Old-Timers Find Renewal at the Track

On the backside at Santa Anita race track, they still remember jockey Johnny Adams. Maybe that’s why he likes visiting there just before he leaves for home each day.

Adams says his doctor suggested walking as a way to recover from gall bladder surgery in June, but the sidewalks and shopping malls around his home in Arcadia don’t interest him much.

He says he’d rather spend his mornings watching the horses train and then taking a walk through the backside, the part of the track seen by few fans but familiar enough to Adams, 71, who retired in 1982 after 50 years of riding and training Thoroughbreds. His distinguished career is recalled in track halls of fame in New York and Maryland.

“I’d be lost other than around the racing environment,” says Adams, a quiet man with a shy, almost self-conscious grin. “I’ve been retired only a few years so it’s pretty hard for me to keep busy. But now that they’re racing again at Santa Anita, I’ll probably be here just about every day.”

51st Year of Racing

Last week, Santa Anita opened its Thoroughbred racing season for the 51st year. For Johnny Adams and a handful of other retired jockeys and trainers who no longer follow the Southern California racing circuit and who live year-round near Santa Anita, the excitement that once accompanied opening day has been replaced by different emotions.

This is a time, they say, of filling hours otherwise idled by retirement and poor health, of chance meetings with men they sometimes don’t recognize at first but remember when they get to swapping stories about owners and trainers and the first winners they ever rode.

The faces include those of jockeys and trainers such as John Deering and Louis (Apples) Taber, survivors of the California circuit and ones just like it up and down the East Coast and through the Midwest and South. They traveled from one small city to the next, sometimes as part of a team of jockeys on the payroll of one owner but often wearing the silks of any owner who offered them a promising mount. Some spent their youth battling to make weight and failing to overcome drinking problems that destroyed marriages and scattered families.

Counting the Years

Now, wearing their paunches proudly and counting the years without a drink, they wait for the circuit to return to them. When it does, early morning at the track--with dew all over everything and the sun still waiting to come up--is theirs again.

“I’ve got to have something to do, some reason to get up in the morning,” said 81-year-old Taber. “They are the only people I know, people associated with Thoroughbred horse racing.”

For many of them, the backside is where they were initiated into horse racing. It’s where owners take great pains dressing up their stables, bringing in imported turf and white wrought iron lawn chairs and tarps painted with company colors and logos; where Mexican illegals scrub barns clean and where hot walkers cool down mares and geldings after early morning runs, the horses’ taut legs still steaming in the brisk autumn air.

Racing is one of those sports that reveres its old-timers. Near the stables and tack rooms, it’s more than simple guesswork that the 4-foot, 8-inch, roly-poly Adams must be an old-time jockey.

Even female exercise riders--girls younger than three of his four grandchildren, who would have been heresy in Adams’ day--call him by his first name as he walks by, his stride short and quick and his boots comfortable in the mix of mud and manure.

‘A Good Feeling’

“It gives you a good feeling knowing the people at Santa Anita remember you,” Adams said. “Horse racing’s been very good to me.”

Adams said Santa Anita is considered the centerpiece of the Southern California racing circuit. The circuit takes jockeys, trainers, grooms and hangers-on from Hollywood Park to Del Mar to Pomona and then back to Santa Anita, where the San Gabriel Mountains provide what horse trainer John Canty calls the “best backdrop for horse racing in the world.”

“Santa Anita is the greatest race place in the world,” said Canty, who grew up and rode his first horse in Ireland, where four generations of his family have raised and trained Thoroughbreds. “The owners pay

attention to every minute detail. It’s what I would term ‘regal racing.’ ”

Fiddled With Stopwatch

On the first day of public workouts last week, Apples Taber sat in the corner of the lower grandstand area and fiddled with a stopwatch that he said has never needed repair in more than 40 years of clocking horses. He said he was looking forward to the running of the Oak Tree Stakes meeting, which began last Wednesday and will continue for five weeks. The six-month winter racing season at Santa Anita begins Dec. 26.

