That night, Chinn had dinner with Charles White, a New York bookmaker, and during their little talk Chinn mapped out a quite workable plan for a successful betting operation. White loved it.
“I’d also like to get the use of four thousand until I can get my runners in action,” Mr. Chinn said.
White said he knew where to get it. He walked out of the hotel dining room, stalked into the lobby, grabbed Izzy Hamm and asked for a short-term character loan in that amount. For an old friend and fellow bookmaker, Hamm dug down and came up with it. White said thank you and walked away. Some seconds later, Chinn was in the lobby flashing the money and calling out, “Izzy, you come over here. I’m going to straighten this situation out.” Hamm became halfsmart about now and let out a scream. They usually do. He also came down with laryngitis by the time he was through handling bets on what was to follow.
Now Moncrief Park was run by a man named Curly Brown who, his grandmother always said, was thoroughly honest. Brown also came with the courage of a bear and a loaded .45 in his pocket. He was the official starter at the track and for a time had to take the insults of irate bettors because of his work. One of them arrived in Brown’s office one day and pointed a gun at Curly. He started to make a speech about what was going to happen. Brown, thoroughly bored, got up from his desk, walked up to the guy and then threw him out the window, gun and all.
With stories such as this being spread around, complaints about Brown’s work grew dim and soon hardly anybody seemed surprised, or would say much more than hello, when Brown would be seen around the betting ring before a race. This was fairly unorthodox behavior for a starter. As was one of his more flamboyant starts. When the race went off, one horse took a stride forward, then wheeled and ran straight back toward the barn. Brown promptly had the field recalled. He sent them off twice more before he let it stick and the race be run. The horse which had tried to run away the first time, and an animal for which Brown seemed to have more than normal love, broke well on top the second time. This was, said people who knew about the gun in Brown’s pocket, merely a coincidence.
If you are around the huge, orderly business that racing is today, you have to wonder if a man like Brown ever existed. But exist he did, and for a good reason. Men of the caliber of a J. E. Davis had been, by law, forced to limit their racing activities to a few hunt meets at such places as the Piping Rock Club on Long Island. For somebody like Fitzsimmons, whose life was committed to being with horses, this situation left him at a place where a Curly Brown would be in charge.
Not that he is ever going to complain about it. With absolute stubbornness, he rails if you sit down and say, “Now tell me about how this guy Brown robbed you.”
“I don’t know that,” he will snap. “And neither do you. There was racing there and I made my living at it and that’s all that I know or ever knew about it. I don’t know the first thing about anything he did. And don’t you start having me say anything about racing except how good it’s been for all of us.”
Which is, of course, the way of the stand-up guy.
The facts, however, would disturb lesser people. When Jimmy Fitz sent out a horse called Via Octavio at Moncrief, there was trouble over the race. Joe McCahey, a little-faced kid out of Philadelphia, was on the horse. He was, as records proved afterward, as fine a lightweight jock as they had in the business, and he never did a thing wrong in his life. Aboard Via Octavio, he got tucked into a pocket, couldn’t get out of it and lost the race. These things happen every day, but the minute the race was over, Judge George Murphy solemnly called McCahey to the stewards’ stand. Murphy was an old, proud-looking man who would scuttle the Atlantic Fleet. He told McCahey that he was going to be suspended for pulling Via Octavio. Curly Brown came up to the stand and seemed considerably agitated.
“We’re going to rule this kid off,” Brown told Fitzsimmons a few minutes later. “We think he pulled the horse. Now if you say so, too, we’ll have a good case.”
Brown most certainly did not say that any agreement by Fitzsimmons would be of benefit to Brown when he met with his bookmakers later and discussed the money he had put down on Via Octavio. But he did get mad when Jimmy Fitz refused to fault McCahey’s dead-level ride. McCahey was told to pack up and get off the track and for a few days Moncrief Park refused any entries from trainer J. Fitzsimmons. When he did get horses in, he did all right and things were moving along at a good clip when the racing secretary came to him one morning and asked if Royal Captive, who had just lost a race a couple of days before, could be entered in the race that day as a favor. The secretary hadn’t been able to fill the event and needed some help. He got it from Fitzsimmons. The trouble was, he got too much help. Royal Captive, an outsider in the betting, went to the post and won the race and Curly Brown and Judge Murphy blew their tops again. They didn’t like an upset at times.
