"You break time down into twelves," he said, "because if a horse runs an eighth of a mile in twelve seconds, he's going pretty good. People who can't do it think it's quite a thing to be able to come within two-fifths of a second, but actually it's four-fifths, because it's two-fifths either side of the second, and not as hard as it seems."
"It would be for me," I said.
"I never rode a race for Davison," he said, "that he didn't tell me everything I did, whether I sawed on his mouth or pulled him up too short. He and his wife watched me from the time I left the paddock until I got back, and now when I see jocks kidding and laughing going to the gate I think of those days. Davison had better not catch me laughing on one of his. I was a solid citizen."
Davison was the first to teach him how to place a horse, how you shouldn't make your run all in an eighth of a mile but gradually, unless it is to save ground. He said that Davison was bugs on saving ground.
"He made me rail conscious," he said. "He had me always looking at that rail first, and if I went around when there was room to come through on the rail, he'd scream, 'I can't run a horse that much the best! You gotta save something on any horse I ever run!' At first he made me lose more races than he helped me win, because he tried to ride every race for me. I rode almost that whole apprentice year and couldn't grasp it, because mentally I didn't know management. I was trying to be a robot for Davison, and he was shouting me into some awful scrapes."
From Tanforan they had moved to Chicago, and Davison also had ten horses stabled up at Devonshire and Kenilworth in Windsor, Canada, just across the border from Detroit. Eddie and Lefoy Cunningham, Davison's other rider, would ride in Chicago and then they would get into Davison's car, and while Davison drove they would sleep in the back seat. The next day they would ride at one of those Windsor tracks.
"That first year I had twelve or fourteen falls," he said, "and I was picking up fines and suspensions at every meeting. Davison would holler, 'Don't get beat no noses on any of my horses!' He was so desperate that if you were on number 8, he'd say, 'Number 6 is the favorite. Now don't give him any of the best of it.' When you put that in a kid's mind you're playing with dynamite. Davison was all for shutting horses off, and when one of his would get beat a head or a nose he'd be so goddamn mad I'd be scared to bring the animal back. He'd holler, 'Why didn't you get ahold of him?'
"It was nothing," he said, "to grab a saddle cloth. The other boy could hardly tell, and if he turned around you just let loose. Riding with your toe in you'd leg lock, hooking your heel in front of his toe. At those Canadian tracks the rail was made of pipe, and where it was joined together there were couplings. You'd get another horse against the rail, and you could hear that fence sing until the jock's boot would hit one of those couplings. There was many a rider got a broken foot up there that way."
One day, while Eddie was trying to take his horse around the leader, the boy on him—a jock named Sielaff—grabbed Eddie's leg. They were about seventy yards from the finish, and Eddie just dropped the reins and grabbed Sielafi by the throat, and that was the way they went across the line with Eddie choking him.
"I won it," he said, "but they disqualified the horse and fined me $50, and that was a horrible trip back to Chicago that night. I'd just get to sleep in the back seat when Davison would go at me again. 'But have you got any idea why you did it?' he'd say over and over. 'You know how bad-legged that poor old horse is, and you just tossed that race off him. Why did you do it?' Who was thinking of that horse? I was just thinking of choking Sielaff, but Davison had a piece of that rough riding and that temper trouble of mine.
"One day he put me up on a filly, and Joe Guerra, the jock from Cuba, threw me against the fence. When Davison came down he wanted to kill Guerra, and the next day he had five horses entered and he put me on all five. He said, 'I'm gonna give you a fair chance. If Guerra don't go down, home you go.'
"At first I didn't pay any attention. The first two races I didn't get near Guerra, but in the third race he put me on a real speedy filly. He said, 'Here's your chance. You haven't been anywhere near Guerra all day. I don't care how this filly finishes. I want Guerra on the ground.' I nailed him. I threw two horses in that race. I threw Guerra, and some poor innocent guy who was in the middle went down too. I got fined $50 again and came near getting Davison's filly all cut up, but that satisfied Davison."
