Former baseball player finds new calling in horse racing

He went on to college in Chicago, got a degree in finance, but then ended up back in Dayton, selling lawn chemicals and “hating it.”

“Back then, nothing seemed to stick for him,” his longtime friend, Kevin Lavoie, said.

And when Watson showed up at the Arlington Park barn of veteran horseman Clint Goodrich in 1986 — only to be told there were no jobs available — he offered to work for nothing, a proposition that drew quick acceptance.

Three months of mucking stalls, washing buckets and cleaning up the barns for free, his family and friends were figuring this was just another false start.

But people find their calling on their own timetable and sometimes in the most unexpected of places.

And in a twist of that old axiom, Doug Watson has proved life is not a marathon, it’s a sprint. More specifically, a horse race.

Talk about something sticking. For the past 16 years Watson has lived in Dubai, where he is now the head trainer at Red Stables, one of the leading thoroughbred and Arabian horse operations in the Middle East.

At present, he and the some 75 people who work under his direction in a sort of we-are-the-world alliance — the riders are from Australia, South Africa and England, an assistant is from Ireland, foremen are from Belize, India and England, grooms from Pakistan and India — have nearly 130 horses in their stable.

Many are owned by Sheikh Hamdan Rashid Al Maktoum, part of the ruling family of Dubai, the Finance Minister of the Persian Gulf emirate and a man deeply involved in horse racing.

In the six years he’s headed Red Stables, Watson has been named Dubai’s top trainer three times and finished as runner-up the other three. In the process he’s become part of the fabric of a place that embraces sports of all kinds in a big and quite spectacular way.

“I’m just so proud of him,” Lavoie said. “How many people can say this? He gets up early every morning, loves what he does and has had great success. And he’s done it far from home.”

Speaking of home, Watson was back in the Miami Valley for a couple of whirlwind days last week. He stayed with Kevin’s brother, Dennis, made sure he had at least one pie at Flying Pizza and ate at Elsa’s. He missed out on a night at the Fraze with Merle Haggard, who canceled due to illness, but he did sit down for a couple of hours at a Kettering restaurant to share some stories.

“Every time he visits,” Lavoie smiled, “I just love to catch up on his exploits.”

Opportunity arrives

Back when he was searching for a path to follow, Watson called George Smith, the dad of his friend Kep, and a well-established Miami Valley horseman.

He had gone to the races with the Smiths and said he had seen George’s “passion for the game.” He wanted to follow suit and Smith encouraged him to do so.

But after three months of gratis grunt work and then a $100-a-week job as a groom, Watson was “struggling.”

He ended up living on the track at Gulfstream Park in South Florida and finally returned to River Downs and Turfway Park.

“That’s when (trainer) Susan Anderson came back from Dubai and asked me if I wanted to work over there,” he said with a smile. “I told her, ‘Sure, I’ll try it for a year.’ ”

Then he went to an atlas and tried to find Dubai on the map. And since he’d only been out of the United States once — to Canada as a kid — he needed a passport, too.

“About 27 hours after I left Chicago I got to Dubai,” he recalled. “Back then you took a stairs off the plane and walked to a bus that got you to the terminal. It was 1 a.m., but I felt this instant heat. I thought it was the heat off the plane’s engine. But it was the outside temperature. The winters are fantastic — 80 to 85 during the day, no humidity — but this was summer in the desert and it was hot.”

For three years, he was a foreman for trainer Satish Seemar, then joined fellow American trainer Kiaran McLaughlin, who ran Red Stables and also trained part of the year in the U.S.

Watson worked as an assistant for seven years and eventually began running the operation in the off months when McLaughlin went back to America to race.

When McLaughlin moved to the U.S. for good, Watson replaced him at Red Stables and began to build his own reputation.

A safe, rich place

Several times when he’s come back home — whether it’s to see his dad in suburban Chicago or friends back here — Watson said he’s been asked: “You sure you’re okay over there? Is it safe?”

He shook his head and smiled: “It’s the safest place in the world. It’s a tourist destination for a lot of Europeans and it’s actually pretty amazing what’s going on there.”

Although it is a Muslim country and there are some strict rules of behavior — “the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue comes with shorts or dresses or something drawn on by the censors,” Lavoie offered — Watson said “you can go to the latest in malls, hotels and restaurants and you wouldn’t notice any difference from here.”

Well, actually you would.

One of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai — with a population of 2.7 million — markets itself with real estate and tourism, while an emirate like Abu Dhabi banks on its oil.

And so Dubai has Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper which rises a half-mile into the sky. It has the world’s biggest mall and the largest man-made harbor and the world’s most expensive hotel, the Burj Al Arab, where a room’s over-the-top opulence can cost from $1,000 to $28,000 a night.

There’s a man-made archipelago of 300 islands — called The World — just off the coast where people like Vijay Singh, Rod Stewart, David Beckham and Formula One champ Michael Schumacher are getting their own private fiefdoms.

And there are the sporting spectacles like the Dubai Cup, which is accompanied by six other races that day where the international field of horses run for another $15 million.

In Dubai itself, there is no gambling, though patrons can play a pick-six card. It doesn’t cost anything and the payout is from sponsors or the coffers of the royal family.

Horses aren’t allowed to race on drugs like Lasix there, and the tracks — turf or mixes of sand and oil — have been far safer than their American counterparts.

While he’s won several big races in the annual Carnival that leads up to the Dubai Cup, he has not won the big race — yet.

But these days, no one doubts Doug Watson, especially not in Dubai where his future seems promising and he has a link — with another twist — to the past.

A century ago, Dubai was known as one of the world’s foremost exporters of pearls. World War I and the Great Depression changed that, but now some of the treasure seems to have returned.

This time though, rather than exporting pearls, Dubai seems to have imported one right from here.