Secrets of the Amazing Shoe : In His Own Words, Bill Shoemaker Sets the Record Straight About His Legendary Racing Career

At age 56, Bill Shoemaker is competing in his 40th year as a professional athlete. His 8,725 victories (as of Jan. 16, 1988) make him the winningest jockey of all time. Of the races he has won, 986 were stakes races, and 246 of those were worth $100,000 or more. The total purse money (through Dec. 27, 1987) won by the horses he has ridden is almost $118 million. How long can Shoemaker continue racing? In an interview early last year, he said: “It looks like I’m going to be at it another year. Another year at least.” Well, he raced all of 1987, and if all continues well he could break his own record as the oldest man to win a Kentucky Derby. In April, the book “Shoemaker” will be published. With Barney Nagler, Shoemaker tells his story from Aug. 19, 1931, the day he was born in Fabens, Tex., to the day he won his fourth Kentucky Derby in 1986 at age 54. Following are excerpts from his forthcoming book.

NO, IT DIDN’T BEGIN IN A SHOE BOX

WHEN I STARTED to attract attention in racing, newspaper writers put a lot of words in my mouth. They were wrong, but I didn’t think it was important to set them straight. A lot of things they wrote about me got to be taken as gospel. One thing that became a legend about me was that I was put into a shoe box and shoved into the stove in my grandmother’s house when I was born. I weighed 2 1/2 pounds.

They wrote this so often that people believed it. A few years ago I went down to Fabens, which is on the Rio Grande, 30 miles downriver from El Paso, and found out the truth.

My grandmother, Maude Harris, was 92 then, and she could remember just about everything that ever happened to our family. I was there with some people who were shooting a television show about me, and as we sat around in her old house they asked her to tell the story of how she put me in a shoe box. My mother said, “Momma, tell them the story about when you put him in the shoe box and the doctor said he wouldn’t live through the night.”

Grandma Harris said: “The doctor just laid you down on the bed and said there were no chance for you at all. So I got up and sat down in front of the stove and got some wraps, warmed them and put them around you. No, I didn’t stick you in no oven. I just got some pillows and put you on the stove door. That’s what I did.”

The heat coming out of the oven kept me warm, and I lived. My Aunt Effie--my mother’s older sister--says: “When I saw him when he was 2 months old, I said, ‘You mean that’s a baby? Oh, my God! He looks like a little rat.’ ”

The First Horse

MY FATHER AND mother were divorced when I was 3. I stayed with my mother in Fabens, and then my younger brother, Lonnie, and I went to live part time with my grandfather. He was called “Big Ed” Harris, and he was the foreman of a ranch in Winters, about 30 miles southwest of Abilene. That is where I rode my first horse.

My mother left me alone in the corral one day. I must have been 4 or 5, and when she wasn’t looking, I climbed up on a fence near this old horse. Then I grabbed the horse’s mane and kind of slipped over on its back. I kicked the horse a little bit, and he just kind of walked around the corral. My mother says everybody was scared when they came out of the house and saw me up on that old horse. It made me feel 10 feet tall.

That first ride, the writers said later, made me believe that I could be a jockey. That wasn’t true. Becoming a jockey is learned. It isn’t a born thing. Back then in Texas, I didn’t dream of being a jockey. I didn’t even know about race tracks.

Texas to El Monte, and Racing

IT WAS when I first went to school in Fabens that I realized I was smaller than other kids. I was first in line in my class. No one ever talked about it, but I knew that I was a runt. My Aunt Effie was very small, and I always said she was the only one in the family I could look straight in the eye. My father, B. B. Shoemaker, was 5 feet, 11 inches, and my mom was just under 5 feet, 4 inches. She still towers over me (I’m 4 feet, 11 inches), and she’s 73 years old.

My father usually worked picking cotton or on the cotton gin. But things were tough in Texas during the Depression, so when he heard about jobs opening up in California, he moved there with his second wife, Vivian, and their four sons. I was 10 and Lonnie was almost 9 when we went to stay with my father and Vivian in a town called El Monte.

I went to grade school in Baldwin Park, and by the time I entered El Monte Union High School, I was still a scrawny-looking runt. I realized that the girls didn’t want to be around a guy like me. I don’t remember if it bothered me, but I think it did. Maybe that’s why I hung around with the big football players. They had all the girls. Or maybe it was because I liked sports.