Waiting for him now in that motel room, I turned on the television. There was a game show in progress, and two losers had just walked off, winners of more than $3,000 each, when the phone rang.
"Bill?" he said. "What the hell kind of a place is this?"
"It's a motel," I said.
"I know that," he said, "but they don't answer the goddamn switchboard. I've been calling for the last half hour but nobody answers, so I came over. I'm down in the lobby."
"So come on up," I said. "Turn right after you get off the elevator. I'm in 419."
I opened the door and waited for him. He came striding down the hall, that little man, and he was wearing a light brown, summer-weight suit and a dark brown sports shirt open at the neck. Around his neck there was a small-linked gold chain with whatever was on it hidden beneath the shirt. That swarthy face was more lined now, but there was that prominent nose and those big dark eyes as quick as ever as he looked around the room and we sat down.
"So what can I tell you?" he said.
"Oh," I said, "about how you're living these days."
"We've got a two-bedroom apartment over there," he said, "and it's nice for Ruth and I. When w,e moved in nine years ago we had to cut down on a lot of furniture and the trophies and things. Ruth gave a lot to the museums at Saratoga and Lexington. There was a whole trunk—one of them steamer trunks—with articles and scrapbooks and stuff.
"The last race I rode, in Australia in January of '62, when I came back I just had that bag with the saddle and the whip and the boots and pants. I put it in a closet, and I've never been able to find it. I've hunted all over the Jockey Club. The place was new then, and they were moving stuff around, and maybe somebody stole it."
Out of a jacket pocket he had taken an emery board. He was starting to work on his nails.
"I don't have time to get a haircut or a manicure," he said.
"What takes up all your time?" I said. "I see you occasionally on TV doing the commentary on a big race. I've seen you on that RCA commercial in the silks and talking about the colors."
"I just did one for Buick,"Jie said. "I don't know if it'll play up your way or not, but I say, 'I rode 250 races before I rode a winner, and this is a winner.'
"Don't tell me you say that," I said. "We had it in those two articles we did for Look, how many races you rode before you broke your maiden."
"We did?" he said. "I don't know if I ever read those things."
"Of course you did," I said. "You had to approve them before the magazine would accept them."
"I remember at Saratoga you were on my tail for the whole month," he said, "but I don't remember reading the articles."
"After Saratoga," I said, "and when I got back to the city, I spent four hours one afternoon in the library at the Morning Telegraph. I got down the chart books and I checked every race at every track you were at when you were breaking in. They'd been writing for years that you'd ridden over 200, and I figured that, if I never did anything else in my life as a reporter, I would at least establish how many races Eddie Arcaro rode before he had a winner."
"How many was it?"
"When you won on Eagle Bird at Caliente, it was your forty-fifth race."
"When I did that Buick thing," he said, "the guy in the truck said, 'You rode 250 before you won?' I said, 'I never rode that many. I couldn't have, but I sure as hell don't know how many it was.' "
"You know now," I said. "So tell me what it was like when you quit."
"I thought I'd go fishing and play golf," he said, "but that became old hat in a hurry. I'd doodle around, and then I got into a couple of business
es and I lost my butt, but I had to keep busy."
In '55 I asked him one evening if he was a millionaire. I never forgot his answer, "To tell you the truth, I don't know. I've never sat down to figure it out."
"I got in a trap with an electric burglar alarm," he was saying now, "and I lost four hundred thousand on that thing."
That's a lot of money to drop, I was thinking, no matter how you make it. When you make it riding, that's an awful lot of races over a lot of years and an awful lot of risks.
"I never got into any serious financial problems," he was saying, "where it curtailed my way of living, and then I got into the horse insurance business and I lost there, but not a lot. I jumped our premiums from three hundred thousand to three million in three-and-a-half years, but you can't make money insuring thoroughbreds. In insurance you hold a claim for a year and make a profit where it's millions of dollars, but you can't do that with horses. I lost a couple of years of my life."
