Penny’s Worth of Luck Went a Long Way : Now Battling Cancer, Don MacBeth Can Look Back on an Illustrious Career

In Florida, the bass are not biting for Don MacBeth.

And in California last week, MacBeth ordered a grapefruit with his breakfast, then had to leave the grapefruit because no spoon had been delivered with his meal.

Such things are among life’s little irritations, but they don’t bother MacBeth in these troubled times. The 37-year-old jockey is just glad the bass are there, just glad he was able to leave his small north-central Florida farm to accept the George Woolf Memorial Award at Santa Anita.

Even MacBeth’s back, broken in a riding accident at Aqueduct last April and still painful, has become a minor consideration. He is fighting a bigger battle. His opponent is cancer.

The disease started with a tumor on his lung. It has since spread to his kidneys, and MacBeth is also undergoing radiation treatments for multiple lesions on the brain.

It is the antithesis of a storybook finish to a career highlighted by stakes wins at most of America’s major tracks and even in Tokyo. Don MacBeth has won more than 2,700 races, and his mounts have earned more than $40 million in purses since he won with the first horse he ever rode, in his native Canada in 1967.

Now, though, MacBeth cannot go to a race track--that source of such joy and accomplishment over the years--without crying. A couple of months ago, he went to the races at Tampa Bay Downs, about 75 miles southwest of here.

“Just standing there and watching, it brought tears to my eyes,” MacBeth said. He walked away from his wife, JoAnne, and friends, not wanting them to see him blubbering. He didn’t return to a track until he was honored at Santa Anita last Saturday.

Despite the back injury and repeated reports that the cancer was not going into remission, MacBeth was still telling himself last fall that he would ride again. At his farm just north of here, he climbed aboard a maiden filly that his wife was planning on running soon.

“It didn’t work out,” MacBeth said. “My back was still hurting me, and I was just too weak.”

Then, he added an incidental footnote to the story, meaningless to the tale but told as any true horseman would tell it. A horse story is never over until the race has been run.

“The filly, she went over to Tampa Bay Downs and ran terrible after that,” MacBeth said.

Many of MacBeth’s 22,000 mounts were terrors rather than being terrible, and although he was approaching 40, his riding skills had peaked as 1986 rolled around. He had survived a difficult, on-again, off-again 1985 campaign with Chief’s Crown and won $6.1 million in purses, a figure that ranked him 10th nationally, despite posting only 151 wins.

The season had ended inauspiciously, however, when MacBeth was injured in a December spill at Aqueduct. He says that the diagnosis was a bruise on the lung--nothing of high concern--but suspects that the cancer got started then. By last March, a biopsy confirmed the worst. There was a malignant tumor on the lung.

“The thing was, I was still feeling good,” MacBeth said.

So he continued riding, although rumors began to circulate--at a race track they are as plentiful as discarded parimutuel tickets--and MacBeth, with four children between the ages of 8 and 14, began denying them. The New York Post even decided not to publish a story about his illness when an angry MacBeth told an editor that the newspaper would be making a mistake.

On April 5, 1986, a horse named Fleet Halo broke down in a race at Aqueduct, throwing MacBeth again, and this time the spill was not minor. MacBeth was carried off on a stretcher. He spent three weeks in the hospital, and doctors described his injury in complicated terms, but what he had was a broken back. Originally, an operation was planned, but the radiation treatments became a priority, and the surgery still has not been done.

The day of April 5 wouldn’t have gone away for him, anyway, and MacBeth has underscored the memory by filing an $87.5-million lawsuit against the New York Racing Assn., which operates Aqueduct, and others, including the owners and trainer of the horse.

The suit has been dismissed by the New York State Supreme Court, but MacBeth says he isn’t finished. The case hinges on whether Fleet Halo was fit to run--at least three veterinarians were involved--and whether his owners and trainer concealed a leg injury from MacBeth.

“When I got on the horse that day, I couldn’t tell,” MacBeth said. “He seemed as sound as a bell made out of brass. The first court ruling said something about the stewards not being responsible for the horse being allowed to run. I wonder. If the stewards aren’t responsible, who is?”