I weighed maybe 80 pounds, but I wanted to be a member of a team, any team. I liked sports so much, I even went out for the football team. They didn’t have shoes that would fit me, and the shoulder pads made me look funny. When the coach took a look at me, he just turned away. I guess he was too polite to laugh in my face. Next I tried basketball. I would go in against kids a head taller than me. I got a lot of fatherly talk from the coach, but when it came time to cut the squad, he told me I was finished.

People always ask me if I was pushed around by the other kids. I didn’t fight very much, but I was never a crybaby. If I had to take my lumps, I took them. And I could really lay it in there when I had to, with both fists. That’s why I went out for the boxing and wrestling teams. The lightest class in boxing and wrestling was 95 pounds. I made the weight easy, and I beat everybody in my division.

I really got interested in boxing. I put on the gloves with anybody who came along, and I even entered the Golden Gloves when they were held at Legion Stadium in El Monte. I knew I had the stuff to go all the way. Because I was so small, I had no real power in my punches, but I was real fast.

When I went into the ring in the final bout of the Golden Gloves tournament, I was ready for this big, skinny kid who stood between me and a title. He was a head taller, and I realized I couldn’t beat him with a jab because he had longer arms. He kept whacking me pretty good until I moved inside the jab and pounded his midsection. I got the decision after three rounds. I thought it was the best night of my life.

It’s been said that I considered going into professional boxing, but it never crossed my mind. When I did become a professional athlete, it was when I went into racing. And that, too, started at El Monte High. I met a girl named Joyce when I was a freshman. She was dating some little jock who was working at Santa Anita Park. Later, I learned his name was Wallace (Bud) Bailey. One day, in class, she said she thought that I ought to become a jockey. I didn’t know what a jockey was. She said, “You ride the horses at the track.” She talked about it some more and I got interested. I said that I thought I might like to try it. I never learned why Bailey ever listened to this girl, but soon after that he took me to the Suzy Q Ranch in La Puente. Thoroughbreds were trained there. I had never seen a place like that before. I was 14, maybe 15, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

I decided then and there that it was better to educate my hands than my head. I would go to school in El Monte in the mornings, and after school I’d rush over to the ranch and work. One day, I wrote out a transfer from El Monte High to La Puente High, and I forged my father’s name on it. I never went to school another day.

My father thought I was still going to high school, but I was into horses all the way. I would work at the ranch all day, then come home at night and pretend that I’d been at school. It was almost a year before my father and Vivian caught on. After they found out, I just told my father straight out that I was leaving home to live at the ranch. I was making $75 a month, which was a lot of money considering I got my room and board for nothing. I felt like a big man.

After two years at the ranch, Shoemaker left in 1948 to continue his riding education at Bay Meadows in San Mateo. Then he went to Del Mar and worked for trainer George Reeves. In 1949, Reeves introduced bug boy, or apprentice jockey, Shoemaker to agent Harry Silbert, who would remain Shoemaker’s agent until his death in 1987. In March, 1949, Shoemaker rode in his first race on one of Reeves’ horses at Golden Gate Fields near San Francisco. A month later, at the same track, he rode his first winner. (That was also the year he met and married his first wife, Virginia McLauglin.) Only a year later, Shoemaker tied Joe Culmone for the riding championship with a record 388 winners. In 1951, he won his first $100,000 stakes race at Santa Anita. By the end of that year, he was the leading rider in the country in purses won-- $1,329,890--and second in total races won. He was off and running. The Derby Shoe Blew

THE WRITERS MADE UP nicknames for me right from the start. First it was Silent Shoe, then plain Shoe. Somebody began calling me Wee Willie, and that stuck for a while. Next they came up with Will the Shoe. My friends called me Bill or Shoe. The win on Swaps in the 1955 Kentucky Derby put these nicknames on a lot of lips. I liked that. If I said I didn’t, I’d be lying. I was flying high. I set three world records on Swaps: a mile, a mile and a sixteenth, and a mile and five-eighths. I was walking around with a lot of money in my pocket. I bet $5,000 on a horse I was riding at Santa Anita and got beat by a nose. It cured me, you betcha. Eddie Arcaro always said he could be a rich man if they gave him the bookmaking concession in the jockeys’ room.

Three years after I tied Culmone for the riding title, I led every jockey in the country again. That was 1953, and I had 485 winners. Bill Hartack was second in the standings with 350. The winning horses I rode produced $1,784,187 for their owners. My end came to more than $200,000.