"Speaking of your life," I said, "I was worried when you had that open heart operation. I heard about it on the morning news on the radio."
"I didn't know I had anything the matter with me," he said. "One evening I was going over some claims to evaluate horses, and Julie Fink came in and he said, 'You don't look good.' I said, 'Man, I don't feel good.' He ran me down to his doctor, and the guy took a cardiogram and told me I had angina. I got out of the insurance business—if that was affecting my health—and I was hitting golf balls one day when the thing hit me.
"Dr. Richard Elias—a hell of a guy—looked at me and took an arteriogram, and he said, 'You need an operation.' He showed Ruth and I the pictures on a TV set like the one there."
"Did that scare you?"
"No. You go to the Heart Institute here and see the people they've done it on, people up to seventy-five, and the loss ratio is so small. I've been operated on from ankles to head, so I've never had that fear. Then the Heart Institute is like living at the Waldorf. I've been on the board there for four or five years, and you've got to see it to believe it.
"They give you a menu, and the night before, the Doc said, 'What do you want for dinner?' I said, 'A Martini and a big steak.' He walked to the phone, and I said, 'You're kidding.' He said
'No.' I said, 'What are my chances?' He said, 'You're chances are good, and you better bet on me. The only ones we lose are the ones we take a chance on when it's the only thing to do.' "
He reached for the gold chain around his neck and on it was a small, circular gold pillbox. He opened it, and in it were small pills, some green and some pink.
"I'm a nervous guy," he said, "and I take 9,000 pills a day to slow me down."
He snapped the pillbox shut and put it back inside the open collar of his shirt. He had been smoking, and he lit another cigarette.
"With all the bullets I dodged in my life," he said, and he meant all the jams and those more than forty spills on the track, "I'm not going to worry about lung cancer. All the races you ride, and you have a near miss every day."
At that winter meeting of 1931-32 at Caliente, where he finally rode his first winner, it was a rodeo every day. He was one with Sylvio Coucci and Hank Hills and Wayne Wright, whom they called "Cowboy Wright," and Georgie Wolf who, he said, used to holler at you and hit you with the whip at the same time.
"When you got half a length in front of a guy," he was telling me once, "you sawed him off. If a guy bothered you one day you didn't run to the stewards and complain, but you got him the next day. That sort of thing started a chain reaction that never stopped, and we had a couple of falls a week.
"One day Jackie Westrope's brother, Billy, was killed. It happened right after the finish, as he was pulling up at the seven-eighths pole, which was right in front of the jocks' room. The horse stumbled and Rope's brother landed on the point of his chin. We all saw it, but I don't believe it scared any of us, we were such a wild bunch of bastards."
The following year, at Washington Park, in Chicago, he had the fall that almost killed him. All he could remember when he came to in the hospital was leaving the gate and running into a jam.
"I was unconscious for three days," he said, "and when I came to I was still a little groggy and I saw my mom and my old man and my Aunt Libertina from Pittsburgh standing there. On the way up they'd heard I was dead. I had a fractured skull and a punctured lung and a broken nose, and it had me cross-eyed for a while.
"The family tried to talk me out of ever riding again, but I thought I really could ride now, and laying there I never thought I'd be scared. I came back at Hawthorne, and I'd been galloping horses mornings, and I thought I was fine until that first day when we went into a turn and I could see those bastards stepping all over me again. You just don't have any fear of those hoofs until one of them nails you.
"For five or six days I couldn't win a race. I was pulling them up, and a lot of times that's the worst thing you can do. They come together in front of you, and you hit their heels, and that's when you go down. You have to fight them in there, if you can make yourself do it.
"That Davison saved me again. He said, 'I've got to send you home. You've lost your nerve. You're just yellow, and you're no good to me or yourself, and you're gonna get yourself killed.' I know it hurt his wife to hear him bawl me out, and he'd holler, 'You're just yellow! I've got two more years on your contract, and if you pull another of my horses up I'm gonna set you down.'
