by Studs Terkel
He is a jockey, unmistakably, and has been at it for about six years. He’s had a good share of win, place, and show at race tracks out East, in the South, as well as in his home territory, Chicago. For “better than six months” of the year, he’s a familiar man on a horse at Hawthorne, Arlington, and Sportsman’s Park. “The first couple of years I rode, I didn’t miss one day. I’d finish in Florida and took a plane and rode here the next day or whenever a track was open. I worked ninety-nine percent of the year.”
He is twenty-eight. Though born in Puerto Rico, he’s considered a Chicago home town boy, having attended high school and junior college here. “They said I was too small to be a baseball player, so why don’t you try to be a jockey? I read how much jockeys made, so I figured I’ll give it a try. Now that I’ve become a jockey, you’re always worried about playin’ ball and gettin’ hurt. You have to be at such a peak that you’re afraid to do anything else. So I quit anything else but riding.
“To the people it’s a glamorous job, but to me it’s the hardest work I ever held in my life. I was brought up tough and I was brought up lucky. Keeps me goin’, I love it. I like the glamour, too. Everybody likes to read about themselves in the papers and likes to see your name on television and people recognize you down the street. They recognize me by my name, my face, my size. You stick out like a basketball player. I think we’re all selfcentered. Most of us have tailor-made clothes and you can see it—the way you carry yourself.”
I been having a little problem of weight the last three weeks. I’ve been retaining the water, which I usually don’t do. I’m not losing it by sweating. My usual weight’s about 110, with saddle and all. Stripped naked, I’m about 106½. Right now I weigh 108. If I try to get to 106, I begin to feel the drain, the loss of energy. But you waste so much energy riding that I eat like a horse. Then I really have to watch it.
I’ve learned to reduce from other riders who’ve been doing it for twenty-some years. They could lose seven pounds in three hours, by sweating, by just being in the hot box. All the jockeys’ rooms have ’em. Or you can take pills. It weakens extremely. It takes the salt out of your body and you’re just not completely there.
Riding is very hazardous. We spend an average of two months out of work from injuries we sustain during the year. We suffer more death than probably any other sport. I was very late becoming a jockey, at twenty-two. They start at sixteen usually. At the age of sixteen, you haven’t enough experience in life to really see danger. At twenty-two, you’ve been through harder times and you see if you make a wrong decision you might get yourself or somebody else hurt. When you’re sixteen you don’t really care.
I been lucky until last year, almost accident-free. My first accident last year came in February, when I broke the cartilage in my knee in a spill, warming up for a race. The horse did somethin’ wrong and I fell off of him and he run over me—my knee—and tore the ligaments in my ankle, broke my finger, bruises all over. About three months later I fell again. I had a concussion, I had lacerations in the temple, six stitches, and I had a fracture in the vertebrae in my back. (Indicates a scar.) I just did this Saturday. A horse threw me out of the gate right here on my nose. I had all my teeth knocked out. (Laughs.)
His mother, who is serving coffee, hovers gently nearby. As she listens, her hand tentatively goes toward her cheek. The universal gesture. Toward the end of the evening she confides softly concerning her daily fears. She hopes he will soon do other things.
The most common accident is what we call clippin’ of another horse’s heels. Your horse trips with the other horse’s heels, and he’ll automatically go down. What helps us is the horse is moving at such a momentum, he falls so quick, that we just sail out into the air and don’t land near the horse. We usually land about fifteen feet away. That’s what really helps.
You put it off as casual. If I were to think how dangerous it is, I wouldn’t dare step on a horse. There’s just so many things that can happen. I’ll come home with a bruise on my arm, I can’t move it. I have no idea when it happened. It happened leaving the gate or during the race. I’ll pull a muscle and not know it happened. I’ll feel the pain after the race. Your mind is one hundred percent on what you’re doing. You feel no pain at that moment.
I’d say the casualty rate is three, four times higher than any other sport. Last year we had nine race track deaths, quite a few broken backs, quite a few paralyzed . . .
