Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (72 page)

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.

 

 

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.

In the barn, we have the tack rooms, where the grooms and the hot walkers live. A hot walker earns sixty dollars a week. He can’t afford an apartment, he lives in the tack room. They have two cots. It’s almost like a stall. You can put a horse in there if you wanted. A groom makes about $100. The exercise boys earn a little more, about $150. So they usually get apartments. I really don’t know what the average jockey gets. I average around sixty thousand a year. I don’t know if we average more than three or four years. I have no idea how long I’ll continue. I wish I could ride another ten years, but . . . My ambition is to win the Kentucky Derby. It’s still the most honored stake of all. I’ve come awful close two or three times to riding in it. I’m riding for Mr. Scott now. Say he comes up with a colt that’s a two-year-old that I ride and I’ll ride him next year and this horse works his way to the Derby. I have worked my way up there with him. Mm-hmm, could happen.

Through experience you know what to do. Whether the stick will make him run, whether hand riding, whether hittin’ him on the shoulders, hittin’’em on the rear, whistling or talkin’ to ’em. You try everything. If one doesn’t work, you try the other.

I’m pretty relaxed now, but when I first started riding—the night before a big stake I’d get very little sleep. You lost two, three pounds from just nervousness, just by going to the washroom and thinking about it. Especially when you run one of the favorites. You have to fight this. I have to really get rid of the butterflies or I’m really gonna make a big mistake. Actually just mind over matter. Concentration.

What I’ve learned as a jockey sometimes drive me crazy. I’ve gotten where I could look at animals and see personalities in them. Most of what I’ve learned is patience. It comes with love of the horses. A lot of times a horse will do something that could even get me hurt. At first you want to hit him, correct him. But then you realize he’s just an animal. He’s smart but not smart enough to know that he’s hurting himself and is gonna hurt you. He’s only doin’ it because it’s the only thing he knows how to do.

Let me tell you somethin’. Animals got traits from humans. You put a nervous person around a nervous horse and he becomes a nervous horse. It’s helped me to understand humans, too. By understanding the horse, the animal himself, his moods, his personality, his way of life, his likes, his dislikes—humans work the same way—you have to accept them for what they are. People do things because it’s the only way they know. You try to change them to your way of thinking, but you have to accept people the way they are.

 

POSTSCRIPT:
“I would like to see the sport treated differently. I would like to see the politicians out of it. I would like to see the states own all the tracks. People that own the tracks now are draining them . . .”

 

Several times I’d go downtown in Manhattan and somebody’d stop me and say, “Aren’t you Steve Hamilton?” This made me feel all puffed up. It made me feel good that people knew me. Whether guys admit it or not, I think most of them feel good when they’re recognized. They feel they’re something special. Everybody gets a kick out of feeling special. I think that’s one part of this game.

I’ve never been a big star. I’ve never done anything outstanding. I feel I’ve been as good as I can be with the equipment I have. I played with Mickey Mantle and now I’m playing with Willie Mays. People always recognize them. Yogi Berra, people always recognize him. Yogi has a face you couldn’t forget. But for someone to recognize me!

 

“
I signed with the Cleveland Indians in 1958, with their farm club. Back and forth in the minors.” He was working on a master’s degree. A scout signed him up. “I told them I was twenty-one. I was really twenty-three. He felt I wouldn’t have a good chance if I was twenty-three, so I went along with him. Now I give my right age. I’m thirty-six
.” (
Laughs
.)

 

Age is very important in baseball. If you’ve got two prospects of equal ability, one kid’s twenty and I’m twenty-three, they’re gonna take the boy that’s twenty. They think they’re gonna have him longer. That’s why it was important to the scout that I be twenty-one. Scouts get some money back if you make the big leagues. Most of us in baseball who are thirty are considered old men. Lotta times when Larry Jansen
⁵⁴
wants me to get in the bull pen he’d say, “Pappy . . .” (Laughs.) I don’t feel old, but in baseball I’m ancient.

The average time in the big leagues is two to four years. When you consider that only one of about seventy that sign a contract even make the big leagues, that’s a very short life. In the minors, guys’ll play eight, nine years. He’s getting really nothing. He makes about five thousand dollars a year. If he hangs on long enough, he may make ten thousand. But he has no winter job and he becomes an organization man. They figure he can help young players. And age is passing by . . .

In the minor leagues we spent a lot of hours riding in buses, and they were so hot and you didn’t have too many stops to eat. You ate poorly because you had bad meal money. We got $1.50 a day. But you were young. When I was with a class B league, I got a long distance call. My wife went to the hospital in labor. It was the first baby. I had to get home. The ticket was forty-some dollars. We didn’t have it between us (laughs)—the manager, everybody. I got there a day late. I thought baseball players made so much money. (Laughs.) That’s why I wanted to play it, loving the game too.