In 1954, I beat Hartack again for the riding title. I had 380 winners, and he had 323. Our careers were hooked up, and in 1957 I ran into him at the Kentucky Derby. That was the Derby where I mistook the finish line, and it probably cost me the race. Wherever I go, people never forget to remind me about the time I goofed on Gallant Man. I tell it straight: I made a horrible mistake.

I wanted to get the feel of the track on that Derby day, but Harry couldn’t book a single ride for me. It was too late. The finish line at Churchill Downs was a sixteenth of a mile farther toward the first turn than at other tracks. And I hadn’t had a ride over a track like that in a year. The year before, my Derby horse, Terrang, had finished 12th. When your horse finishes 12th, you hardly notice where the wire is.

In the early stretch, I got close to Iron Liege, the horse Hartack was riding. Then at the end, I stood up in the irons. Hartack was digging into his horse and Iron Liege was charging, and by the time I got my colt back in stride, I couldn’t catch them. I knew I had made a big, big boo-boo. It happened so fast, a lot of people didn’t realize it, but the other jockeys in the race knew it happened. It wasn’t the first time a jock misjudged the finish line, but this was the Kentucky Derby, and there I was looking like a fool in front of a national television audience and maybe a hundred thousand fans in the stands. I didn’t make any excuses. Gallant Man might have hung a little, but I didn’t cop a plea the day I made the mistake and I’m not doing it now.

The First Bad Spill

UP TO THIS POINT I had been lucky in my career. A few falls, some sprains and scraped shins, but nothing much more than that. It was 1968. I was 37 and had been riding for 19 years, and people were saying I was the most successful rider in the 200-year history of thoroughbred racing. I had racked up a lot of victories. I leave counting them to other people, but if I had looked in the records, I would have seen that by January, 1968, I had 5,785 wins. I had won the Kentucky Derby three times. Horses I’d ridden had won more than $40 million in purses. Each year I made money in the six figures, and I was living in luxury with my second wife, Babbs, and my adopted son, Mitchell, in Beverly Hills. All the rich dudes live there.

Early in 1968 I won two big stakes races on Damascus. I was thinking he was a cinch for the Strub Stakes two weeks later. But then, on Jan. 26, it happened. I’m riding a horse called Bel Bush at Santa Anita. My pal Don Pierce is on the right, just outside me, on a horse called Top Floor. There’s an apprentice, Juan Gonzales, on Kodiak Kid. He thinks he sees an opening, but it’s just not there. He’s inexperienced, and he heads for the hole he thinks he sees. I yell, “Hey, don’t do that! Don’t go in there!” Pierce hears me and turns to the outside. Gonzalez goes down.

By the time Pierce comes back in my direction, Kodiak Kid has clipped the heels of the horse in front of him and is down. That’s when Pierce really sees what’s happening. He wheels out, but I’m in a trap. I’m caught in the middle. I go right off my horse and he goes down, and while he’s trying to get up, he hits me and breaks my right thigh bone. I’m out for a few seconds. All the other times I’ve been down, I’ve gotten up on my own. But not this time.

The ambulance comes to get me, and they take me to Arcadia Methodist Hospital. Pretty soon they move me to Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood, near Hollywood Park. I’m a lucky man, but not as lucky as Gonzalez, the bug boy. He got away in that race without a scratch. But his luck didn’t hold. Seven years later he was killed in a spill at a track in Pleasanton, California.

Dr. Robert Kerlan is my friend. He’s one of the best orthopedic doctors in the country. He brings Dr. Frank Jobe in on my case. Jobe handles a lot of the pro teams around Los Angeles. They look at the X-rays and decide that the only way to repair my thigh is to insert a metal pin into the marrow of the femur. That’s what they call my broken bone in medical lingo. There’s one problem, though. Kerlan has to search high and low in the hospital supply room for a metal pin that is the right size for my thigh. He finally finds one in the children’s department.

It’s three weeks before they wheel me out of the hospital. I make a promise to myself: I’m not going to be a sour ball. When people are around, I keep smiling. I have a lot of time to think, and I realize that I might never ride another horse. My right leg is knitting, but the muscles have deteriorated and the leg has withered. The thigh is about as big around as a Coke bottle. I think to myself, I’ll never ride again. Look at this leg. But I never lose hope, not deep inside. I don’t tell Babbs or Harry what I’m thinking.

Kerlan keeps encouraging me, telling me I’ll get back to normal. I have my doubts, but nature has a way of making people forget. I hobble around on crutches. I lift weights and walk. I ride a stationary bike. Later, I start running. It is 13 months before I return to the scene of the crime. On Feb. 11, 1969, I am back riding at Santa Anita.