"When I went to bed I cried all night. I was more scared of being sent home than I was of getting hurt, but I still couldn't do it until I went down on a filly of his named Printemps. There was a jam at the half-mile pole, and I was pulling up when I should have been going. I didn't get a scratch on me, and that cured me. After that, just to prove I wasn't scared, I'd put those sonsabitches up there where they had no chances. I'd put them up there running and just split the field open.
"It's an awful thing," he said, "being scared to ride and having to ride. Young kids laugh at that sort of thing, but they haven't had it. Nick Wall was laid up in a hospital once for fourteen months, between life and death. When he first came back he couldn't do it. He'd scream and holler in a spot where you could put a bunch in sideways. Johnny Gilbert went into the hospital black-haired and came out gray. Alfred Robertson had a fall at Jamaica and said, 'I quit.' Ralph Neves had a fall in California one year, and when they got him to the hospital there was no pulse or heart beat. They gave him adrenalin, but nothing happened. They pulled a sheet up over him, and after a while he pulled it off and said, 'I'm riding in the fourth race. What am I doin' here?'
"Gilbert Elston had two terrible falls. He was a nice-looking boy, real trim, until a horse stepped on his head and scalped him and popped his eyes. After that he was never exactly right. He never smoked or drank, but then he became an alcoholic and he tried suicide two or three times. I stopped him one night in a hotel in Chicago. I had him living with me, trying to get him to straighten out, and he was trying to get-out the window. Then later he shot and killed himself."
"I'll always remember," I was saying now, "something you told me when we were doing those pieces. You said, 'Jockeys are the only athletes who, if you left them alone, would kill one another.' You said that, if it weren't for the stewards and patrol judges and film patrol, you could start out with twenty jocks and at the end of three months of racing there would be only one left, because that's what racing does to you."
"That was right," he said.
"Do you think that, left on their own, jocks would still be that way today?"
"More or less," he said. "It's the nature of the game, and I don't think that's changed, but people have changed."
"In what way?"
"You take Shoe," he said, meaning Willie Shoemaker, and since the day when they first became competitors they have been the best of friends. "I've seen Shoe time and again throw away the race rather than hurt somebody. People are more considerate. It's like you've got a gun on a guy and you pull the trigger.
"They tell me this Ca
uthen kid in New York," he said—Steve Cauthen was having his sensational apprentice year—"is like that. He'll give a little."
"Do you wish you were him, and starting all over again when you read about him?"
"Hell, no," he said. "I hardly remember riding. I go to the races occasionally because I still get a kick out of seeing a good horse run, and I can hardly conceive of doing what they're doing. He's an awful nice kid though, sixteen going on thirty mentally. He handles himself real well."
"You've met him?"
"I did that race on TV when he rode here. They told me, 'Go interview him. We want him on.' I said, 'Hell. Leave the kid alone. He just rode a race. The press has been bothering his butt off.' I didn't want to do it, but they insisted."
"I know," I said. "Now you're on my end of this business."
"He couldn't have been nicer. He was real nice to me."
"After all," I said, "you're Eddie Arcaro. You're probably a hero of his."
"I don't know about that," he said. "He's just a real nice kid. A fella interviewed me for the paper here. I wasn't derogatory. I just said that, like with all jocks, his butt has got to hit the ground, and if he's busted up you have to see how it bothers him. He wrote an awful article—that I said he's gonna get hurt and he may be chicken."
"The last spill you ever had," I said, "was it in that Belmont?"
It was the 1959 Belmont Stakes, and I was watching it on television at home. It had come up mud, and Eddie, on Black Hills, had started to make his move on the stretch turn when the horse and Eddie went down. Another fell over them, and after the finish a camera closed in on Eddie, lying there like a lifeless doll, face down in the ankle-deep mud just off the rail.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 44