Injured Cordero to Sit This One Out : Jockey, Recovering From Bad Spill, Has to Miss the Derby

Angel Cordero experienced such a high in winning the 1974 Kentucky Derby aboard Cannonade that he vowed to win the race four more times before he retired.

Cordero’s second Derby victory came on Bold Forbes in 1976. Last year, the 43-year-old jockey won his third with Spend a Buck.

The calender and fate are working against Cordero’s attempt to reach his 12-year-old goal at Churchill Downs. He is in the September of his years and was probably pushed into November when he suffered serious injuries in an ugly accident at Aqueduct on March 8.

Cordero broke a bone just beneath his left knee and suffered a lacerated liver in the spill. His horse clipped the heels of another on the first turn and went down, sending the rider flying. Cordero’s horse wound up sideways on the track, and two trailing horses, trying to avoid the prone animal, jumped over the horse and landed on the jockey.

Cordero underwent 4 1/2 hours of surgery to repair his liver, which had been cut into seven pieces. A hideous seven-inch scar runs vertically from mid-chest to his navel. There are small, matching pockets on both sides of the navel, remnants of holes that were made during the operation. He still uses crutches to get around.

But just as Cordero needed to duplicate that initial Derby success, he now needs to return to the saddle. “When I leave this game, I want to leave on my own,” he said the other day in the trophy-filled den of his Queens home, which is a seven-minute ride from Aqueduct. “I don’t want to leave because I got hurt, or because my business wasn’t any good.”

Looking at Cordero on this rainy, miserable afternoon, you fully realize what Leroy Jolley, the trainer, had meant the previous morning. “Angel was just lucky to have lived through what he went through,” Jolley said. “He says he’s going to ride again, and I suppose he will. I know he’s much improved from the way he was the first time I saw him.”

Certain goals won’t let Cordero walk away from a jockey’s life now. His career purses of more than $100 million and wins in almost all of New York’s major races still haven’t satisfied him. He wants to win 6,000 races and needs about 200 more victories to reach that milestone.

And then there’s still that private promise of riding five Kentucky Derby winners.

Mogambo, the Jolley-trained colt who will compete Saturday in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct, would have given him a running start at No. 4 for the May 3 Derby. But Jacinto Vasquez has the mount now, and Cordero can’t possibly think of riding again until late July, long after this year’s Triple Crown is old news.

Cordero might be headstrong and obsessive, but he is enough of a realist to know that next year’s Kentucky Derby may be his last. “I’m going to start looking for that real good 2-year-old this fall,” he said. “That will give me a good shot at No. 4. It may be too late to think about No. 5, but I’ll get it as a trainer. That would kind of count, too, wouldn’t it?”

There’s one additional goal, related to the urgency of his return in July at Belmont Park. “I need about a week there to get sharp again,” Cordero said. “Then I’ll be ready for Saratoga.”

Cordero owns Saratoga. He has led that Upstate New York track in wins for each of the last 10 years, an incredible feat when you consider that the season there lasts only a month and is visited by some of the finest, most competitive jockeys in the country.

When it is mentioned that his Saratoga record is indeed one that will never be broken, Cordero doesn’t disagree. “It ought to last at least through my lifetime, and that’s good enough for me,” he said.

Cordero’s private life has come full circle. Through his first marriage, he has a 22-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter. The son is only four years younger than Marjorie Clayton, former jockey, currently a trainer and Cordero’s live-in companion for about two years. Cordero and Clayton, who are planning to marry as soon as his divorce comes through, are the parents of Julie Angelica Cordero, who is 3 months old today. Cordero’s other daughter, Merly, will be making him a grandfather in June. A man with this life style needs to get off crutches as soon as he can.

Just like those heel-clipping horses, these crutches have been hazardous to Cordero’s health. A few days ago, someone rang the jockey’s doorbell, and Cordero, on the second floor and eager to answer the call, went from the eighth step to the bottom of the staircase in one movement. One of the crutches flew over the railing.

“It was a bad fall,” Cordero said. “I was scared I might have torn something or made something worse. But I went to the doctor the next day and he said that the only thing I did was bruise one of my heels.”

As much as dropping a crutch, Cordero’s deteriorating muscle tone was responsible for the header. He came out of the hospital three weeks ago weighing 101, about 7 to 13 pounds less than his riding weight.

The operation took its toll. Cordero ran a 103-degree fever for several days; his body rejected the second blood transfusion that he received.

He has gained back five pounds. Marjorie Clayton can cook. Cordero spends the mornings with her and her five horses at Belmont Park, then she fixes breakfast at home. Cordero will soon start therapy--an exercise bike and weight lifting--to rejuvenate the broken leg.

His eventual training career will be abetted by the fact that he has breeding rights to a few good horses he has ridden, Track Barron reportedly among them. And although Cordero has intermittently been tough on rival jockeys and trainers with his win-at-any-cost riding style, he appears to have burned few bridges in the game. Most of his detractors seem to forgive and forget.

One of the horses, however, that Cordero doesn’t have a breeding interest in is Spend a Buck, the Derby winner and 1985’s Horse of the Year. It still bothers Cordero that he got caught between loyalties after Spend a Buck’s Kentucky Derby victory. Dennis Diaz, Spend a Buck’s owner, rejected a possible Triple Crown by running in the Jersey Derby instead of the Preakness, and Cordero was committed to ride Track Barron in New York on the same day as the Garden State Park race.

The Jersey Derby was a potential $260,000 payday for the jockey riding Spend a Buck--10% of the $600,000 winner’s purse and 10% of a $2-million bonus that the colt was eligible for. Cordero had ridden Spend a Buck to victories in the first three races of the $2-million bonus series.

Cordero wanted Diaz to pressure Garden State Park into changing the post time of the Jersey Derby to enable the jockey to ride Track Barron in New York and take a helicopter the 100 miles down to Cherry Hill, N.J., in time to handle the assignment on Spend a Buck.

“Spend a Buck was the Jersey Derby,” Cordero said. “They (Diaz and trainer Cam Gambolati) were in a position to get what they wanted. The race was going to be on national television, but it wasn’t ABC or one of the big networks, it was ESPN, so that should have been no problem. ESPN has the kind of programming that they could have put the race on any time of the day.

“The way I figured it, all I needed was seven minutes. If they could have run the Jersey Derby seven minutes later than what they did, I could have made both races.”

Instead, Laffit Pincay was hired to ride Spend a Buck, and he won the race and collected the full jockey’s share of $260,000. Some felt that Cordero should at least have been entitled to a share of Pincay’s bonus money.

“Laffit deserved the $60,000 because he rode the horse in the Jersey Derby,” Cordero said. “But maybe we should have gone 50-50 on the $200,000 from the bonus. The owner (Diaz) said that I could call Laffit and see if he would go along with the split. But by then it wasn’t my business and it wasn’t Laffit’s, either. Before the race, it was the owner who should have straightened it out.

“I don’t regret what I did, riding Track Barron (whose third-place finish in the Metropolitan Handicap couldn’t have netted Cordero more than $4,000). I can still look Peter Brant (Track Barron’s owner) in the eye. I can still call him my friend.”

Brant also owns Mogambo, the Kentucky Derby candidate that Cordero won’t be able to ride this year. But when the jockey says he’ll be back in the Derby next year, there’s nobody around who’ll make book against him.