A RARE PAIR RIDING HIGH : Apprentices Patton, Gryder Doing Well in Talent-Rich Area

The jockey standings at Hollywood Park this season are top-weighted with some familiar names.

Laffit Pincay, who has won more than 2,000 races at Hollywood Park in his career, the highest total by any jockey except Bill Shoemaker, heads the list with 65 wins through the first 58 days.

Just behind Pincay are Chris McCarron, Eddie Delahoussaye, Gary Stevens and Pat Valenzuela, all consistent winners on the Southern California circuit.

But then, in sixth place, with 39 winners, is Dave Patton, while Aaron Gryder is seventh with 36 first-place finishes.

Apart from being newcomers to the local racing scene, Patton and Gryder are also apprentices, jockeys who are allowed to ride while carrying five fewer pounds than their more experienced counterparts.

With so much talent in local jockey rooms, it’s seldom that apprentices come along and succeed as Patton and Gryder have. That two apprentices should do so in the same season is especially rare.

Hollywood Park, Santa Anita and Del Mar are not known as havens for apprentice riders. Since an Eclipse Award was first awarded to the country’s top apprentice in 1971, only one California jockey--Steve Valdez in 1973--has taken the trophy. One of the better performances by a California apprentice came from Corey Black last year, when his mounts earned more than $3.5 million in purses, but he still lost the Eclipse in a close vote to Allen Stacy, who won more races while competing primarily in Maryland.

Another Maryland hotshot, 17-year-old Kent Desormeaux, is on his way to winning this year’s award, despite the accomplishments of Patton and Gryder on a much more competitive circuit. Desormeaux already has passed the 240-win mark for the year and has ridden 11 stakes winners.

Patton and Gryder, happy that they have shown enough horsemanship to create enough business for both of their agents, are not thinking about an Eclipse Award.

They are alike in only one way: having that asterisk--called a bug around the track--next to their weight in the program, which indicates that they are receiving the five-pound apprentice allowance.

Gryder, like Desormeaux, is 17, having celebrated his birthday on June 5 at Hollywood with a three-win day. Patton is 25, an advanced age for an apprentice, and last week he was handing out cigars in the jockeys’ room after his wife, Trudy, gave birth to a daughter, their first child.

Both jockeys knew they could not walk in the door at Hollywood Park or Santa Anita and expect to set up shop, but Patton’s plan was much more deliberate than Gryder’s. Much of Patton’s preparation was by choice, but some of the delay wasn’t--at 16, he was told that a mole on his chest was a malignant cancer and he underwent surgery and radiation treatments for a year.

Patton said he expected to die, but later it was determined that he did not have cancer. Patton says that as an aftereffect to the treatments, many of his immunities were broken down and now he suffers from several allergies. There was a lawsuit over the original diagnosis, but Patton prefers not to discuss the case.

Born in Anaheim, Patton was a versatile athlete in high school, wrestling being his favorite sport. He owned his first car when he was 15 and later studied automotive and business courses for two years at Fullerton Junior College.

He weighed more than 120 pounds then, but having grown up around his family’s pleasure horses, he envisioned a riding career, at least with quarter horses, whose jockeys are able to carry more weight than thoroughbred riders.

Solely because he lived just a short drive from Los Alamitos Race Course, Patton sought work there and began exercising quarter horses for jockeys Greg Gift and Bruce Pilkenton, and he also worked at McGahn Farms, a breeding and training center in Rancho, Calif.

“All this time, I was anxious to ride,” Patton said. “But I wanted to be prepared when the time came. Things haven’t just clicked for me. It’s been hard work, a lot of hard work between the time I started and where I’m at now.”

Patton was told he would be better off riding thoroughbreds if he could get his weight down and he says it wasn’t any trouble reducing to the 103 pounds he now carries.

He became an exercise rider for Don Warren, a thoroughbred trainer, and eventually took on the responsibilities of barn foreman.

“Donnie taught me things about horses that I hadn’t learned working with the quarter horses,” Patton said. “Things like caring for horses’ legs and getting them shod. He told me that he’d let me know when he thought I was ready to ride in the afternoons, and he was honest about that.

“Then, when I did start riding, I had Donnie’s credibility as a trainer going for me. That gave me access to some more of the right people around the track, and that’s important when you’re just starting out.”

