New York at this time was a city of a million and a quarter people and everything took a step back to make way for the opening of Sheepshead. The sports world at this time was bare outside of racing. The heavyweight champion of the world, for example, was Paddy Ryan, who came from Tipperary and fought bare knuckles. He won his title by taking out Joe Goss in an hour-and-twenty-four-minute fight at Colliers Station, West Virginia, on June 21, 1880. But nobody knew much about organized boxing in those days and Ryan’s victory caused only passing comment in the papers. At that, it wasn’t until some days after the fight had been held. The man who was to make boxing popular, John L. Sullivan, was just a thick-chested, fresh guy who could punch good and hung around Boston.
So the newspapers shot the works on what they called the “glorious opening” at Sheepshead. The stories were loaded with words and said nothing for paragraphs at a time. Which isn’t a thing that newspapers have gotten over, but in those days there was a good reason for it. Many of the reporters were working on space rates, so when they went on a story they took their best shots. Adjectives, for example, could put bread on your table if you strung enough of them together. The city had a ton of papers, with the Morning and Evening World, the Tribune, Press, Mail, Globe, Sun, Morning Telegraph, Times and Sun. Of the people who worked on them, and were knocking out words about Sheepshead Bay the day it opened, everybody was an amateur next to Esdail (Doc) Cohen.
Cohen became an important man in New York newspapers the afternoon Joseph Pulitzer walked into the city room at the World, took a look around at a staff which seemed to be industrious, go-by-the-book, and announced he didn’t like them at all. “We don’t have enough people who drink around here,” he said. “Get me a drinker for this paper.”
The Doc was made. He had started out in life as a physician in Philadelphia but gave up his practice when he found too many women were having babies during the hours he usually reserved for drinking. He had a flair for writing, so he took down his shingle and came to New York, landed a job as reporter on the Sun. His literary specialty, lies, soon earned him something of a name. But he was even more famous for his drinking. When Pulitzer called for a drinker, the World editors rated him a 4-5 shot to fill the job. When they finally found him and brought him to Pulitzer there was no question about it. He had been in a place called the Umbrella. By the time he got to Pulitzer’s office the whiskey was making him walk stiff and he didn’t care about anything but getting the hell out of the office and back to the bar.
“I like drinking,” the Doc said. “I drink all the time. You can be sure of one thing. I’m not going to stop.” Pulitzer said he was hired and the Doc cut out for a bar. He had just been given a license to drink.
Sheepshead had been running for five successful years before Jimmy Fitz was old enough to get somebody to hire him. And when he did check into the stable area he was a long way from the color and excitement because he was just a kid of eleven working around horses and there was too much to be done in the kitchen and too much harness to be shined and too many hots to be walked to leave room for anything else. He was in the kitchen with the Brannan Brothers for a time and, when that stable headed west, Jimmy Fitz had to hustle around and come up with another spot. This time it was with the powerful stable owned by Phil and Mike Dwyer, two powerfully connected brothers who were as much a part of New York City politics as a ballot box. He weighed a little over eighty pounds when Hardy Campbell, the Dwyers’ trainer, took him on as an exercise boy. By now, Jimmy Fitz could ride well enough to fill the job. Like everything else in his life, riding was a thing he had to pick up by himself. Nobody taught him anything in particular, but just by being around stables you learned how to ride, if you were light enough.
The backstretch of a race track at this time was something which, again, is unbelievable today, but was accepted as matter of course by anybody in racing at the time. The stable area was filled with a mixture of small kids who had never received much schooling, and tough older people, along the lines of a fellow named Dynamite, who would pretend he was spitting in some kid’s pudding so he could disgust the kid and could have the pudding when the kid walked away. Nearly everybody working at horses put in 83 or 84 hours a week. Apprentice riders were under contract to the trainer, who was supposed to be in charge of not only their working but also he was responsible for their private lives. An apprentice received two meals a day, clothing, a place to sleep, and $10 a month. The trainer saw to it that they were up in the morning and in bed at night. And if they didn’t move quickly enough during the day it was nothing for the trainer to give them a swat with anything handy.