Taber said he’s done just about everything a man can do in racing except get on a horse’s back. He grew up in Baltimore and was a schoolboy when he began selling apples at Pimlico Race Track, where the Preakness, the second leg of racing’s Triple Crown, is run. He said he was soon captivated by the “school of psychology, the school of philosophy” of horse racing. Asked if that meant he enjoyed placing a wager from time to time, Taber grew philosophical.

“I’ve won a little money and lost some back. It’s a tough game but no tougher than life itself. Yeah, you can put that down, quote that in your notebook. It’s up and down, just like life.”

Life’s Guarantees Are Few

Taber said nothing was guaranteed in life, except for maybe his stopwatch and the cap he bought along the waterfront in Baltimore and wears to the track every day.

“My wife and I separated in 1960. Never had an argument,” he said. “She just up and left one day.”

Taber seems not to hear the question of whether his days at the race track caused the breakup. He turns around and in a garrulous manner that is at once ingratiating and irritating points to Adams and John Deering, who are sitting a few feet away.

“Hey, if you want to know about racing, you should talk to those two guys over there,” he yells, breaking the early morning quiet. “They’re old jocks. Talk to them. They’ll give you a good story.”

Deering’s career, unlike that of Adams, was a promise unfulfilled. Like the great Eddie Arcaro, Deering was fashionable on a horse, his belly and chest so low and streamlined that it was almost as if the horse and he were one.

Began Drinking at 12

“I began drinking at 12. I never drank during the day because it would fog me up when I was on a horse,” said Deering, who hasn’t tasted alcohol since 1971. “But I drank plenty at night. It got so bad that word got around to the trainers. Some days I was so hung over that I had to take myself off of mounts.”

Still, Deering figures he must have won 700 to 800 races in more than 25 years of riding. He said he was a good but not great jockey. He said too many wins got away because he lacked ambition.

“In 1938, I took myself off of five mounts in Rhode Island so I could go see Joe Louis fight in Philadelphia,” he recalled. “It went seven rounds and I thought I got my money’s worth because in those days no one went past three or four rounds with Louis. Then I got back to Rhode Island and found out that two of my mounts had won.”

Remembers First Winner

Deering grew up in Detroit and he was 19 when he rode his first winner, a horse named Sam Pass at a place called Epsom Downs in Houston. “Every jockey remembers his first winner. There are few greater thrills in life.”

He said his most productive days saw him as the No. 2 rider for J. H. Whitney, a one-time U.S. ambassador to England who owned a considerable stable of horses. But he was never able to control his drinking for very long. Eventually, it destroyed his marriage and caused a 38-year separation from his oldest son. Deering has never remarried.

“I’ve been to Portland three times in the last three years to see them,” said Deering, who weighs only 80 pounds after suffering ulcer problems that almost killed him. “My oldest boy took me out on his yacht and my old wife accepted me. She had a barbecue for me and I met her new husband.

Granddaughter’s Wedding

“Last month one of my granddaughters who’s a college graduate invited me to her wedding. I didn’t go. Figured I’d be a stick in the mud, an old fogey like me around all those youngsters. I just sent her a present and begged off. In the meantime, I hadn’t driven across the country in 40 years. I have an old Thunderbird and she was acting pretty good so I drove back to Detroit to visit my three sisters and brother.”

Deering retired a few years ago after 13 years’ checking credentials at the gates at Santa Anita. He said he comes to the track almost every day during the season, drinks coffee with old friends and maybe makes a wager or two.

“Me and Johnny Adams talk more now than we ever did when we rode. Sometimes other jocks join us. There’s always something to talk about.”

Adams, who trained J. O. Tobin, the first horse to beat Seattle Slew, said all the talk sometimes gets him to thinking about a comeback.

“I might still get a few horses of my own to train. Since I’m feeling pretty good, I’ve been considering that,” he says. “It’s in the back of my mind all the time.”