Patton got his first mount at Hollywood Park a year ago and, two weeks later, he won his first race--on a thoroughbred at the Orange County Fair at Los Alamitos.

Aaron Gryder’s first winner came last Jan. 18, about three weeks after he began riding at Caliente.

“I went to Mexico to get some experience,” Gryder said. “At the tracks around here, it’s awfully hard to get started, and if you make mistakes in the beginning, they (the trainers) remember.”

In a kindergarten class when he was 5, Gryder wrote that he wanted to become a jockey. Growing up in West Covina, he went to the races a few times with his grandparents, and when he was 13 he met Rudy Campas, the retired jockey who has a ranch and training track in Riverside.

“Rudy gave me confidence and taught me a lot,” Gryder said.

At Caliente, Gryder said he won 32 races and was the second-leading jockey in the standings when he moved to Santa Anita in March.

He went 22 mounts without a winner when there was nobody around to ride a 16-1 longshot called One Eyed Romeo in the last race one day in early April. Gryder broke One Eye Romeo on the lead and kept him there for his first American win. Usually, such an event means that a young rider is treated to an initiation rite of shoe polish, shaving cream and cold water in the jockeys’ room, but Gryder was spared. Most of the other riders had already gone home.

Both Gryder and Patton had mounts in the $500,000 Hollywood Gold Cup on June 28. Patton was named to ride Schiller; Gryder, once more sitting and available in the jockeys’ room, was the last-minute rider on Captain Vigors when Pat Day couldn’t leave commitments at Arlington Park.

Neither bug boy won the race, with Schiller finishing ninth, but Captain Vigors ran fourth, which meant a $3,750 paycheck for Gryder as his 10% share of the horse’s purse.

“That was all right for a pickup mount,” Gryder said. “I had won on the horse before. I wanted to ride him in the Gold Cup like it was just another race. I thought it was so neat that somebody would let me ride, and there I was, riding against Ferdinand (the Gold Cup winner), the horse that I had watched win the Kentucky Derby on TV (in 1986).”

Gryder’s friends appreciate his success, but they have been telling him that he’s got a one-track mind, that he seldom has time for socializing.

“I’m at the track early in the morning to work horses, then I ride in the afternoon,” Gryder said. “Then I watch the (TV) replays in the evening and it’s almost time to go to bed to get ready for the next day.

“But all this to me is my fun. It’s fun doing all you can do to try to grow in the business.”

Gryder, who is 5-5, three inches taller than Patton, hopes that he doesn’t grow in the literal sense. Gryder’s parents are small, but he has big hands, the kind that remind you of Steve Cauthen, the young American sensation of the 1970s who just recently has been having a weight problem in England.

What trainer Roger Stein likes about Gryder is that he follows orders.

“You give him instructions and he does exactly what you tell him to do,” Stein said. “It doesn’t always work that way. It’s like riding in a cab--when you get in, you want the driver to take you where you want to go.”

Trainer Laz Barrera says that Patton’s chief quality is patience, the ability to wait with a horse until he has to make his move.

Patton loses his weight allowance in November, about halfway through the Oak Tree season at Santa Anita. Gryder will ride as an apprentice until next Feb. 1. In Maryland, Kent Desormeaux’s bug vanishes on Aug. 16.

Some apprentices discover that when the bug goes, the mounts don’t come as easily. And when a just-turned journeyman goes into a slump, trainers may theorize that the loss of the weight edge has turned a winning rider into a loser. Even Black, for all of his success last year, wound up riding lesser stock at Santa Anita this year, moved to Longacres and then signed on to take a shot in France.

“I don’t think the five pounds means that much,” Patton said. “When I started, I was riding maybe one horse a day only a couple of times a week. How can it be any rougher than that?”

JOCKEY STANDINGS AT HOLLYWOOD PARK

THROUGH JULY 8

No Jockey Sts 1st 2nd 3rd 1 Laffit Pincay 282 65 45 36 2 Chris McCarron 219 55 35 26 3 Eddie Delahoussaye 312 53 50 63 4 Gary Stevens 364 50 64 48 5 Patrick Valenzuela 284 42 49 42 6 Dave Patton 349 39 43 35 7 Aaron Gryder 292 36 25 41 8 Alex Solis 214 22 24 17 9 Ray Sibille 233 21 17 36 10 Rafael Meza 205 20 23 17