It is, of course, all different today. But nobody who came through the old era, particularly Mr. Fitz, thinks there ever was anything the matter with things as they were. It was part of life as it was in those times, and nobody ever claimed the living was easy in 1890 and thereabouts.
The case of a trainer called Bill Daly is an example. Daly was called “Father” because he hit kids. Now this is, as a rule, highly commendable, except the kids Daly hit were not his own. Father Bill kept a pair of rubber martingales—part of the rigging you put on a horse—within reach and whenever anybody in the stable area didn’t do as he was supposed to, Daly would take a swipe at him with the martingales.
In 1890, Jimmy Fitz, the kid, didn’t see anything wrong with this. And today, Mr. Fitz, in his eighties, still doesn’t see where there was any harm done.
“A trainer was in charge of the apprentices,” he says, “and these kids were around without any home discipline. They would’ve gotten a whack or two at home, so what’s wrong with them getting it at the track? You say what you want about it, I say there was nothing wrong. And I also say none of these kids got into trouble, the way they do today. There was none of this delinquency. Besides, how are you going to argue with what Daly did? He was as good a trainer as you’ll ever want to see.”
Daly demanded his jockeys go to the lead immediately and would swing the martingales at anybody from the lowest apprentice to Snapper Garrison if they didn’t. The race term,
“On the Bill Daly,” which means take the lead right off, comes from this.
He was a tough Irishman who had a peg leg that came in handy at times. There was, for example, one afternoon when he was treating a sore-ankled horse by tubbing him out, as they say, which means you stick the horse’s leg into a tub of steaming water. One afternoon while he was doing this, a man from the local chapter of the ASPCA was touring the Gravesend stable area. The ASPCA man was horrified when he saw Daly jamming the horse’s leg into the scalding water.
“You’re being cruel to that horse,” the man said. “I’m going to summon the police.”
“It doesn’t hurt him a bit,” Daly said. “Here I’ll show you. I can put my foot in.”
“Don’t! You’ll burn yourself alive,” the man yelled.
Daly looked straight at him, stuck the wooden leg into the tub and stood there.
“I told you it didn’t hurt none,” he told the guy.
Jimmy Fitz had no contract with the Dwyer Brothers. Nobody knew anything about him and they didn’t bother to find out if he was worth putting under the apprentice rule. But he still had to work as hard as any kid on the grounds.
The first morning he overslept, the foreman, Theodore Strauss, stomped down the shedrow, counted heads, and saw he was missing.
“Get him up,” he yelled.
His assistant knew what that meant. He grabbed a bucket of cold water and climbed up the ladder to the loft and threw it on Jimmy.
“Don’t even bother to dry yourself,” the guy yelled at Jimmy. “Just get down there and get workin’. Now.”
It was 4:30 in the morning and the horses had to be fed. It didn’t bother Jimmy Fitz at all. He got up and worked and made sure he woke on time after that.
The Dwyer Brothers put the Fitzsimmons kid to work with their set of yearlings. As an exercise boy, he had to do everything but marry the horses. He rode th
em mornings, then hotwalked them, fed them, mucked out stalls, helped wash them down, shined the tack and, as a daily rule, did everything but outrun them. This was fine with him until an animal called Aposta, Jr., colt came along. They called a yearling after the mare who produced him in those years. Then they tacked a “Junior” on the end of the name. When the yearling turned into a two-year-old he was, of course, given an official name, except when he began to run in front of people who bet him they usually came up with their own pet names for him. At any rate, the Aposta, Jr., colt came off the farm mean. He wanted nothing more out of life than the chance to bite a hole in somebody’s hand or throw an exercise boy as high as possible. He had been in the Dwyers’ Stable for two weeks and one morning, while up on another colt, Jimmy Fitz passed Aposta, Jr., just as the colt sent his boy sailing. Jimmy made a mental note to stay clear of this one.