Harry gets three rides for me on that day. The park has a good crowd, and the fans give me a big hand when I come into the saddling area to mount Princess Endeavor. I feel great. Then I hear a fan yell, “She’s going to bump you off!” I think, “They never change.”

Now I’m in the gate, and I’m thinking only of the race. I’m back in action. Princess Endeavor gets off alertly. I feel comfortable on her. We settle down behind the leaders, save ground in the stretch, and she responds when I call for her to go into her drive. We wear down the leaders and win by 2 lengths. The Shoe is fit again, I think.

In the eighth race, I’m on Racing Room. We win going away. That’s two in a row. I say to myself, I’m really back.

It Happens Again, And It’s Worse

THE 1969 KENTUCKY Derby was scheduled for May 3. On the Wednesday before the Derby, Harry got me a ride on a filly named Poona’s Day at Hollywood Park.

The filly’s trainer is Lou Glauberg, a friend of Harry’s. It’s the fourth race on the card, six furlongs for 3-year-old filly maidens. When a rider climbs into the saddle, it is the trainer who gives him a leg up. Suddenly Poona’s Day starts flipping over backward. Instead of letting me go so I can jump off, Glauberg tries to help me by hanging on to me. I’m trapped under the horse. I wind up in the shrubs against the concrete wall circling the saddling area. I’m knocked out. I’m hurt. I’m hurt real bad.

They move me to the dispensary at the track. Harry is with me and he puts in a call to Babbs. She takes it hard. Harry tells her that it’s not the leg with the pin in it but something worse. They take me to Centinela Hospital, and Harry rides in the ambulance with me. At the hospital, they strip away my pants, which are soaked with blood. They call Kerlan, and he tells them to move me to Daniel Freeman Hospital. I’m back where I was 15 months ago. X-rays show that my pelvis is broken and that my left sacroiliac joint is dislocated. My pelvis is splintered in five places, my bladder is ruptured and my left leg is paralyzed. The pain is the worst I’ve ever felt.

Kerlan operates on me for 2 1/2 hours. The damage is pretty bad. I feel nothing but pain. When the people around the barns hear about my accident, they shake their heads and say, “Hey, poor Shoe, he’s finished.” In the jocks’ room, my pals pray for a miracle because they are saying that only a miracle will let me ever ride again. If I ever get back, it’ll take six months, maybe a year. But they don’t know Shoe and they don’t know anything about medicine. Kerlan comes to my room in the hospital and talks to me a lot. He talks to me about guts. He says when they handed out courage, I got a lot of it.

At first I think I’m through, that the grooms and the hotwalkers are right when they say I’ll never make it back. Kerlan tells me I’ll have to do a lot of therapy before I ride again. He says running is important. He knows what I have to do to get fit again. I listen carefully. I never become mean or sour.

As soon as I’m out of the hospital, I start thinking about getting back to racing. In the morning, I go out to Hollywood Park and jog around the empty track. It gives me time to think. I think that two bad accidents in 15 months might make some guys take the hint. Not me. I’m going to ride again and I know it. The odds are against me, but I’m not walking away. The next time the ambulance might be too late. What am I going to prove by getting on a horse again? I’ve had maybe 25,000 mounts by then. When is it enough? When does a jock’s time come?

After a while, my muscles seem stronger. Nature is working for me, and I feel better. I begin exercising horses, and I start getting my timing back. Four months after the accident, I finally get back into action, but I don’t win on three mounts like the first day back after I broke my leg. But I’m not worried. I’m 38 years old now, and time is still on my side.

Retire? Words From the Wise

WHEN I THINK OF all the trainers I’ve worked for, I think of some great men. I can’t mention them all. The list would fill a book. Sure as hell, I’m going to leave a lot of guys out, and they’re going to say, “Hey, Shoe, you forgot me.”

But I’ve got to tell you about Charlie Whittingham. I like Charlie outside racing too. He’s a big old bear, but he knows how to laugh at himself. And he knows all about life. When I talk about retiring, he says, “Hey, Shoe, you know what a jockey is when he’s retired? He’s just another little man.”

‘Rich Is Better’

WHEN I MARRIED my third wife, Cindy, in March, 1978, we had a long talk about money. I had earned more than $10 million, maybe closer to $12 million, but if I was pressed, I would say my net worth was less than $500,000. I had no pension plan and no retirement plan, and I was 47. I had some oil and natural gas stocks, and a little real estate that wasn’t producing very much. We moved into a big house in Coldwater Canyon, and it proved too much to carry. Where had all my money gone?