Even in his prosperous year of 1985, MacBeth ran afoul of the stewards--this time, Hialeah’s--and Chief’s Crown, the jockey’s meal ticket, was the party of the second part.

They had won the Flamingo Stakes in a stirring drive to the wire with Proud Truth and Stephan’s Odyssey, but Chief’s Crown was disqualified for interference near the finish.

The handlers of Stephan’s Odyssey thought that Proud Truth, the upgraded winner, had fouled their horse. Proud Truth’s owners, John and Dan Galbreath, seemed chagrined at having won. Eddie Maple, the jockey on Stephan’s Odyssey, was taken off the horse because he hadn’t claimed foul against Proud Truth.

MacBeth says that the contretemps might have been avoided had Walter Blum, the former jockey and veteran steward, been in the judges’ stand. But Blum’s mother had died shortly before the race.

After the Flamingo, an embittered, contemplative MacBeth got in his car and drove by himself the 1,300 miles to his Long Island, N.Y., home, stopping only for gas. In the next days, he reviewed the various videotape angles of the race hundreds of times, and at an appeal hearing before a de facto panel in Florida, the jockey’s frame-by-frame analysis of the race was instrumental in the stewards’ decision being overturned in favor of Chief’s Crown.

Chief’s Crown, who gave MacBeth the win in the first Breeders’ Cup race ever run, the $1-million Juvenile at Hollywood Park in 1984, accomplished more than any horse he has ever ridden. But life with Chief’s Crown was no sinecure. Based on his wins in the Flamingo and the Blue Grass, Chief’s Crown was the favorite in the Kentucky Derby but finished a poor third, wiped out by the Spend a Buck express.

With Spend a Buck not running in the Preakness two weeks later, Chief’s Crown was again favored, and this time he was a close second to Tank’s Prospect. But there were whispers afterward that MacBeth had been at fault, and he was replaced by Angel Cordero, a more aggressive rider, for the Belmont Stakes.

The result didn’t change immediately. Chief’s Crown finished third, becoming the first Triple Crown horse to have been favored in all three races and not to have won any.

Cordero continued to ride Chief’s Crown, winning the Travers at Saratoga in August, while MacBeth remained silent.

“I’ve never been one to tell off a trainer,” MacBeth says now. “And besides, I think Roger Laurin (Chief’s Crown’s trainer) tried to keep me on. I saw it as part of the game, and I felt that it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t get the chance to ride the horse again.”

He got the chance in September and rode Chief’s Crown to a narrow victory over Gate Dancer in the Marlboro Cup at Belmont Park. The win was described in some circles as vindication.

“That’s too strong of a word,” MacBeth said. “But it was gratifying, in both a personal and a professional sense.”

Wins with Chief’s Crown, Temperence Hill, Vanlandingham, Lady’s Secret and Deputy Minister notwithstanding, MacBeth’s favorite horse is Misty Gallore.

“She wasn’t the best, but she’s the one I’ve liked the most,” he said. “I think she won nine straight races for me at one point.”

Reminiscing seems to help, and MacBeth tries to be philosophical.

“I could have had a heart attack,” he said. “At least the way it is now, I’ve got the chance to reflect, on all the people--many of them at the bush tracks--that helped me get this far.”

He began a roundelay of his Canadian beginnings. It sounded like a railroad schedule, but actually was a list of small tracks where he broke in--Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatchewan. There were outposts in the United States as well--Spokane, Phoenix, Omaha and Denver, some of them not outlasting MacBeth and running races no more.

He won his first stakes race in 1970 in Florida, at Gulfstream Park, well south of here. The horse was Starstrand, who like his jockey had started modestly, in the claiming ranks.

MacBeth remembers sitting on a track bench with his wife earlier that day, and noticing a penny on the ground.

“Put it in your pocket,” JoAnne MacBeth had said. “It might be good luck.”

For a long time, it was.