But a few nights later, as he was about to walk into the stable kitchen and grab something, Jimmy heard Rogers, the trainer, talking over coffee with Theodore Strauss, his foreman, about the work lineup for the next morning.
“Who are you going to try on the Aposta, Jr., colt tomorrow?” Rogers asked.
“Jimmy Fitz,” Strauss said.
Jimmy Fitz stood like a statue a few steps from the door.
“Little green for that, isn’t he?” Rogers asked.
“He’s here same as the rest of them,” Strauss said. “Let him take his turn.”
“I guess you’re right,” Rogers said.
Not on your life, Jimmy Fitz said to himself. Then he padded away from the door, climbed up to his loft and spent the rest of the night figuring out what ailment he was going to have and what its symptoms were.
The next morning, when one of Strauss’ assistants came down the shedrow and yelled up to Jimmy Fitz, the exercise boy announced he was stricken with a stomach ache that was almost certainly an appendicitis attack. He would yell down later if he needed a lift to the hospital for the operation. For now, he’d just stay put.
“It hurts somethin’ awful,” he said. “I’m good and sick.”
“All right,” the guy said and he went out and told Rogers that Jimmy Fitz couldn’t make the shape.
A few minutes later, however, Lewis, the cook, came down and called up.
“We almost through breakfastin’,” he told Jimmy. “You want eats, you better get ’em now.”
“I might be able to eat,” the kid called down.
“What you want?”
“What you got?”
“Pork chops, fried potatoes and eggs. Some fried onions, too.”
“I’ll take a little of everything.”
Lewis went back to the kitchen and had a tray crammed with food when Rogers looked up from his coffee.
“Who’s that for?” he asked.
“Jimmy Fitz.”
About five minutes later, Jimmy Fitz, chomping quickly on a piece of bread he was able to grab, was putting one foot into the stirrup on the Aposta, Jr., colt. The colt started to skitter a little and the foreman held tight. Then Jimmy Fitz was on and heading for the track and his mount, who had a mean head on him, did his best to get rid of another exercise boy. The boy lasted through the workout in this case. But he learned that food and lying do not mix at times.
But in general, he found the life wonderful. He was a simple kid who was just starting to read and write a little by picking up a word here and there and writing it down on a piece of paper if he got the chance. He had no grand thoughts of doing anything but a full day’s work. The life of a jockey, or of a horse trainer who could go into Allois Soeller’s or Billy Schesseler’s, the good saloons around the Bay, and be a big man, was a bit more than he could imagine. But he had something going for him. He calls it the horse bug. It means walking around a stable area and seeing one or these huge, graceful animals leaning over to pick at grass with the sun glaring on a strong, beautiful neck that makes a swan seem insignificant. Or listening to the chopping sound of one of them chewing on hay. Or being around them out on the track when their nostrils flare and their legs start reaching out and they move with a smoothness and speed that can be murder on you if you see enough of it. Living and working in Sheepshead Bay meant nothing to him. Only summers of potato picking and winters of long, hard odd jobs and being around the same talk and the same problems and the same dreary life of everybody else who was poor and lived there. The horses made things different. No horse ever could be much in the way of company and when you keep talking about Mr. Fitz loving horses you are getting syrupy. But all through his life every time a horse standing in a stable shifted his feet and made that little clop-clop sound it meant something to Jimmy Fitz. It was a sound that got him through life.
This was the start of the long years for Mr. Fitz. He was a little, strong-bodied kid who would travel one of the hardest roads anybody in sports ever took before finally reaching the top. It would leave him with a deformed body and memories of hard work. But it would give him something, too. He is a man who has been part of some of the great stories in sports history, but the hard years in racing taught him that you do not become arrogant or important just because you won yesterday. Tomorrow could start the big slide. The people who learn this lesson are few. But Mr. Fitz understands it and it is something you find running throughout his huge family.