When the meeting ended, and Jimmy Fitz was shipping North, with money in his pocket to do it with, too, the great Colonel Chinn came around to see him.
The meeting, for Colonel Chinn, had been a disaster. He tried to cash a bet or two, was whacked out of the box, then his horses started to come up hurt. The horses didn’t complain, but the bookmakers and bill collectors did and Jacksonville was not Chinn’s idea of paradise at the moment.
“You ’member when we first got here I told you I had this thing by the tail down here?” Chinn said. “Well, let me tell you. Looks like right now the only man who got anything by the tail is the sheriff. And the one he’s got is me.”
In 1912, the ban on racing was repealed and Mr. Fitz came back to New York and started to build his career again. And now you could see he was not going to miss. It was all the same—a cheap horse, a lot of work on the cheap horse and then just enough money to pay the bills. But during all of this, one thing was becoming apparent to everybody who saw him working and succeeding with everything he was given.
He has, they said, an eye for a horse. This is one of the oldest of the Irish expressions. There is no casual meaning to it because in the old country, where it comes from, thoroughbred horses are a serious business. And only a few men are accepted as knowing much about these animals. They said it about Mr. Fitz.
They also began to realize that Mr. Fitz had an eye for the right way of doing things, too. He had been rummaging around the country for several years and he was not a consistent churchgoer. On most Sundays, digging up food was the main project and that did not leave much time for scouting around the countryside for a church—if there was one to be found. But religion is a way of life, not just a Sunday business, and it includes things like being honest, which is Mr. Fitz’s hole card.
Joe McCahey, the little jockey Mr. Fitz brought up, was one who knew it. McCahey was a fine lightweight rider who had a deep trust in God, and as many gold certificates as he could get his paws on. Such things as the usual paper money, most human beings, and any and all occasions which required money to be spent were not for McCahey. It was different if it was Mr. Fitz. Then, Joe never had a question. He’d do anything, as long as he was doing it with Mr. Fitz. But with anybody else, Joe was a little suspicious.
He roomed with Frank Herold and the first night the two put up together, McCahey declared the hand. He took a wad of folded gold certificates out of his pocket—he was riding well and was the only one with any money—and handed them to Herold.
“Put this under your pillow and sleep on it for me,” McCahey said.
“Why don’t you do it yourself?” Frank asked.
“Because if I sleep on it and you put your hand in during the night and take some of the money off me, you can say you don’t know nothing about it. You could say some thief come in here while we both was asleep. But if you got it under your pillow then you won’t take it because you know I wouldn’t believe any story you tell me in the morning. Take the money. It’s safer for me like this.”
McCahey went to bed and slept like a firedog. Herold spent most of the night trying to figure out how this little g
uy next to him was able to arrive at that kind of logic.
Herold soon found out he had to spend a lot of time thinking around McCahey. The little jockey was adept at such things as having no change when it came to paying for a trolley car ride and making sure he was alone when it was time to eat in a restaurant so he wouldn’t be faced with the prospects of paying for somebody else. McCahey bought a car for the Saratoga season one summer, but after paying the gas and oil bills for it a few times, he gave it to Herold for the rest of the season. By his strange logic, he figured he was saving money.
With Mr. Fitz, he went the other way. By 1913, the scrapping had started to pay off, and Mr. Fitz wanted to build a house in Sheepshead Bay. He was shy $8000 and things like bank loans and mortgages were something he didn’t think much about. He asked McCahey about the money. Joe didn’t bother with formalities. He came up with the $8000 in gold certificates. It was always gold notes with McCahey; he spent most of his non-riding hours going around exchanging paper for them because he did not trust normal currency. Yet McCahey, who would not spend a quarter to see an earthquake, didn’t even think about giving Mr. Fitz $8000. He just started to count it out.
