Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  Moreno had been introduced to racing a decade earlier while sweeping the floor at his father’s barbershop in Chicago; there was a lot of racing talk in the shop, and one customer was a horseman who brought Moreno to the track and tutored him as a rider. Moreno wound up in Northern California, rode his first winner at the Alameda County Fair, and started working his way up the ladder. He had soft hands and steady nerves and had experienced his share of success, but he was still unknown in the East and hardly at the top of the game. Before signing with Cain Hoy and coming to Kentucky in early April, he had been struggling for mounts at Tanforan, a smaller track in San Bruno, California. In Kentucky, he and his wife and young son were staying at a tourist camp, a crude cabin hostelry outside Louisville.

  Hayward hadn’t purchased his contract without reason, though: Calumet trainer Jimmy Jones had seen enough in Moreno to give him the first call on Calumet’s horses at Hollywood Park the previous summer. Moreno rode Two Lea to victory in the Hollywood Park Gold Cup, a $100,000 race, and delivered a handful of other stakes wins. He eventually lost Calumet’s first call in California when Eddie Arcaro chose to ride at Santa Anita over the winter of 1953, but Hayward had seen enough to offer him a contract.

  Even if they fared well in the Derby Trial, however, Moreno and Dark Star were destined to be the longest of Derby shots along with Spy Defense, winner of four allowance races in fourteen starts; Curragh King, a former claimer who had won the Arkansas Derby in a major surprise; and Ace Destroyer, a colt who had finished out of the money in six straight starts. Dark Star belonged in that company, a fringe contender blotted out by the Dancer’s luminous presence. Most horsemen agreed that if the sire Royal Gem II was going to leave a mark on the Derby with his first crop of horses eligible for the race, it would be with the stretch-running Royal Bay Gem. Dark Star? Even with Guggenheim’s name working for him, the lightly raced colt with an unknown jockey and less than $30,000 in career earnings was as invisible as a springtime breeze.

  TWELVE

  Racing fans in New York who stayed home and watched NBC’s national telecast of the Wood Memorial knew what was coming when broadcaster Win Elliott pulled Eric Guerin aside for an interview after the race. “First of all,” Guerin said to Elliott, “I’ve got to say hi to my son at home.” The jockey then turned, looked at the camera, waved, and shouted, “Hi, Ronnie!”

  He had begun his TV interviews with greetings to his son since local coverage of racing had started in New York in the late 1940s. “It was the early days of TV and [the greetings] had quite an impact on people,” Carey Winfrey, Bill’s son, recalled. “Eric became well known for it I used to nag my father about it. I’d say, ‘Eric says hello to his son; what can’t you say hi to me?’ ”

  Now, on successive Saturdays, during NBC’s coverage of the Wood and Gotham, Guerin, twenty-nine, had introduced the custom to millions of viewers across the country. His rise from a meager upbringing in a sparse Cajun backwater had moved slowly, if steadily, for years, but it was accelerating dizzily now. Improbably, a blacksmith’s son with a ninth-grade education was linked with a Vanderbilt and America’s most popular horse, at the forefront of the public’s sports awareness.

  Guerin was already living far beyond the most fortunate circumstances he could have imagined as a boy growing up in the 1930s in Maringouin, Louisiana, sixty miles northwest of New Orleans. He, his wife, Gloria, a dark-haired New Orleans native, and Ronnie, aged seven, lived in a large home near the Jamaica Racetrack, with their basement fashioned after the dance floor of their favorite nightspot, the Copacabana in Manhattan. Guerin shared tables with famous athletes and entertainers and had made enough money to maintain a high lifestyle and buy a home for his parents in New Orleans.

  Now he had the keys to the mightiest of equine rides, an undefeated Kentucky Derby favorite, raising his circumstances even higher. If Eddie Arcaro was the face of racing in America, Guerin, for the moment, was a close second, his smiling face and Cajun twang burnished into the minds of millions of fans watching at home on TV. He was the jockey who rode Native Dancer and never forgot his son, not even in the winner’s circle.

