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Hawley Returns for Oak Tree Meet : Winning Canterbury Title Restored Jockey’s Confidence

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Times Staff Writer

Not so long ago, 200 wins would have been only a down payment on a year for jockey Sandy Hawley.

In 1971, at 21 and in just his third full year of riding, Hawley was the toast of Toronto when he rode 453 winners. That total not only led North American jockeys, it was also the second-highest number of victories in racing history, behind Bill Shoemaker’s long-standing 485 in 1953.

Hawley beat the record two years later, becoming the first rider to go over the 500 mark with 515. Only one jockey since--Chris McCarron with 546 wins the very next year, 1974--has bettered Hawley’s achievement.

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Going into the 1980s, Hawley seemed at the height of his powers. He made the successful transition from Canadian racing to the intensely competitive Southern California circuit. In 1977, he rode 123 winners at Hollywood Park alone, missing Laffit Pincay’s record by only two and inspiring a clever headline writer to dub the track “Hawleypark.”

Hawley was still young, a jockey without a weight problem and with a body that had absorbed far fewer bumps than the average rider in a hazardous profession.

But gradually the runaway winning stopped and now, in Sandy Hawley’s 37th summer, he is nearing only the 200 mark for the year. Instead of being symptomatic of a slump, however, that figure is being characterized as the beginning of a comeback. After all, Hawley hasn’t won so many races since 1981.

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Hawley has done most of his winning this year at Canterbury Downs, a second-year track outside Minneapolis. Hawley left his California base, where the livin’ had not become so easy, and began riding at Canterbury in April. He won 133 races--more than anybody else--and almost $1 million in purses during a 95-day season.

That success might have been written off as a big fish, once removed, asserting himself in a small pond, but in August, at the end of the season in Canterbury, Hawley, at the urging of his agent, John DeSantis, dropped in at Arlington Park. The suburban Chicago track was trying to recover from a devastating fire in 1985 by running a 13-day meeting and offering about $5 million in purses.

When the Arlington season ended on Labor Day, Hawley won 23 races and had tied for the riding championship with Pat Day. In the last four years, Day has been the national leader in wins three times.

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In the closing days of the Arlington meet, Hawley and DeSantis discussed their next move.

DeSantis seemed to be leaning toward a three-week season in October at Keeneland, the Lexington, Ky., track where many of the same Midwest horsemen would be running horses Hawley had already ridden. But both the agent and the rider have maintained homes in the Los Angeles area, and the Oak Tree season at Santa Anita, scheduled to begin on Oct. 1, will be a month-long meeting that ends with the $10-million Breeders’ Cup on Nov. 1. So for Hawley it is goodby, Keeneland, hello, Santa Anita.

It remains to be seen whether Hawley’s wholesale winning in the Midwest will help erase the California doldrums that beset him in recent years. The same successful newcomers--Gary Stevens, Corey Black, Alex Solis and others--who Hawley says cut into the general business of many California riders, are still around. Stevens, in fact, is the No. 3 jockey in the country in purses, and Black is making a concerted bid to win the Eclipse Award as the nation’s best apprentice.

Hawley knows all about Eclipse Awards. He probably would have won one in 1969, when he led North American apprentices in wins with 230, but the awards didn’t start until two years later. In 1973, Hawley’s 515-win year, Laffit Pincay was voted the Eclipse, but Hawley won the prize in 1976 with 413 wins and $4.3 million in purses.

Despite a proliferation of million-dollar races and a general mushrooming of purses, Hawley’s purse total was down to $3.7 million last year, which ranked him 24th in the country. He needed 1,109 mounts to win 140 races, a .126 percentage that was well below his career mark of .219.

“I can’t attribute the dropoff to any one thing,” Hawley said recently in the track kitchen at Arlington Park. “It just seemed like I got into a slump and everything snowballed. There were the new faces (jockeys) that came to California and did well. The outfits (stables) I was riding for stopped winning races.”

Instead of being in demand as a stakes rider, Hawley had to settle for hoping somebody else’s stakes mounts would become available. In late November, Pat Valenzuela called in sick at Hollywood Park and Hawley replaced him, riding Fact Finder to victory in the Matriarch Invitational.

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“I thought things might go on the upswing after that,” Hawley said. “But they didn’t.”

When this year started no more optimistically at Santa Anita, Hawley and DeSantis began thinking about a change of scenery at Canterbury. One day, DeSantis said to Hawley, “Maybe we ought to consider going to Canterbury when they open.”

Answered Hawley: “You know, I’ve been thinking about the same thing.”

Jenx Fires, who wound up the leading trainer at Canterbury, gave Hawley some mounts right from the start. Transplanted California trainers such as David LaCroix and Lee Rossi also used Hawley.

“I was riding good right off the bat,” Hawley said. “I don’t think I ever lost confidence, though. But not winning, after you’ve gotten used to it, does give you a weird feeling. I think now, after what I did at Canterbury, that I’ve got greater confidence than I ever had before.”

In the halcyon years, Hawley was known for winning races in bunches. Twice at Woodbine, outside Toronto, he won seven races in one day, and six times he has had six-win days, including twice within five weeks at Santa Anita in 1976.

Last May 30, Hawley rode five winners at Canterbury. On June 27, he won five again, but the first, with a $20,000 maiden claiming horse named Mighty Massa, was the most important. It was Hawley’s 5,000th victory, a level achieved by only six other riders--Shoemaker, Johnny Longden, Pincay, Angel Cordero, Jorge Velasquez and Larry Snyder.

Hawley considered trying to win No. 5,000 in his native Canada, where he reached the 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 milestones.

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“We’re glad he stayed,” said Ben Cambra, a Canterbury Downs official. “We got a tremendous amount of publicity out of that achievement.

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