling at the New Jersey Classic Sale in the fall of 2002 when the Perretti Farms protégé was purchased by 3 Brothers Stables, Fred Wallace and the Enviro Stables Ltd.

Burke bought the gelding two years later on behalf of George Leon of Pittsburgh, PA, who had a 50 percent interest, and John Howard of Morgantown, WV and James Koran of Macedonia OH, who split the other half.

In June of 2006, Leon sold his interest, with Howard and Koran increasing their holdings to 37.5 percent each and Sylvia Burke acquiring a 25 percent interest.

There was one additional ownership adjustment just a few weeks ago – March 8, 2008 – when Howard sold out his interest. Now Sylvia Burke and Koran, a retired Ohio fire chief, are 50-50 owners.

Maltese Artist will have a busy 2008 campaign. His initial objective will be to repeat in the George Morton Levy Series at Yonkers. He won last May’s $475,000 final in 1:51.

In 2007 he also won the $345,500 Quillen at Harrington and concluded his campaign with a victory in the $205,000 American National at Balmoral Park on November 3 to extend his winning streak to four.

He picked up this year, stringing together another three straight – the prep and two preliminary legs of the Isle of Capri at Pompano Park, only to come up short in the $267,000 final on March 1.

“He just got in a bad position in the race in Florida,” Burke said. “He had the nine-hole. Usually they’ll beat each other’s heads in and then back in to him a little. But that didn’t happen that night. I was glad to get a check [finishing fifth]. He’s really sharp.”

Reunited with Burke’s son, Ronnie, earlier last week at their New Jersey base, Gaitway Farms in Manalapan, Maltese Artist was entered at the Meadowlands in a final tune up before the Levy.

In the winners over contest on March 22, Maltese Artist made a late bid but despite a 25.3 final quarter, could do no better than sixth in the race won by Mr Feelgood.

“The George Morton Levy Series goes six weeks with a final [prelims on March 29, April 5, 12, 19 and 26 with a $750,000 estimated final on May 3],” Burke said. “We won’t race him six weeks in a row. We’ll race him two or three legs and then give him a break for a week and then bring him back for a couple of more, assuming we make the final. We staked him pretty heavily.

“Some people will say that it is too bad he was gelded, but if he hadn’t been cut, you’d have never heard of him,” Burke said of Maltese Artist. “He was a gelding when I got him. But [I was told] he’d go out on the track and attack horses.”

The pacer’s personality has mellowed – somewhat.

“He gets very attached to his groom,” Burke noted. “Pat Johnson takes care of him down here in Florida, a boy, Alex, takes care of him in New Jersey and my daughter [Michelle] is the only one that touches him at the Meadows. He becomes very protective of his grooms. If you go to walk into the stall when they’re working on him -- beware.

“Other than that, he’s a jewel to drive, he’s a jewel to train, he does nothing wrong, but he always lets you know that Maltese Artist is in charge,” he said.

“He has a unique thing that he does every time,” he added. “When you go to bring a jog cart or a race bike up to hitch to him, he’ll kick with his right hind. He’ll never miss doing that, and it’s never with his left. If you hold the bike back and he kicks the first time and doesn’t hear it hit the apron, he’ll kick it again. He has a unique personality.”

Much the same is true of Burke whose various careers and interests are hard to condense.

While there have been any number of zigs and zags in his life, Burke has usually made a success of whatever he was doing.

“I also had a large jumping horse stable until I was 50 years old and had my knees replaced and couldn’t ride anymore,” Burke explained. “You ride on your knees and once you have them replaced it’s like riding on two bowling balls. I didn’t mind giving up showing, but I really had a hard time giving up fox hunting.

“I used to fox hunt two or three mornings a week before I’d go to work,” he continued. “I’d get up at 2:30 in the morning and go hunting from 4:30 to 6:30 in the morning. At that time, I owned a Pontiac and Buick dealership, and I’d be in there by 8 in the morning. I had my own dealership for 12 years. I was the youngest Pontiac and Buick dealer ever signed [at age 33], and, I think, the youngest one to retire [at 45]. I did the horses as a hobby.”

There was the nine years that the Irishman found himself in the bagel and kosher catering business in Columbus, Ohio with his investment in Sammy’s New York Bagels until December 2005.

Son Mickey Jr. was working in that business when he was lured back to Burke’s rapidly expanding racing enterprise.

Key to the success of the Burke Stable are Mickey and Sylvia’s children.

“I have a son with a computer for a brain,” he said. “Ronnie deserves all the credit for it [managing 190 horses]. He’s taken this stable to levels I never would have attempted to take it without him.

“He spends two and a half, three hours a night on a computer just trying to figure out where to enter all these things, especially when we get into the heart of the stakes season,” he added.