Cindy and I agreed we had to do something. I was still earning a lot of money, and we wanted to make sure that what I got from then on wasn’t squandered. We hired a business manager--Vincent Andrews. He read us the riot act. He said from now on he was running our money drawer. He set up William Shoemaker Inc., and the corporation started paying me a salary. He set up two plans for me, a retirement fund and a pension plan. When I think of my corporation, I laugh. I think it’s the littlest corporation in the world.

The house we live in, in San Marino, cost us about $400,000. We have nine rooms and a swimming pool. It’s really not a big house. I’m not mad about clothes either. I dress up when we go out, but I’d rather wear leisure clothes. I have to have my suits custom-made. A tailor over in Arcadia, Rocco Crupi, makes them; he charges $600 a suit. I wear size 1 1/2 shoes. I have them made at Gucci. They’re pretty expensive--$150, $200, $250. I have my shirts made over in Beverly Hills for $85 a shot.

I don’t try to live beyond what I can afford. Vincent Andrews keeps me down. We have two cars in the garage, a Mercedes and a BMW. One we own, the other is leased by our corporation. Don’t get me wrong. I know how it is to live poor and how it is to live rich. Rich is better. And I’m not being a smart-ass about it. When I see poor people

around, I don’t like it. I don’t understand why it has to be like that.

A 54-Year-Old in the ’86 Derby

THE 3-year-olds were going to the gate, 16 of them running for the roses. I was up on Ferdinand, and I was thinking, “Hey, I’m 54 years old, and here I am with a bunch of kids, some of them young enough to be my sons, and I’m going to ride against them in the biggest race of them all.”

The Kentucky Derby wasn’t a new thing for me. No sir. This was my 24th Derby, more rides than anyone in history. I had been on three winners before and should have had another on Gallant Man. Now it was the 112th Derby, and if you’ve never been to the Derby, if you’ve never heard 120,000 people singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” you don’t know how it feels to be on a colt, going toward the gate, walking slowly, maybe cantering, and if you’re sitting chilly, well, then, you don’t have no blood in you at all.

I think Ferdinand knew this was his big day. Maybe he knew, from the talk around the barn back in California, that Charlie Whittingham, his trainer, hadn’t had a Derby horse in 26 years. “Only time I’m going back,” Charlie said, “is if I have a real Derby horse.” Now Charlie was 73 and I was on his Derby horse. It had been 21 years since my last victory in this mile-and-a-quarter race. At my age I was getting a shot that I never thought I’d get again.

Sixteen jockeys are fighting for position, and I think, “Hell, we’re all crazy, we’re all jockeys.” And now the others are streaming away toward the first turn. I’m running last, but I’m not going to chase them. If I do, I’ll use up my horse early. Some call it patience, and some call it sitting chilly.

I’m going to take my time. Let them run out, and then I’ll just pick them up. You learn that as you go along. All those years of experience always come out at the right time. Rush Ferdinand early and he dies in the stretch.

Going into the first turn, I’ve got a good hold on Ferdinand. We start picking up horses, turning into the backstretch. I’m moving between horses, knowing I have to get back to the rail. There are three horses in front of me, and I’m on the outside shoulders of two others on the rail. Then I see my chance.

It’s like a guy driving a car trying to cut over from the middle lane to the outside lane. He’s got to be going faster than cars he’s trying to pass. I duck in, and I hear the noise from the crowd. I’m on the rail, and I’m hitting Ferdinand with the whip in my left hand.

I’ve got Ferdinand right where I want him now, inside horses, and I’m saying to myself, “Look at this, I’m going . . . I’m going to win.” I’m sure of it by then, and I go under the wire with 2 lengths on the English horse, Bold Arrangement.

They take me to the winner’s circle then, and Cindy is there and so is Charlie. Charlie is so nervous, he can’t speak. My wife is crying and she bends down and throws her arms around me and kisses me. (She has to bend to kiss me because she’s 5 feet, 10 inches tall.) I start thinking how great all this feels. I think about my daughter, Amanda, who is 6 years old. I know she has seen me win on TV, but I wish then that we had brought her with us from California for this race.

When I get home the next day, there’s a big sign on the door of our garage. I LOVE YOU, DADDY, it says. I kiss Amanda and talk to her for a while, then I have to head for more work at Hollywood Park. I’m running lucky these days. I ride Charlie’s French horse, Palace Music, in the John Henry Handicap and win again. How sweet it is. How sweet it is.