Eddie Arcaro Usually Found a Way to Win

When you start talking about great race riders, you begin with George Edward Arcaro. He could do anything on horseback that Jesse James, Tom Mix, Buffalo Bill, The Lone Ranger or any Indian that ever lived could.

He rode in the days before they had cameras stuck every step of the way. And he rode in the days when they did. Nobody could snatch a saddlecloth, lock a leg or lug in on a passing entry any smoother than Arcaro.

Lots of guys can whip horses. Eddie could whip jockeys. It was not considered smart to get too close to him in a stretch or to crowd him on a turn for that matter. Eddie used whatever was available to him.

He never pulled a horse in his life. If you wanted to lose, Arcaro wasn’t your man. His book was titled, “I Ride To Win.” When Eddie got “days” (race track-ese for suspensions), it was not for what he did to a horse, it was what he did to jockeys. He once got a year on the ground for not only whipping another horse but another jockey and putting them both in the infield. He was also ready to take on the owner, trainer and members of the Jockey Club before he cooled out. “I shoulda got life,” he admits today.

They wrote poems about Earl Sande, they built statues to Sonny Workman, but when a trainer had a good horse, he wanted Eddie Arcaro on him. What Vince Lombardi was to football players, Michelangelo to statues, Eddie Arcaro was to horses. They ran for him or else. A horse moved up several lengths with Arcaro on. The theory was, he was trying to get away from that son of the whip on his back.

He might have been the greatest money rider who ever lived. He won two Triple Crowns. Nobody ever did that before. Or since. He won five Kentucky Derbies. Only one other rider has ever done that (Bill Hartack). He won six Preaknesses and six Belmonts. No one comes close to having done that.

They didn’t make the horse he couldn’t tame, the track he couldn’t solve. In 1941, Calumet had a colt who could run a hole in the wind and break every clock in Kentucky, but he was such a headstrong rogue that Arcaro recalls, “you couldn’t keep him between the fences. He’d get five lengths in front and head for the grandstand. He’d pull you off his back.”

Trainer Ben Jones wanted Arcaro for this brute. Two other people didn’t. One was Arcaro. The other was owner Warren Wright.

Ben Jones threatened to quit if Arcaro couldn’t ride the horse. The owner relented. In the contest of wills that followed, Eddie flogged Whirlaway into one of the great Kentucky Derby triumphs of all time by eight lengths. Then he won the Preakness with him by 5 1/2 and the Belmont as easily. Eddie didn’t want to ride the outlaw, but he figured as long as he did they were going to do it his way.

Actually, the only rider in America who could beat Eddie Arcaro in those days was Eddie Arcaro. Eddie rode in the first Santa Anita Handicap ever run, 51 years ago, and he would have won it but he got outsmarted by the only guy on the track who could do it--himself. He passed up the mount on Azucar, who won it, to take the one on Gusto, who won eighth place.

But that was nothing. Eddie took himself off a Kentucky Derby winner in 1942. He liked the chances of Devil Diver. And took himself off Shut Out. Shut Out won. Devil Diver struggled in sixth.

Eddie was never without an opinion--or sometimes without a glass--in those days. The morning of his first Kentucky Derby win--on a longshot named Lawrin--trainer Jones took him on a pre-dawn tour of the rain-soaked track. Eddie was pretty well soaked himself. He hadn’t really been to bed. “He walked me around that track twice, pointing out the mudholes by the fence. ‘Don’t run him there,’ he told me.”

The trouble was, on race day, Eddie couldn’t run anywhere else. The rest of the field apparently had the same instructions, and since he had the No. 1 post, he had nowhere to go but straight. “I never went outside a horse all day.” It was a good thing. He very quickly saw, through bloodshot eyes, that the 100-degree heat had dried the inside lane so thoroughly. “All those holes he showed me weren’t there. It was the best place on the race track to be.” He won the race by 2 1/2 lengths but estimated he ran about 3 1/2 lengths less than anybody else in the race. “Everybody thought I was a genius. If I could have gotten out, I might not have beat a horse.”

The secret of race riding is to make a horse confident or afraid. Eddie Arcaro was good at both. “It’s a question of who’s going to be boss,” he explains. Eddie expects everyone to give his best. When he rode the great Nashua in the ‘50s, he found it hard to say something nice about him. The trainer, Jim Fitzsimmons, was not so sunny that day. “Why do you keep knocking the horse when all he does is win?” he demanded. “Because he ought to be 15 lengths better than he is,” Arcaro snapped.

Arcaro always figured the bettor deserved the team’s best. Although still a young man (45) by race-track standards, he even took himself off the track in 1961. “I was getting good horses beat. My shoulder was paining me.” Eddie Arcaro didn’t believe sore riders belonged on the track any more than sore horses. He scratched himself out of the game.

Jockeys have suffered all kinds of terrible injuries on a track. Eddie Arcaro is probably the only one who almost drowned. It was in New York, and he got tumbled off a fractious colt named Black Hills into the homestretch slop. The photographer who came out to take his picture noticed his head in a pool of water and lifted it out. “I was actually drowning, they told me later,” Arcaro recalls.

Eddie, who rode in 15 of them, is at Santa Anita this weekend for the 49th running of the Santa Anita Handicap. He won this race on Talon and on Mark-Ye-Well, but it was the scene of one of his greatest disappointments. It was in 1950 and Eddie was aboard the great Citation, whom he had ridden to the Triple Crown two years before and whom Eddie regards as not only the greatest horse he ever rode but maybe the greatest anybody has.

“We had a three-horse entry in the race. And it was my stablemate, Two Lea, that blocked me off at the head of the stretch. Johnny Gilbert wouldn’t give me, his own stablemate, room. Noor won it, but Citation should have.”

It was a week later that Noor beat Citation again in the greatest stretch run that maybe anyone has ever seen on a track when Johnny Longden, on Noor, kept Steve Brooks, on Citation, pinned against the rail all the way to the wire, and he couldn’t whip. There were two jockey’s agents, neither of them Arcaro’s, leaving the track that night. “Arcaro wouldn’t have got that horse beat,” one of them said. “Arcaro would never have let that good a horse get beat like that.”

It’s probably as good an epitaph as any for him. Eddie Arcaro never got the best horse beat. Unless someone else was on him.