  The scrutiny was intense, but Guerin had deftly handled such pressure since his first winning rides in the early forties. Like Teddy Atkinson, Conn McCreary, and the rest of the top jockeys other than Arcaro, he was cast in the Master’s shadow and relegated to a second tier; but he was successful in his own right and possessed an assortment of winning qualities. With calm and consistency, Guerin excelled at breaking quickly from the starting gate, judging pace, and avoiding trouble. “He took a very mathematical approach, knew where he was going all the time and didn’t take a lot of crazy chances,” Arcaro said years later.

  Then there was his greatest attribute, unseen by the public. “The guy just absolutely loved horses, lived and breathed them; and loved being around them,” recalled Frank Curry, Guerin’s nephew, years later. His affection for the animals enabled him to get more out of skittish fillies and two-year-olds than other jockeys. “He was maybe the best filly rider there ever was,” trainer Allen Jerkens recalled. “He liked horses, fillies especially. Some jockeys would lose patience with them, but Eric never did. He was a levelheaded, natural jock with a great affinity for horses, and that served him well.”

  Relationships between jockeys, trainers, and owners could be fragile and rife with distrust, but Winfrey and Vanderbilt were comfortable with Guerin. Unlike some jockeys, he was dependable on and off the track, courteous and professional in his dealings, and never rash; he had many friends and few enemies. And although he was easygoing, there was no doubting his will: he had come back from several horrific accidents early in his career and had struggled constantly with his weight, yet here he was, at the top of the game. He had won numerous races on Bed o’ Roses, Next Move, Loser Weeper, and others in recent years, and with those memories still fresh as the 1953 Kentucky Derby neared, Winfrey and Vanderbilt were brimming with confidence in their jockey.

  He wasn’t the first jockey to come out of Louisiana’s bayou country; a generation of hard-driving boys named Hebert, Martin, Duhon, Dubois, and Leblanc had carved out the pipeline before him. They were descendants of the French Canadians who had migrated to Louisiana after the British exiled them from Acadia, near Nova Scotia, in the 1750s, and these Acadians—nicknamed Cajuns—developed unerring balance while navigating narrow bayous in pirogue canoes twelve inches wide and ten feet long. Decades later, that exceptional balance gave Cajun jockeys an advantage, or so the story went.

  The prototypical Cajun rider started at the bawdy, unlicensed “bush tracks” around Lafayette, where there was weekend racing for raucous fans who wanted to drink, gamble, and see fearless boys ride to win at any cost, even tying rocks and cans to their quarter horses to “make weight” and shock the animals into running. Guerin never rode at such a track: Maringouin was forty miles from Lafayette, and his family had no car to get him there. “We were poor as hell,” said Charles Ray Leblanc, who was Guerin’s first cousin and, like Guerin, grew up in Maringouin and became a jockey.

  Maringouin was little more than a main street and a few side streets, a church, an oil company office, and a few houses; only the wealthy had cars, and the rest depended on horses and wagons for transportation, even in the 1930s. “It was pretty unsophisticated; when the little plane carrying the mail flew over, we all ran outside to look,” Leblanc said. The weather was stiflingly hot and humid in the summer, and people worked hard for small wages and hunted possum and squirrel on weekends. “Eric’s father would come home with a catch and his mom would cook it up for dinner,” said Frank Curry, who was the eldest son of Guerin’s sister.

  The Leblancs were sharecroppers; the family rented a small farm and gave a share of their crops and proceeds to a landlord. Guerin’s father, Oliver, worked as a blacksmith at a farm machinery shop he owned with a partner, and moved his wife and three children from house to house while carving out a living. Oliver never shod horses, and his son
Eric didn’t ride much. “I would ride a horse to the store for my mother, but Eric didn’t live on a farm and didn’t do that kind of stuff,” said Leblanc, who was three years younger than his cousin.

  Leblanc’s older brother, Norman, served as the family’s instrument of change. He became a jockey at a track in nearby Plaquemine and went on to ride in New Orleans and elsewhere, his career peaking with a victory in a stakes race at Saratoga. His travels and tales from the racetrack sounded impossibly exciting to his brothers and cousins back in Maringouin, who knew of little beyond their rural environs. By 1935, Norman had retired and become a trainer, and, one by one, began bringing his kinfolk to the track as jockeys. His brother Hubert joined him in New Orleans, spent two years learning to ride, and went out on his own, later winning the Widener Handicap and other races. Another brother, Euclid, followed Hubert and developed into a highly successful rider, the best of the Leblanc brothers.