McCahey was paid off in 1914 when Mr. Fitz got lucky with a horse named Rosseaux. The horse was running at old Empire City track in Yonkers, New York, and a fellow named Bud May claimed him for $1700 from a friend of Mr. Fitz’s, Bob McKeever.
After the horse was claimed, Mr. Fitz talked to May, who said he’d resell the horse for a $200 profit. Mr. Fitz liked the horse, and knew he could do something with it. But under his code he had to tell McKeever, the original owner, about it first.
“I know you liked the horse,” Mr. Fitz told him. “You can get it back for a $200 profit.”
McKeever said he’d rather forget about it, so Mr. Fitz got Johnson, the prison warden, to put up the money for the horse. Then he took Rosseaux in hand and the mare started winning races, good races, too, and presently a sign appeared over Mr. Fitz’s new house at 1174 Sheepshead Bay Road. THE ROSSEAUX, it read.
The Rosseaux, with the Fitzsimmons family living in it, resembled a boardinghouse, particularly in the summers when the family would line the long front porch. What with the sign and the number of people on the premises, anybody in the neighborhood looking for a room during the racing season would come up the walk, suitcase in hand, and ask what the rates were. When they were told it was not a rooming house they would walk off muttering, thinking they were being turned down on appearance.
McCahey took on weight and became sick and had to leave racing. He died in North Carolina at the age of twenty-seven. He left $52,000 in gold certificates and named Fitzsimmons as executor of the will. This didn’t seem to bother his mother at all. When her son’s body was shipped to her house in Philadelphia, the casket almost completely filled the living room and visitors would find her sitting in the room and shaking her head as she looked at her son.
“I can’t understand why they didn’t send Joe’s overcoat up with him,” she said.
By 1914, when Mr. Fitz went with James Johnson and his Quincy Stable, everybody on the race track knew what he was like and what he could do and the only question was just how high he could go. Everybody thought it would be very high. And everybody means a lot of people because they were starting to come around Mr. Fitz now and get a taste of his warmth and when they went away they felt as if they had a friend they were going to keep for a long time. And they made sure to come again and to see him smile and talk, just as people would every day for the next forty-six years.
The newspaper writers were part of the crowd. It used to be J. Fitzsimmons in agate type next to a horse he rode or in the charts if he trained a winner. But now it was Jimmy Fitzsimmons in stories and Fitz and Fitzsimmons and Jim Fitzsimmons in 36-and 48-point headlines and finally one day George Daley of the World started his story by saying: Jimmy Fitzsimmons—Sunny Jim they ought to call him because of a disposition that ever makes for a happy smile—had three good ones at Jamaica yesterday. The copyreader had a two-column head to put over the story, and he used Sunny Jim in the head and it was the name that was to stick. It was in nearly everybody’s stories after that. And there were plenty of them. The sportswriters read as if they were writing of an old friend and the people who read papers started to talk about him and as Mr. Fitz started to knock them dead with winners around New York tracks, the sports world opened for him.
Everything became like the afternoon at Empire City when Jack Kearns, the great fight manager, came into the paddock with a dark-haired, murderous kid from Manassa, Colorado, and as they walked, Kearns was telling this fighter of his, “Hype Igoe introduces me to a terrific guy before. We’ll go over and say hello. You’ll love the guy.”
Then Kearns came over to Mr. Fitz and introduced his fighter, Jack Dempsey.
Mr. Fitz stepped away from Dempsey and looked him over from hocks to head, as if he were the four horse in the next race.
“Look at him,” Mr. Fitz said. Built for speed. Oh, you can see that. “Don’t have to know much to see you’re built for speed, boy.”
Dempsey and Kearns stayed around and talked with Mr. Fitz and soon there was a crowd in a circle around them, laughing and listening to the talk. It was just a little thing that happened during a day at the races, but they put it all in the papers the next day, all about how the champ and Sunny Jim talked at the track. It got to be like this every day.
