Smarty Jones, the horse that proved Pennsylvania could produce a champion

It’s 2004.

Philadelphia’s professional sports teams are in the middle of a championship drought that dates back to 1983. The Eagles have lost three straight NFC championship games. The Phillies haven’t made the playoffs in over a decade.

And then comes a horse, born in Chester County, trained in Bensalem, and beloved throughout a region that does not produce many championship racehorses.

That spring, Smarty Jones won the first two legs of the Triple Crown, coming in first place in both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, coming up short in the Belmont in what it turned out was his only career loss.

Philadelphia fans, starved of sports glory, embraced the horse.

Smarty Jones was born in Chester County’s Fairthorne Farm in 2001. During his racing career, he was based at what was then called Philadelphia Park, in Bensalem. He now lives at Equistar Training and Breeding in Annville, Pa., near Hershey.

Smarty overcame adversity (Smarty’s original trainer, Bobby Camac, was murdered in 2001), he is an underdog and a blue-collar competitor. Not too different from the area’s biggest sports heroes.

“It was like a Super Bowl,” Joseph DiGirolamo, the mayor of Bensalem, said. “You got a horse [in] our backyard. And knowing the trainers and knowing the people involved, it was a big deal. It is a big deal.”

There was even talk of a parade down Broad Street, had Smarty — sometimes called “The Philly Flyer”— pulled off the Triple Crown. His trainer, John Servis, hoped there would be parades for both Smarty and the Flyers, who were on a playoff run at the time.

Neither parade, alas, came to pass.

Smarty even found himself in the middle of a debate, similar to the familiar ones about whether Lower Merion’s Kobe Bryant is a Philadelphia athlete or if Villanova is a Philly school: Is a horse from Bensalem a Philadelphia horse?

“We want our recognition,” DiGirolamo, even then the mayor of Bensalem, told the Associated Press at the Preakness in 2004.

“We were very, very happy, and I was going to name — if he won the Triple Crown — Street Road ‘Smarty Jones Boulevard,’” DiGirolamo said this week.

“Bensalem’s a big town, and we wanted to take the credit that we deserved,” he added, noting that Servis is from Bensalem and still lives there. “We wanted to get our point across that … this isn’t just a Philadelphia horse, this is a Bensalem horse.”

Philadelphia Park is now called Parx Casino and Racing, and it turns out Smarty has a lot to do with that, too.

Smarty’s success is credited with getting casino gambling legalized in the state of Pennsylvania, with the Pennsylvania Race Horse Development and Gaming Act passing in the spring of 2004, just weeks after Smarty’s run; it was signed by the state’s then-governor, Ed Rendell, the sports-crazed former Philadelphia mayor.

Parx still hosts a race every September called the Smarty Jones Stakes.

“Smarty basically carried us” in the effort to get casino gambling legalized, said Jeffrey Matty, executive director of the Pennsylvania Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association. He “showed the legislators that Pennsylvania can produce a champion.”

Smarty Jones was the only nonperson on 2024’s Time Magazine’s list of “People Who Mattered.” Already in the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame, Smarty Jones is a finalist for the National Museum of Racing’s 2025 Hall of Fame, with the results set to be announced next week.

Ahead of that decision, he is the star of a new short documentary, Ride of a Lifetime: Smarty Jones, which is a part of the PFS Springfest film festival lineup. The film, produced in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, explores the horse’s story, and also Philadelphia’s love for him.

“The Smarty Jones story has been top of mind for me ever since it happened,” said Tom Farrell, the film’s executive producer. “Smarty Jones IS Philadelphia,” he said. “And the reason I say that is because of all the characteristics of that horse … Many experts predicted [it] would never get to the level that it got to, and it just had the grit and determination and the right people around Smarty, to bring him to the level that every Philadelphia sports fan can latch on to.”

There’s talk, he said, of making a feature-length film.

“I think it’s everybody’s horse, plain and simple,” Farrell said. “Whether you’re from Philly, Bensalem, Villanova, Drexel Hill, everybody had ownership of that horse, and I think that’s the beauty of the horse, that everybody felt like it was that horse.”

“Ride of a Lifetime: Smarty Jones” plays at PFS Springfest’s Philly Stories Shorts Program. April 19, noon, Film Society East, 125 S. Second St., Phila. filmadelphia.org