  But the best in the extended family was Guerin, who dropped out of school at age fourteen, in 1938, and joined Norman in New Orleans, intent on immersing himself in racing and learning to ride. For two years, he mucked stalls, exercised horses, and kept his eyes and ears open. Norman then sold his contract to Fred Wyse, a mannerly Texas businessman who operated a stable and took the sixteen-year-old Guerin around the country for a year, giving him mounts and breaking him in as a rider. The older man’s influence was invaluable; Guerin’s respectful behavior was attractive to clients throughout his career. “Fred Wyse was like a father to me; I learned more from him in one year than most people learn in 10, and I don’t mean just about horses,” Guerin told the Blood-Horse in a 1975 interview.

  He finished ninth in the first race of his career at Florida’s Tropical Park on March 12, 1941, then made thirty more starts for Wyse before winning for the first time on a filly named Sweet Shop at Boston’s Narragansett Park on August 29. Less than a month later, he fractured his skull and collarbone in a fall at Narragansett and was in the hospital for a month. He came back strong, winning a riding title back home at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, with the help of the apprentice’s bug (weight advantage). When Wyse decided to get out of racing, he sold Guerin’s contract to Joe W. Brown, a wealthy New Orleans sportsman and bookmaker who operated a top stable.

  Riding for Brown and trainer Johnny Theall at age seventeen, Guerin was flying high—but not for long. He was leading the nation in wins in the summer of 1942 when he took a hard fall at Chicago’s Washington Park that left him unconscious for twelve hours and out of action for six weeks with a concussion. His year with the apprentice’s bug [weight allowance] was up when he returned, and the slump that often befalls young jockeys at that point in their careers hit Guerin hard. He slumped miserably in 1943, ending the year with yet another fall that resulted in a broken shoulder, a concussion, and seven weeks in the hospital. Then he tried, without success, to establish himself in New York in 1944 and 1945, attracting attention only as one of the riders in a rare triple dead heat at Aqueduct.

  “It was a tough time to be a jockey,” Clem Florio recalled. “The money was bad. A couple of guys had contracts or understandings that they would get 10 percent, and everyone else had to fight for everything. There was no obligation. You might get forty bucks if you won, and if you didn’t win, you got blamed. They were paying guys off in the dark. Jockeys were the most underpaid, undervalued guys in the business. That’s when they had big fields, with guys all hungry, trying to get every hole. Sometimes guys would cook something up and split the money. It’s surprising there wasn’t more larceny.”

  Guerin had talent, but he was over his head competing at age nineteen against Arcaro, McCreary, George Woolf, and others. The older jockeys took his mounts and took advantage of him before the advent of the film patrol, elbowing him and cutting him off. “A lot of things happened that officials didn’t see; the film patrol changed everything,” said Charles Ray Leblanc, who followed Guerin’s career path, breaking in with Norman in 1941 and ultimately riding for Joe W. Brown.

  Still, Guerin’s biggest problem came from within as he struggled to establish himself. Tall for a jockey at five foot four, he gained weight easily and had to go to extremes to get the extra pounds off. He jogged in the heat, spent hours in jockeys’ room “hot boxes,” read books in his car with the windows rolled up, and when all else failed, stuck his finger down his throat. “Eric did that a lot,” Leblanc said. His normal weight was close to 130 pounds, but he raced at 115, and sometimes even less.

  Such harsh reducing left him weak and unable to ride up to his potential. Fortunately, Theall, a fellow Cajun, continued believing in him, and he remained under contract to Brown. Theall’s faith finally paid off in 1946. Guerin, at twenty-one, spent the summer dueling with Arcaro in New York and won his share of races. “It’s funny that you fellows who write for the papers seldom give Eric Guerin the credit he deserves. He’s a pretty slick rider,” Arcaro told reporters one day. The secret was out by the end of 1946. Guerin’s total of twenty-one wins in stakes and handicap races ranked among the nation’s best.