A real close friend of mine, he’s paralyzed. Three days after I fell, he fell. Just a normal accident. We all expected him to get up and walk away. He’s paralyzed from the waist down. It’s been a year and some months. We had a benefit dinner for him. Gettin’ money out of those people—track owners—is like tryin’ to squeeze a lemon dry.
He gets compensation if he’s a member of the Jockeys’ Guild or the Jockeys’ Association. Of the two thousand or more jockeys, about fifteen hundred belong to the guild. I’m the representative here in Chicago. The guild comes up with fifty dollars a week and the race track gives us fifty.
Only fifty bucks compensation! We don’t have a pension plan. We’re working on one, but the legislature stops us. They say we’re self-employed. They put us in the same category as a doctor. There are old doctors, but there are no old jockeys.
Some tracks still object to the guild. A lotta time the tracks get so hazardous that we refuse to ride on ‘em. They usually wait till two or three riders fall, then they determine the track’s hazardous. Sometimes nothin’ happens to riders, other times they break bones. The rains, the cold weather, sometimes it freezes and there are holes. It’s plain to see it’s just not fit for an animal or a human being to work on these conditions.
Bones break a little casual. You get used to it, a finger . . . What most breaks is your collarbone. I fractured it. I could name you rider after rider, that’s the first thing that goes, the collarbone.
I prep horses for a race. Three days before, I’ll go a half mile with the horse I’m gonna ride, or three-eighths of a mile. The owner wants me to get the feel of the horse. I do this day in and day out through the year. So I’m a good judge of pace. He knows I’m not gonna let a horse go three seconds too fast. He might loose all his energies out, and when the race comes up he’s empty. I’ll average two or three in the morning. Most of the time I’ll just talk to the man and he’ll tell me, “How did my horse run the other day?” or “I’m gonna ride you on this horse and he likes to run this way.” I don’t work for one man. I ride for anyone that wants me.
If I ride within the first four races, I have to be back at twelve-thirty. The first race is two-ten. They want you at least an hour and a half before. You have about a good thirty, forty-five minutes to get dressed, get your weight down, get prepared, read up on the charts of the horses that are gonna ride that day, plus your own. You look for speed.
You know their records, because more or less you rode against them before or rode them themselves. Does he like to go to the front? Does he like to come from behind? Does he like to stay in the middle? Does he like to go around? Does he like to go through? Then the trainer will tell you how he likes his horse rode. If he’s a good trainer, he’ll tell you the habits of the horse, even if they’re bad habits. A bad habit are horses that lug in, that like to ride around instead of inside, that don’t break too good. It makes it more dangerous—and a little more difficult to win races. There’s more ways of getting beat.
You have only a minute and ten seconds sometimes to do everything you have to do. The average race is three-quarters of a mile, and they usually are a minute and ten or a minute, eleven. You make the wrong decision, that’s the race. You really don’t know where you’re gonna lay or how the horse is gonna react from one race to the other. Your first thing is to get him out of the gate. You have to look for position. Where can I be? There’s ten, twelve other horses that would like to have the same position. There’s maybe six horses that want to go into the lead. The other six might come from behind. You can’t be
all in the same place at the same time. You have to wiggle your way around here and there.
You ride around, you find the race is half-over. If you’re layin’ near the leaders, you’re gonna wait a little later to move. If you’re way back there, you have to move a little earlier, because you have a lot of catching up to do. Here’s what makes riders. You must realize there are other jockeys as capable as you are in the race. So you must use good judgment. You have to handicap which horses are gonna do what in front of you. Which ones are gonna keep runnin’ and vacate that space that you can flow through. Or which are stoppin’ and you have to avoid.
