Gary Stevens’ Horses Might Be Longshots, but He Is a Winner

Three weeks ago, trainer Laz Barrera started a 7-year-old horse named Western at Santa Anita.

Talk about losing streaks, Western hadn’t won a race in 23 months. He had started 27 times since March, 1983, and the best he had done was three second-place finishes.

By rights, the horse should have been renamed; Woebegone would have had an apt ring to it.

Western won seven races as a young horse, and Barrera had tried everything to re-introduce him to the winner’s circle. Horses for courses? Western ran at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Del Mar, Belmont Park and Saratoga and could find none to his liking. He had run on both dirt and grass, on fast and sloppy surfaces, in sprints and over distances.

Barrera put the best jockeys available on his back. Chris McCarron, Eddie Delahoussaye, Laffit Pincay, Wesley Ward and Pat Day were just some of his riders.

Finally, on Feb. 1, Western won again, and now he’s on a different kind of streak, having returned last Saturday to take the $206,750 San Luis Obispo Handicap.

Riding Western for the first time in these two races was Gary Stevens, who, along with apprentice Rick Dominguez, has given the Santa Anita jockey standings a couple of fresh names to be reckoned with this season.

After Western’s streak-snapping win Feb. 1, Barrera said: “Stevens is as good as any young rider that has come here.”

The 21-year-old Stevens won three other races Feb. 1--all longshots. Last Wednesday, Stevens registered consecutive victories with Tara’s Song, a first-time starter who went off at 33-1, and Search for Heaven, a 3-year-old maiden who was 15-1.

Stevens now has 33 wins and ranks fourth in the Santa Anita rider standings. Only McCarron, Pat Valenzuela and Delahoussaye are ahead of him.

“He’s smart and he’s light,” trainer Loren Rettele said of Stevens. “I started using him when he first came to Oak Tree last fall. I had seen him ride at Longacres (near Seattle) last year. He won so many races there that I think even he would have had trouble breaking the record if he’d gone back this year.”

Stevens rode 232 winners in a 136-day season at Longacres, breaking the record of 168 he had set in 1983.

“He’s a good rider, period,” said Stevens’ agent, Ray Kravagna, who accompanied the jockey to California from Longacres. “He can ride any kind of a horse.”

Stevens and Kravagna first teamed up at Portland Meadows, where the jockey’s agent, former rider Von Cunningham, had switched over to training horses. “When Cunningham asked me if I’d take Gary’s book,” Kravagna said, “I told him, ‘If you’ll use him, I’ll take him.’ I had always liked the kid personally.”

Stevens had gone to Portland from the track in his hometown of Boise, Ida. Scott Stevens, Gary’s older brother by three years, also rode in Boise and, quite frankly, the track wasn’t big enough for the two of them.

“Scott was the top rider in Boise for six years,” Gary said. “At first, his success had a lot to do with mine. We had the same agent, and he was being asked to ride so many horses that I was getting the second calls and winning with quite a few of them. But after a while, I started getting tired of being known as Scott’s little brother. Also, I was getting sick of being second to him, year after year.”

It was not surprising that two of the three sons in the Stevens family became jockeys. Ron Stevens, their father, has been a longtime trainer in the Pacific Northwest.

“I was galloping horses when I was 12,” Gary said. “By 14, I was riding quarter horses (at unrecognized tracks) in Utah. My first win was on a quarter horse in Salt Lake City. A month later, just after I had turned 16, I won the first thoroughbred race I ever rode in, at Boise with a filly of my dad’s called Little Star. I won three other races the same day.”

So Stevens might be young chronologically, but the years with his father have made him a seasoned horseman.

“I broke colts with my dad back home,” Stevens said. “Being around horses so much, I’ve had a chance to see what makes them work. And seeing the way my dad had to work, I’ve got an appreciation for a trainer’s problems, too.

“I can handle the part that comes with the trainer telling you he can’t ride you because his owner prefers somebody else.”

Stevens said there were no miracles in ending Western’s slump. “He’s the kind of horse you can’t mess with too much,” he said. “He wouldn’t get rank on you, but you just have to let him run in the early part of the race. From the three-eighths pole home, though, he seems to like an aggressive ride.”

Stevens’ first appearance at Santa Anita came in 1980. Encouraged by Taylor Powell, a former rider who is now an official in Boise with the Jockeys’ Guild, he spent three months riding against the country’s most competitive jockeys.

“I was getting a lot of mounts,” Stevens said, “but I only won three races and I got homesick. But I learned a lot while I was here. The taste I had then has helped me, because I came here this time knowing that I was shooting for something that wasn’t out of reach.”

Still, Stevens and his wife, Toni (whose father, Carl Baze, is a trainer and whose brothers, Mike and Gary, are jockeys), originally planned to return to Longacres by mid-March.

“By the middle of the Hollywood Park meeting (in December), we started thinking about staying,” Stevens said. “The business was good and we were winning races. The longer we’ve stayed, the better it’s got.”