  He earned his first Kentucky Derby mount the following year on Jet Pilot, trained by Silent Tom Smith, the reclusive legend who had conditioned Seabiscuit. Jet Pilot had won five races and more than $87,000 as a two-year-old with Guerin on him, and he was the second choice in the Derby, behind Phalanx, ridden by Arcaro. Smith had brought Jet Pilot along slowly because of sore feet, but figuring the chestnut colt had one good race left, he hoisted Guerin up before the Derby with simple advice: “Take him to the front and don’t look back.”

  Guerin broke to the lead and slowed the pace to a crawl—a half mile in 49 seconds—leaving Jet Pilot with enough energy to hold off Phalanx and Calumet’s Faultless down the stretch. It was a brilliant ride. Guerin had won the Kentucky Derby at age twenty-two. “I was at Churchill Downs that day, riding for Joe W. Brown,” Leblanc said. “Jet Pilot wasn’t the best horse in the race, but Phalanx didn’t run for Arcaro and Eric rode a nice race.”

  A rush of bad luck immediately ensued, as if the racing gods were punishing Guerin for winning the Derby before he had paid his dues. He made seventy-five straight starts without winning, and the streak was halted not by a victory, but by the fourth major fall of Guerin’s career. This one resulted in a fractured vertebra that laid him up for three months, giving him time to ponder his many ups and downs. He made a fateful decision, realizing that his persistent weight problem and resulting lack of strength had contributed to this latest fall. It was time to start eating right.

  For years, he had eaten one major meal a day and otherwise starved himself on a liquid diet. That had allowed him to ride, but he wasn’t winning the war. Lying in the hospital with a broken back, he listened as Dr. Alexander Kays, the medical adviser to the Jockeys’ Guild, prescribed a new eating regimen: a poached egg, toast, and coffee for breakfast; no lunch; a slice of lean meat and a vegetable for dinner; and minimal intake of liquids. It was a diet that could help Guerin control his weight with doses of vitamin supplements, weekly shots of vitamin B12, and, of course, willpower. “It wasn’t an easy way to live,” Guerin told the Blood-Horse years later, “but the vitamins and diet enabled me to keep riding.”

  Leblanc said, “The one thing you could never take away from Eric was that he had a lot of willpower. He had a real weight problem and he had to reduce hard for a long time to keep riding, and he did.”

  By 1949, Guerin was healthy and stronger, and his career was on the upswing. Vanderbilt and Winfrey called, looking for a rider. The timing was perfect. Vanderbilt’s stable was on the rise. Guerin won on Bed o’ Roses, Loser Weeper, Next Move, Foreign Affair, and Cousin, and also rode stakes winners Crafty Admiral and Royal Governor for other stables, including the King Ranch, which gave him a mount in the 1950 Kentucky Derby. Vanderbilt and Winfrey loved his soothing way with fillies and his nose for the finish line: at one point in 1949 he won five stakes races within three weeks, all photo finishes. In January 1951, he signed
a contract with Vanderbilt; he would earn $1,000 per month, plus 10 percent of the stakes earnings his horses accumulated.

  “Eric was in a beautiful spot, getting to ride all those good horses, but he made the most of it; he really produced,” recalled Costy Caras. “He was a big name around New York. He and Arcaro and Teddy Atkinson were the key guys, the guys that dominated. Eric would come into my father’s restaurant. I got to know him very well. We became quite buddy-buddy We both liked big-band music, and we liked to play softball. I went with him to New Orleans one time when he was suspended for a week, and as big as he was in New York, you would have thought God had walked into the room down there.”

  The media’s typical depiction of him as a “quiet youngster” was good for business but not entirely accurate. He was young, successful, and making more money than he could believe, and “like a lot of the jockeys back then, he spent whatever he made,” Allen Jerkens said. Recalled Frank Curry, “When he’d come to New Orleans, there would be a party lasting two or three days. They’d rent out a restaurant and go to the jai alai at this place Joe Brown ran, and it was just lights-out. And Eric was picking up the tab.”

  Inevitably, with so many jockeys in the family, his success caused problems. “We were close growing up, but we drifted apart: he was famous and I wasn’t,” said Charles Ray Leblanc, who later became a racing official in Chicago and New Orleans. “My brother Euclid resented that the whole family kowtowed to Eric, and he moved out to California to get away from it, to get out of Eric’s shadow and the whole family talking about him. It got to Euclid.”