You must know the other jockeys, too. They all have habits. I know jockeys I can get through and jockeys that don’t let you. I have a habit. I’ve been known as a front running rider, that I can save a horse better. I got a good judge of pace when I’m in front. But I feel I’d rather ride a horse from behind. A horse is competitive. It’s his nature to beat other horses. That’s all they’ve been taught all their lives. Usually at three years old they start going in pairs. When they start gettin’ ready in the morning workouts, we’re matchin’ ’em up against each other. You can see the little babies, two year olds, they are trying to beat each other, just their instinct. One tries to get in front of the other, just like a little bitty game. One will get so much in front and he’ll wait. The other will get in front. And they’ll go like that. They’re conditioned to it.
Sure the animal makes a difference, but if you have two horses alike you have to beat the other rider. You have to wait for his mistakes or his habit. I’ve learned patience. I know other people’s habits a lot better than mine. I’m sure they know mine a lot better than they know theirs.
If a jockey’s in trouble and he hollers for help, that other rider has to do everything in his power to help—whether it’s gonna cost him the race or not. One possibility: there’s horses all around him, he’s in the middle, he can’t control his horse. So he’s gonna run into another horse, he’ gonna clip the other horse’s heels. If he does this, he’s gonna fall, and the people behind him are gonna fall over him. That’s what happened today.
You see him or he hollers “I can’t hold my horse!” You just move out, let him out, so he can take his horse wide. Most jockeys’ll do this even if it’ll cost ‘em the race. Not all. Some that are just interested in winning . . . They’re frowned on. They have very little friends among other riders. You don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. I know a lot of riders that had me in trouble and I’ve asked for help, and I felt they coulda done a lot more than they did. No conscience. At the same time, they been in trouble and I did everything possible to help. I had to stop ridin’ a horse to protect another rider. What’s worse is seein’ another rider make a mistake and you have to protect him. You have to do it.
People of the racing world are a close fraternity. “We work together, we travel together. The whole shebang moves over from one state to another. We automatically seek each other out. We’re good friends.”
The wages consist of ten percent of the horse’s purse. If it’s $4,500, you get about $450. About ten percent of the win. The smallest purse here is $2,500, so you win $250. You get a straight wage for place or show. For second place, it would be fifty or fifty-five. Third money is forty, forty-five. For the out money, fourth or under, it’s thirty, thirty-five dollars.
We have agents. My agent works only for me. I pay him twenty-five percent of my gross earnings. It’s quite a bit, but he’s worth it. An agent is very important in a jockey’s success. He gets your mounts. He has the right to commit you to ride a horse and you have to abide by it. He tries to get you on the best horse he can. He has to be a good handicapper. He has to be a good talker. And he has to be trustworthy, that the owners can trust him. There’s an awful lot of information related from the trainer to the agent to the jockey, which you wouldn’t want someone else to find out. Some agents are ex-jockeys, but not too many. They’re connected with racing, father to son and so on. Racing has a habit of keeping their own.
You go to the barn and start as a hot walker. He’s the one that walks the horse a half-hour, after he’s been on the track for his training, while he drinks the water. About every five minutes, you gotta do about two or three swallows. Then you keep with him until he’s completely cooled down, until he’s not sweating any more. You do this every day. You might walk six, seven horses, which starts building your legs up. We all started this way. There’s no short cuts.
From walkin’, I became a groom—one that takes care of horses. That’s a step up. He usually takes care of three or four horses all day. He cleans them, he massages their legs and their body, takes care of the stalls.
I went from groom to exercise boy, another step higher. Now you’re riding a horse. You first start walking, getting used to the reins, getting used to the little bitty saddle. You might walk for a week around shed row. They usually pick an old horse, that’s well-mannered. From then, you graduate to goin’ on the track.
The first day you go to the track it’s really hilarious. Because there’s somethin’ about a galloping horse there’s no way to prepare for it. No matter how much exercise you do, you’re not fit. I went clear around this mile and an eighth track. When I got up to the back side where they pulled me up, my legs were numb. I couldn’t feel any more. I jumped off the horse, there was nothin’ there to hold me up. I went down right to the ground. I sat there a half-hour, right where I landed. They made a lot of fun out of it. It happens to everybody.