One day last spring, Toney Betts, the New York racing writer, was in the elevator going to the press box at Bowie race track in Baltimore. Jack Fitzsimmons, one of Mr. Fitz’s grandsons, was running it.
“I go to law school in the morning,” the boy said. “I work here afternoons and then in a law office downtown at night. My wife is expecting a baby so I have to keep hustling. Study? Do that weekends and when I get up in the morning.”
“Your grandfather,” Betts said, “you don’t want to use him.”
“My grandfather is one thing,” Jack said. “I’m another. I have to make it by myself. I can’t go around twenty years from now saying ‘my grandfather was Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons.’ So I might as well not do it now.”
That is Mr. Fitz’s creed. And he learned it the hard way.
6. Rough Tracks
IN SPORTS, SOMETIMES IT can all happen fast. One minute you have nothing. The next, everything. For a kid named Earl Sande from American Falls, Idaho, it took one minute and 15 seconds to get there. He got on Miss Flame, the first race horse he ever worked in his life, one morning in 1917 at the Fair Grounds track in New Orleans, broke her from the six furlong pole and then, hunched over, his long legs gripping the sides of the horse, he became part of Miss Flame’s motion and he worked her in exactly what he was ordered to do one minute and 15 seconds and not a step faster, kid—and as Sande pulled up Miss Flame, Tom Jordan, the old trainer, clicked his stop watch and turned to the stable foreman next to him and said, “We are going to ride this kid. We’re going to do it as soon as we can. He’s got a touch.” By 1918, Sande had ridden 158 winners and he was around buying real estate. It happens this way a lot and the stories make professional sports in this country fascinating. But these are stories of the few. For the rest, you nearly always have to tell of long years and hard work, which is the way it went for Jimmy Fitzsimmons of Sheepshead Bay. In the 1880s, a kid working around a race track, as he was, found that there was no such thing as a break, no chance to take it all in one shot. If it ever was going to come, it would come slow.
The Dwyer Brothers Stable was a powerful outfit. Working for them, Jimmy Fitz was around good horses for the first time in his life. From 1886-89, the golden chestnut Hanover was in the barn. He won 17 straight races, earning what was then tremendous money—$109,032.50. By 1886 he had won 14 stakes races before a horse named Laggard, in 17 pounds lighter, beat him at Monmouth Park. Tremont was another big horse in the barn. But Jimmy Fitz was only allowed to look at them—and then only when he wasn’t mucking out a stall. The best horse he can remember being on was a mare called Arranger. He worked this one in the mornings. Otherwise, he was a small boy trying t
o make it in a business and in an era that was tough on men and horses alike.
Anybody working with horses had to be able to do one thing—walk. A trainer named Jack Goldsboro walked a horse from Sheepshead to Morris Park, which is up in the Bronx section of New York, a healthy 25 miles away. Exercise boys and grooms walked their horses from Sheepshead to the Brighton or Gravesend tracks if races were being run there, waited for the race, then walked the horse back. It was a five-mile trip and it could be done two or three times a day and nobody could say a word about it if they got stuck with extra trips.
The horses were not pampered, either. One afternoon in 1889 trainer Billy Lakeland ran a horse called Exile in the first race at Brighton Beach. Jockey Fitzpatrick up, and got nowhere with the proposition. He didn’t like it a bit, so he washed the horse down, threw a blanket over his back and walked him over to Sheepshead where he put up Jockey Hamilton and sent the horse out for the sixth race. Exile picked up horses on the last turn, won by a half-length and for his extra effort got a pat on the rump from Lakeland. Away from the track, things were done on the same order. Tim Cochrane, a friend of Jimmy Fitz’s, walked up to a place near Prospect Park, eight miles away, bought a stove, had them strap it to his back, then started back. He carried the stove every step of the way. Everybody in the Bay talked about this.
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