UNEASY RIDER : At Race Track--and at Home--Joy Scott Fights to Pursue Her Career as a Jockey

Last October, jockey Joy Scott, a 7-year survivor on the fair circuit, got a rare mount at Santa Anita, the No. 1 track in the West. The horse was a 6-year-old gelding named Smooth Bid.

The smart money looked elsewhere. Smooth Bid was unpredictable, what jockeys call a nut case. And the rider was a fringe journeyman. Fringe journeymen win maybe once every few weeks at Santa Anita. Fringe journeymen who are also women hadn’t won in nearly a decade.

Smooth Bid went off at 75-1 in the 6-furlong race. What didn’t go according to form, however, was the finish.

Racing toward the wire were some of racing’s top jockeys, among them Gary Stevens, the leading rider at the track. Scott got there first. And when Smooth Bid won by a neck, it didn’t take a calculator to figure out that Scott had probably taken a giant leap forward in her career.

“After all of those years of paying dues, I thought I’d gotten my big break,” she said. “I thought, ‘Now I’m on my way.’ ”

But seven months later, Scott, not just a jockey but a wife and mother as well, has been sidetracked. She dropped out of racing at the end of December and has only vague plans about continuing her career.

“She’s confused,” said an aunt, Sarah Jane Burke. “She doesn’t know what to do.”

In a hardscrabble career, Scott has had to buck the prevailing ideas about women in horse racing: Women can’t ride as well as men, female jockeys aren’t as strong or as clever as men, and horses somehow know the difference.

After winning at Santa Anita, Scott assumed that the barriers would start to crumble. She never expected male chauvinism to rear up where it did. Right in her own home.

Joy Scott, 29, got her jockey’s license at Del Mar in the summer of 1981. It was the culmination of a lifelong dream but marked the beginning of a vagabond existence.

Scott seemed to be in constant motion. She traveled from Mexico to Northern California in a beat-up van, working the fair circuit and other racing backwaters, the bush leagues where rules were loose and competition unfriendly. It wasn’t easy riding.

“There are rougher horses and rougher riders at the state fairs,” she said. “Everybody is unpredictable.”

The horses, she says, blasted out of starting gates in all directions, endangering riders and other horses, but the animal she feared the most walked on two legs.

“I had a lot of trouble with male jockeys at those small tracks,” she said. “I won a lot of races and they didn’t like me. They didn’t like my style and they didn’t like a girl beating them. So they tried to keep me from winning. They’d shut me off. Bump me. Whip my horse in the face. Run me into the rail.”

But they got a whip in the face back from her. In the rough-and-tumble department, Scott has no trouble being one of the boys.

“I’ll slug anyone, and I’m not afraid to fight men,” she said. “With Irish and Indian blood, I’ve got a low boiling point. You can’t let yourself be pushed around in this business.”

Jockeys have a reputation for being short tempered--they’ve been known to fight each other from the winner’s circle to the locker room--and Scott, a rock-solid 4-foot-11, 110 pounds, is no exception.

Once, she said, a male jockey jumped her after a race and tried choking her. She choked back. Another time, a jockey punched her, she said, bloodying her eye, and she whacked him over the head with her helmet, knocking him to his knees.

Corey Black, who has ridden against Scott at Pomona and Los Alamitos as well as Santa Anita, has seen her temper. “I remember her punching a guy one time and I know she didn’t put up with anything,” he said. “You couldn’t do a thing to her during a race or she’d tell you about it.”

Because of her aggressive tactics and personal toughness, some men questioned her femininity, Scott said. “I’d hear them say, ‘That Joy Scott, she’s no woman.’ But being a woman doesn’t make me any less of a rider. And being a rider doesn’t make me any less of a woman.”

Which hasn’t been ignored by the opposite sex. Often, she says, men make passes.

“I deal with it every day, and I don’t know how to deal with it,” she said.

Her rule: “Don’t fool around with jockeys and trainers. I never, never went out with a trainer,” she said. “If I did, I’d never ride for him. I don’t want people saying, ‘I know how she got that horse.’ ”

Basing herself in her hometown of Sunland, Scott got a taste of the big time by exercising horses at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park during periods when she wasn’t racing at the fairs. Occasionally, she’d hustle for a mount. “Horses nobody else wanted,” she said. Since riding her first race at Santa Anita five years ago, she’s had 50 starts, finishing 5 times in the money.