“He’s unbelievable what he can do with his brain and a computer,” he noted. “I train all the babies and train back all the top three-year-olds down here. I’ll spend the better part of this summer in New Jersey and New York. But between Ronnie and I, one of us will be at the Meadowlands all the time and my daughter, Michelle [Hill], actually runs the stable at the Meadows.

“My son, Mickey, trains our horses at Sahbra Farms,” he continued. “Jamie Rucker works for me now, and she’ll have eight to 10 in Indiana.

“Melissa [Lynne Patterson], Michelle’s twin, is a cardiac thoracic anesthetist [at the Cleveland Clinic],” Burke explained. “Michelle’s a dental hygienist by trade, but she doesn’t do it anymore. She came to me after she finished her education. She told me she really didn’t like this [work]. I told her, ‘Michelle, I sent you to school to get smart, not to get a job. So what do you really want to do?’ And she said she wanted to train horses so that’s what she’s doing.

“All my kids worked around the horses while they were getting their educations,” he noted. “Rebecca – Becky -- is a regional manager [overseeing four states] for Beverly Health Systems. She has a Masters in occupational therapy.

“Ronnie has a degree in politic science,” Burke added. “Mickey has a double degree in computers.

“The boys are five days less than a year apart,” he explained. “They’re 38 [Ronald J. was born October 16, 1969] and 39 years old now [Michael D. was born October 21, 1968]. Mickey and Melissa live in Ohio. Michelle just built a new home on our farm; we deeded her off two acres. The other two kids live within 20 minutes. We have 30 stalls at the fairgrounds in Waynesburg, PA -- that’s where Ronnie lives.”

In 2006, Mickey Burke was honored as the Glen Garnsey Trainer of the Year when his stable posted a record of 450 victories and nearly $5.7 million in earnings.

Just to prove it was not a quirk, the Burke’s sent out 664 winners along with collecting 426 seconds and 362 thirds from 2,747 starters in 2007.

In 2007, Burke also became harness racing’s first $10 million trainer when his stable banked $10,626,343.

No previous trainer had topped 500 wins or $8.3 million.

When pressed to explain the secret of his success, Burke refers to a comment made by his Agway feed rep, Charlie Fox.

“He said it better than anyone,” Burke noted. “He said ‘If you want to find out why those boys win more races than anybody else, just come out to the Meadows on a miserable, rotten, rainy day and look out on the track and all you’ll see is yellow [the Burke’s colors]. They’re out there training when everyone else is up in the kitchen.’

“We don’t ever take a rain day,” Burke added. “We work very hard at what we do.

“There are a couple of little things that we do different than most people, and I think they’re very big,” Burke said. “We don’t do this with two-year-olds because they haven’t learned to relax yet, but all our three-year-olds and up, with very few exceptions, I don’t care what the temperature is outside, the night before they race they get turned out with a New Zealand rug on them; it’s a water proof winter blanket.

“Every one of our paddocks has run in sheds and heated running water, and we turn them out and let them be horses,” he noted.

“They move around and you almost eliminate the possibility of a horse tying up,” he continued. “And they also get their heads down and drain all that nonsense out of their sinuses and they breathe better.

“Then we bring them in the next morning and let them rest all day until it’s time for them to go to work,” he added.

Burke also is from the less-is-better school of equipping horses.

“If we get a horse off of a top trainer and the horse is on the top of his game, we don’t touch him, at least for the first start or two,” he explained. “Other than that, most of the time when you get horses from other trainers, you’re getting them because they haven’t been doing well.

“The first thing we do is take every piece of equipment off of them and start over,” he said. “Eighty percent of the horses in the country are racing with too short of a hobble. So we let their hobbles out two, three, four inches. We take heavy hobbles off them and put light hobbles on them.

“When they go to the races for us, they’re probably wearing half the equipment because I’ve said it time and again that there are more trinket trainers in this business,” he mused. “They just keep wanting to hang more stuff. They think they’re Christmas trees.”

The Burke Stable is off to a good start in 2008 with 148 wins and earnings of $1,795,439 with most of the juicy stakes purses ahead of them.

Burke plans to trim his stable in the weeks ahead. .

“We’re going to cut it down to 150 horses,” he said. “You’ll see quite a display of horses in the Delaware Sale. Basically we’re a Friday and Saturday night stable with stakes horses. We’ll get rid of a lot of them [lesser horses]. Now that we’re in this position, I don’t want to take on any new owners and don’t want to train for day money.

“I want to own a quarter or a half of every horse in the barn, which I own now of all but 20 or so of them,” Burke explained. “We’ve turned down quite a few horses now. We had a 150 last summer and that was manageable. I think 190 is going to be unmanageable if we don’t cut it back.”

One who has a solid spot in the starting lineup, of course, will be Maltese Artist.

Carol Hodes