Racing’s Lonely Rider Left With Loving Memories

In all the years I’ve known him, Laffit Pincay, the jockey, has always had this little secret smile--as if he had a joke no one else knew.

It’s not there anymore. Life has become a very somber place for Laffit Pincay since one terrible afternoon in January when he received a phone call he didn’t want on a subject he couldn’t believe.

In all the years anyone had known him, no one had ever heard Laffit Pincay raise his voice above a semi-whisper. That afternoon, he was heard shrieking into the mouthpiece, trying to blot out what he was hearing.

The terrible news was that his lovely wife of 16 years, Linda, had just taken her life with a gunshot wound to the head in a locked bedroom of their luxurious Los Feliz home.

It was incomprehensible to anyone who had known the Pincays. Theirs had not been one of those jockey-showgirl relationships. Theirs was not a bright-lights-and-champagne courtship and wedding.

Their whole life was race-track-oriented, home-based. Her father had owned horses, and Linda was a self-possessed, beautiful woman who was at home in that atmosphere. She presided easily over social gatherings. They had two beautiful children.

Their marriage fairly reeked of stability and mutual respect; there were none of the usual race-track rumors of stormy scenes, discord, deceptions.

The Pincays were a class act. If Laffit never raised his voice in public, neither did Linda. She was a lady in the best sense of the word. Everyone agreed on that.

For Laffit, the year 1984 had been one of triumph after triumph, the most satisfying of his illustrious career. After decades of trying, he had finally won a Kentucky Derby. One historic injustice had been righted.

For a jockey of his Hall of Fame stature never to have won a Kentucky Derby was a travesty of the order of a Babe Ruth never making a World Series. He had also won his third Belmont in a row. And he was on the verge of overtaking Johnny Longden as the second-most successful rider of all time.

It should have been the happiest of times. It wasn’t. Something was happening to Linda. The part of his life he cared most about was coming unglued.

It all began with what Laffit remembers as a botched appendicitis diagnosis and operation. “For some reason, they missed it. They sent her home with what turned out to be a rupturing appendix. A month later, we took her back for the operation. She never healed right. She had adhesions; in fact, gangrene set in.”

Depression set in, too. Pills were prescribed. This bothered Pincay, who had gone through the veil of pills himself for dietary reasons and found the payoff to be increased irritability, unease and, sometimes, an unwillingness to go through with it all one more day.

A natural welterweight, Laffit was in a profession that doesn’t allow him to weigh more than 112 pounds at any time, and he paid the price.

When he finally found a way to stabilize his own weight, Laffit tried to pass on his knowledge to Linda.

Depression proved a more formidable obstacle than weight.

“Our first hint something was terribly wrong was, she quit enjoying the races,” he said. “She had always loved them, but suddenly, she didn’t want to go out at all and she began making up excuses not to go.

“She used to get so down, she’d say, ‘I’m making everyone miserable. I’m a burden to my family.’ I tried to tell her everyone loved her. That we loved her.

“But she got afraid to go out, at all. I tried to get her to get psychiatric help. But, to her, that meant we thought she was crazy. She hid from life.”

May 5, 1984, should have been the greatest day of rider Pincay’s professional life. It wasn’t. He won the Kentucky Derby that day, the most celebrated win of his career. But there was no one to celebrate with.

The one he wanted to celebrate with was home in a darkened bedroom. He stood quietly in the jockeys’ room at Churchill Downs that afternoon, answered questions by the media, then packed his tack and took one of the loneliest flights of his life, back to California.

He arrived home at 1:30 in the morning. “I wanted to talk about the race,” he said. “I wanted to see her happy. I used to enjoy seeing her happy. Always, we used to talk into the night about happy wins.

“But this time, she was asleep. She had taken a pill and gone to sleep. I couldn’t sleep. But I didn’t want to wake her up. It was very sad. You see, I had won the Kentucky Derby too late.”

Linda Radkovich was “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” Laffit Pincay recalls of the day he met her in the paddock at Hollywood Park in 1966.

“I couldn’t believe my good luck. She taught me everything. What to wear, what colors went with what. What to say. How to live. I was very proud of her. She was everything to me.”

On a horse, he was a champion. Off it, he was a scared kid from Panama. “Linda changed all that,” he said. “She was a very great lady.”

The incomprehensibility of her final act stunned the race world. Laffit’s eyes fill with tears when he remembers it. “She thought she was providing a solution,” he said. “She wasn’t. She was producing a problem which will never leave us.”

The smile has gone, but the memories remain. “I thought I could never ride again,” Laffit said. “But I thought of what I told her: You have to face life. You can’t hide from it.”

Has it made goals meaningless? Pincay isn’t sure. He stood in the jockeys’ room at Hollywood Park the other day and tried to explain. “You see, I ride to win,” he said. “I always have. It’s what I’m about. If the goals come, fine. But it’s doing your best, is what it’s about.

“What people don’t understand is, I like to talk about her. I love to remember the good times. And we had so many of them. I like to remember her beautiful smile. I like to remember when I made her smile. I like to talk to her friends about her. People think you don’t want to talk about someone you loved and you lost. But you do. Because, you see, everyone loved her.”