Dwyer Brothers Stable was an American thoroughbred horse racing operation owned by Brooklyn businessmen Phil and Mike Dwyer.
The Dwyer brothers hired trainer Evert Snedecker and purchased their first Thoroughbred, Rhadamanthus, in 1874. In October of that same year they acquired Vigil from Col. David McDaniel who to that point had earned $5630. In the ensuing few months of 1876 the colt won another $20,160 and was chosen that year's retrospective American Champion Three-Year-Old Male Horse.
Other trainers who worked for the Dwyers were James G. Rowe, Sr. and Frank McCabe. The Dwyers won the 1881 Kentucky Derby with future U.S. Hall of Fame colt Hindoo and finished second with Runnymede the following year. However, they had their greatest racing success in the Belmont Stakes in their hometown, winning the classic event five times. One of the few major races at tracks in the New York/New Jersey area that they never won was the Brooklyn Handicap.
The brothers, either together or individually, owned a number of prominent horses, including Hindoo, Bramble, Bella B., Luke Blackburn, Bonnie Scotland, George Kinney, Miss Woodford, Barnes, Hanover, Raceland, Tremont, Ben Brush, and Cleophus. Mike Dwyer was a partner in Kingston.
In 1886 they were a key part of the group of investors who formed the Brooklyn Jockey Club and built the Gravesend Race Track at Gravesend on Coney Island. The brothers racing partnership was dissolved in 1890 and Mike Dwyer went on to enjoy further success. He won the Kentucky Derby for the second time in 1896 with Ben Brush, ridden by jockey Willie Simms.
The Dwyers were owners who, like many others of that era, pushed their horses hard in a manner that would be unacceptable today.
The Brooklyn Derby, founded in 1887, was renamed the Dwyer Stakes in their honor in 1918.
Read more about Dwyer Brothers Stable: Dwyer Brothers U.S. Champions (retrospective)
Famous quotes containing the words brothers and/or stable:
“Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)