The Bug Boy’s Plan : Apprentice Jockey Corey Black Is Hoping That There Will Be an Eclipse Award Waiting for Him at the Finish Line This Year

Not many historians are only 17 years old and wear braces on their teeth. But apprentice jockey Corey Black qualifies as a historian, horse-racing variety.

Black was talking recently about the Eclipse Award that is given annually to the best apprentice rider in the country. “Pat (Valenzuela) won all those races (83) at Santa Anita in 1980, but he didn’t win the Eclipse,” Black said.

“Frank Lovato (a New York jockey) did.”

Early on in an interview at Santa Anita, it was clear to see what tack Black was taking. “If I’m not mistaken (and he wasn’t), Steve Valdez is the only California apprentice who has ever won the Eclipse,” Black said.

Valdez won the award in 1973, and don’t remind Valenzuela about 1980, the year he nearly doubled Valdez’s win total at Santa Anita. Valenzuela’s apprenticeship ended in the spring, after he won the Santa Anita Derby as a 17-year-old with Codex and almost reached the $1-million mark in purses with only 420 mounts before he graduated to journeyman. But Lovato’s apprenticeship ran almost to the end of the year, and he carried the vote.

“Anything you can do about getting that trophy back for me?” Valenzuela said the other day.

It’s too late for Valenzuela, but it might be just in time for Black, who’s already started on a plan to win the Eclipse this year. In addition to riding at Santa Anita, where he’s seventh in the jockey standings with 16 wins, Black has been competing one day a week, when Santa Anita is closed, at Bay Meadows, and he’s going to continue that ambitious schedule with the opening of Golden Gate Fields near San Francisco.

“I really wasn’t thinking,” Black said. “I should have started going up north even sooner than I did. I don’t want to be waiting until September to see what I need (to win the Eclipse).”

Black won his first race with his 20th mount, at Santa Anita’s Oak Tree meeting last Oct. 16, and his fifth win came during the Orange County Fair meeting at Los Alamitos late that month. A jockey can ride as an apprentice for a year after his fifth win, his horses carrying five pounds less than those with journeyman riders, so Black will be a “bug boy,” as they are called, until almost November. He’ll have the time Lovato had--but Valenzuela didn’t have--in 1980.

It’s not happenstance that Corey Black would be so familiar with the apprentice class of ’80. Another of its prominent members was Kenny Black, Corey’s brother, who was then 17. Kenny Black won 159 races and totaled $1.2 million in purses to rank fifth on the money list.

Kenny Black went on to win more than 750 races, but his career stopped last year in California, cocaine and weight problems being at the crux.

Corey Black says that his brother’s weight got as high as 142 pounds, adding that he’s now under 130 and hopes to lose 15 more pounds so that he might resume riding. Meantime, Kenny Black is at Santa Anita almost daily, critiquing his kid brother’s rides.

“It’s almost like having a tutor,” Corey Black said. “The guys you ride with can help, too, but usually they’ll only notice that you’re doing something wrong if they’re right next to you. Kenny can watch me every step of the way and talk to me later. It’s like having a teacher and you’re the only student in the class.”

Their father, Ardon, was a quarter-horse rider at Los Alamitos and now works on a farm in Utah. Corey, who lives with his mother, Kathy, dropped out of school after the 10th grade in Arcadia to concentrate on riding and currently is studying trigonometry and English with a private tutor.

Corey Black’s first win, on a mare that had stumbled leaving the gate and dropped him to the ground in her previous start, was for trainer and ex-jockey Danny Velasquez. Since then, Black finished as the fifth-leading jockey at Hollywood Park’s winter meeting with 17 wins and now at Santa Anita he’s won races for more than 10 different trainers.

The trainer connections of his agent, Scott McClellan, don’t hurt. McClellan’s other rider is Chris McCarron, third in the country in purses last year, first this year and currently on his way to a third Santa Anita title in the last four years.

“Corey made a mistake going with Scott,” another agent said early in the season. “He’ll only get the horses that Chris doesn’t want.”

Black disagrees. “I’m lucky to have Scott,” he says. “If a horse is available and Chris is open, Scott’s got to give the mount to him, because Chris is his main man. That’s not Scott’s fault, because the trainers want Chris and I understand.

“If you produce with the horses you get the chance to ride, trainers are going to use you. If I get taken off a horse, I don’t worry, because it’s a big cycle.”

Last week, Black was of some help to McCarron, who had a choice of three horses to ride in the $100,000 Santa Maria Handicap. Black had been aboard Love Smitten in the mornings and told McCarron that the mare had been training well. McCarron subsequently rode her to a 2-length victory.

Black won a race last month for trainer Jerry Fanning. It was Fanning who used Black when he appeared at Hollywood Park last summer to gallop horses.

“If he waits long enough and gives himself a couple of years, he’ll be a rider here,” Fanning said then.

Like a lot of 17-year-olds, Black is in a hurry. “He works like the dickens,” says trainer Ron McAnally. “He comes around the barn at 5 or 6 in the morning, asking if you’ve got any horses to gallop.

“In races, he takes chances, because he doesn’t know what fear’s all about.

“At that age, who does? I remember when I was growing up in Kentucky, I’d fool around on the roof of a building that was two stories high. Years later, I looked at that building and said to myself, ‘Did I really go up there and not worry about falling off?’ When you’re young, you don’t worry. That’s the way it is for this kid now.”

Black is 5-2 1/2 and weighs 96 pounds. In the Santa Anita jockeys’ room, only Bill Shoemaker may be lighter. Unlike his brother Kenny, Corey doesn’t look as if he’ll get any bigger. A track steward once said of Kenny: “He might only weigh 115 now, but that’s the body of a 145-pound man that he’s walking around in.”

Corey Black feels that even with the five-pound apprentice advantage he’ll have for most of this year, improvement is still the quality most trainers will be looking for.

“If a young rider doesn’t show improvement, it hurts,” Black said. “With me, there’s room for tons of improvement. Especially in distance races and on the grass. Turf courses are so much different. At Hollywood Park, with the banked turns, it’s almost impossible to win on the front end. At Santa Anita, the turf course is sandy now. Horses have trouble catching the speed, because it’s hard for them to dig in.”

Black doesn’t have a stakes win yet. His best finish was running third with Pettrax in the On Trust Handicap at Hollywood last November. Corey Black may come of age, though, without winning his first stake. Those braces on his teeth come off later this month.