Mr. Fitz loved it. Not the stories. They meant nothing. Nor did it matter much that it was a big-name personality who was around to see him. What Mr. Fitz loved was simply that there were lots of people around. There would be the steady ones, Fish and Herold and the horse owners and jockeys and other people in the business. Now, to make it better, there were others. Whether they were reporters or show-business names or milk-delivery men was not important. Just so long as they came.
He was stepping into the world of sports for the first time, but he was different. It can be, this thing called sports, like show business. The winner finds he is a national figure and is included in a fast-moving, publicity-conscious, name-dropping circle that attracts hangers-on and well-wishers and produces as many megalomaniacs per headline as any movie studio. But Mr. Fitz never noticed he was entering this. He was surprised when strangers would know his name, just as surprised as he is forty-six years later. He never thought much about what they said about him in the newspapers. The suspicion is he has always liked the pictures a little bit more, although when he first started to pose for photographers he tried a little too hard and, particularly when he wore a hat, came out looking like a guy being booked for burglary. Later on, when he took back off the pace a little and relaxed, he became perhaps the best-photographed subject in sports. Even this is something which did not change him. He liked the picture posing and made sure to see them when they were printed, but never thought of them as being significant of anything except a little fun between trying to figure out what he could do for horses that were hurting.
“Did you ever think that you were on your way to being important?” Mr. Fitz was asked once when he was talking about these years.
“Important?” The hand made that little waving motion in front of him. “I never was important. Never will be. Get that important stuff right out of your head. That’s nonsense.”
This outlook is part of his success. An important part.
Fitzsimmons is one of the characters of the race track, a guy on the New York Sun wrote. To begin with, he wears suspenders. He doesn’t bother about whether or not there are any creases in his trousers, either, and on hot days he takes his coat off and carries it around under his arm. He wouldn’t feel comfortable in a silk shirt, and he’s not particular about the color effect when it comes to neckties. Fitz is just a horse trainer. He has no connection with betting cliques, and any time he bets more than $5 on a horse, the horse is ‘in.’ One of these days some rich man is going to put Jimmy Fitzsimmons in charge of a regular stable, and then let all the Ji
mmy Rowes, Walter Jenningses, Tom Healeys and Sam Hildreths look to their laurels.
In those days, incidentally, Mr. Fitz always was able to have more fun with the mob around him in the paddock when he didn’t look so smart with a horse than when he would have some good winners popping home.
One afternoon at Jamaica, Mr. Fitz was around telling everybody that his horse Liola couldn’t be worse than third in the next race.
“You can step right out with this one, boys,” he was saying.
“Go heavy. I’m unbucklin’ my belt myself. We’ll have them all in trouble on this one.”
Liola took the track and ran as if she owed the chiropractor money. She was dead last all the way around and at the eight pole a little black bulldog darted out from the infield, took the track near Liola, skipped home well ahead of the horse, then disappeared back into the infield.
“I told you I wasn’t so smart,” he said to the mob after the race. He was delighted when the papers made a big thing out of the bulldog beating his sure-thing home.
On another occasion he was in the middle of a discussion about the buying of yearlings and since he was considered to be quite a hand at this, he was asked about it. Mr. Fitz gave his views on the subject and then, making sure everybody was listening, he said he knew all there was to know about yearlings.
“Why, a few months ago I bought a yearling by Spanish Prince out of a very high-class broodmare,” he said. “A real corker.”
“How does he look now?” he was asked. “What are you doing with him?”
“I don’t know. Sold him for $50 because the minute we started to put him in training you could see he never would get to the races.”
He liked telling that story.
Johnson, the Quincy Stable owner, was not a rich man compared to the Whitneys and Belmonts and others in racing. But he had a sugar weighing business on Wall Street which gave him enough income to own horses and bet on them pretty good whenever he had a spot. In the process of keeping alive in an expensive game, Johnson bought and sold horses, looked to cash a bet here and there as well as ride with the normal fortunes and misfortunes which would hit his horses when they ran for money.
Sunny Jim Page 16