Some days I’ll ride seven, eight. Some days two or three. You feel it at the end of the day. Sometimes I come home, I just collapse. I could sleep right through the next day. You’re lucky when you have horses that want to run. Other times you have to do all the work. It’s easier to have a free-running horse. You don’t have to do very much but kinda guide him along and help him when the time comes. But if you get a horse that doesn’t want to run, you’re pretty tired after three-quarters of a mile.
To be a jockey you must love the horse. There’s a lot of times when I lose my patience with him. There’s just certain horses that annoy you. There’s no two alike. They have personalities just like you and I do.
Distant-U, the filly, she’s beautiful. She’s a little lady. She looks like a lady, petite. Except she’s a little mean, unpredictable. I’ve gotten to like her and I know how she likes to be rode. I don’t know if she knows me, but I know her, exactly what she likes me to do. The horse can tell it right away. When I sit there with confidence she’ll be a perfect lady. If you don’t have confidence, the horse takes advantage of it.
Willie Shoemaker’s the greatest. He has the old style of the long hold. He has a gift with his hands to translate messages to the horse. He has the gift of feeling a horse’s mouth. But it’s a different style from ninety percent of us. We’ve gone to the trend of the South American riders. They ride a horse’s shoulder instead of a horse’s back. They look a hundred percent better. Most riders have now changed over, mixed the two together.
Latin American riders are dominating the sport. They’re hustlers and they’ve had it tougher than American riders. They come from very, very poor people. They have a goal they want to reach, bein’ the tops. The American rider, he’s satisified makin’ a livin’, makin’ a name for himself. He’s reached a plateau and he’s stayed there. While the other fella is just pluggin’ away . . .
There’s some prejudice from riders, but most jockeys become very good friends after they get to know each other. But most is from the officials. I couldn’t believe it. The stewards are prejudiced against Spanish riders. I have not felt it because I was brought up here. Home town boy makes good. But the Spanish ones . . . two riders commit the same infraction, one’s penalized, the other isn’t. One’s Spanish, the other isn’t. Once in a while, okay, but it’s repeated again and again. It has a prejudice.
Sometimes I feel people don’t treat you as they should. Other times they treat you a little too well. They
get a little pesty. Lotta times you want to be by yourself. They don’t realize I spent fifteen minutes combin’ my hair and they come along and the first thing they do is muss it up. They’ll put their arm around you and buy you a drink, and you can’t drink. You have to ride the next day. You turn the drinks down and right away, they’ll say, “This kid is too good for me.” If I was gonna accept every drink that was offered to me, I’d be as big as a balloon.
I have a lot of friends who are horse players, but I’ve never been approached by undesirables, gangsters. I’ve been approached by other riders. I’d say racing has changed a little bit from the days when they were notorious. Riders now make enough money where they don’t have to cheat. Any race I win, I’m gonna make two, three hundred dollars. For me to take a chance of losing my license, it don’t make sense. A rider is more apt to take it when the money isn’t there
It’s incredible to see jockeys as honest as they are, for the conditions they come from. If you could see conditions on the back side, the way people have to live. The barn area, it’s bad now like it was twenty years ago. The filth I had to live in, the wages I had to work for, the environment I was with, with alcoholics and whatnots. To come out of there . . . I was twenty-two, I was set in my ways. But friends of mine, when they were thirteen, fourteen years old, lived through this and made good citizens of themselves. It’s incredible to believe that people could come out of there and become great athletes and great individuals. You figure, they’d be no good.
The guild is workin’ for better track conditions, better rooms for where we ride at. I think only four or five tracks have jockey quarters that are clean and livable. Here’s an organization, they’re bettin’ a million dollars a day and you get a newspaperman come in and interview you. You’re embarrassed to have him walk in there. It’s filthy. We drag all that mud in from the track. You figure they would have someone to keep it clean. They don’t. The same furniture . . . there hasn’t been much change.