Like a lot of young riders, male or female, she tried using her experience in the minors to establish credibility and break into the majors. But Santa Anita presents a unique obstacle for young riders: An exclusive, seemingly unpenetrable inner circle of great jockeys.

In every race on any given day, half the jockeys are members of racing’s Who’s Who--Gary Stevens, Laffit Pincay Jr., Bill Shoemaker, Chris McCarron, Eddie Delahoussaye, Sandy Hawley.

According to statistics supplied by the track, the odds on a woman riding a race at Santa Anita during the recent 91-day meeting were about 800-1, leading Scott to conclude: “They don’t give women a chance. They just don’t believe a woman can do the job.”

Feld agreed. “It’s really a detriment to be a woman around here,” he said.

At Santa Anita, women are good enough to work horses in the morning--trainer Charlie Whittingham calls his trio “Charlie’s Angels”--but few get to ride the same horses in the afternoon. The word is that women don’t have the strength to handle a 1,200-pound animal.

Again, Feld disagrees.

“Strength isn’t necessary in a race,” he said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t pull up a horse if the horse didn’t want him to. It’s a matter of finesse. The horse does the moving, the jockey does the steering.”

Anyway, said Fred Wilson, who trains Smooth Bid, Scott does have strength.

“If there’s any woman in the country who’s strong enough to ride a race horse, it’s Joy Scott,” he said.

In the early ‘70s, Wilson gave mounts to Martha Majors, who went on to become one of the nation’s leading female jockeys. Comparing Majors to Scott, he said, “Joy is 10 times better.”

Curiously, the prevailing wisdom at the track is that jockeys have little to say about the outcome of a race.

“Most riders win on the best horse,” said Black, who was the leading apprentice at Santa Anita two years ago. “Joy keeps her horse straight like everybody else. But it’s hard to judge her. She doesn’t get many quality mounts.”

Even youngsters such as Black have trouble getting more than three or four rides a day and have to settle for horses that aren’t contenders.

Usually when women get good horses at other tracks, they do well. Scott was the leading rider at the Fresno County Fair for two years. Vicki Aragon has been a leading rider in Northern California for the last few years. In the East, Julie Krone was the leading rider on the New Jersey circuit and rides winners at New York tracks.

But Santa Anita can be a humbling, frustrating experience even for big-name riders. Aragon tried to crack the lineup last year but couldn’t and returned to the Bay Area. In about a month here, she had only 25 mounts, most longshots, and didn’t ride a winner.

“I’ve never seen a talented enough woman rider here in my 18 years as an agent,” Vic Lipton said.

Asked trainer Roger Stein: “Why put a Vicki Aragon on horse when she can’t ride as well as the top 20 riders here? I haven’t seen a woman who could ride as well as Pincay or McCarron. A girl who could handle horses would not be discriminated against, but the few girls who do try here don’t have the ability. If Joy Scott had the ability, she’d be riding more.”

“Joy was born to ride,” said her aunt, Sarah Jane Burke, who lives in Burbank and who put Scott on a horse when she was a few months old.

“The first word out of her mouth was horse, “ Burke said. “She always loved animals, and they loved her. From the beginning, all her pets have been completely devoted, and I swear, she has psychic ability with those ponies of hers. Big horses, too. Even when she was a child, she could walk up to a wild stallion and he would seem to calm down.”

Said Scott: “I have a natural talent. I can communicate with horses, verbal and nonverbal. I have a certain amount of power over an animal.”

Burke thinks she knows why.

“Joy has golden brown stars in the middle of her eyes,” Burke said. “According to Indian legend, this is like a sixth sense.”

Raised in the horse country of the northeast San Fernando Valley, Scott was 5 when Burke gave her a pony.

Scott quickly learned that it takes work to keep a horse. So she began pulling neighbors’ weeds to earn money for feed, groomed her animals and developed a predawn wake-up ritual that continues to this day. Before she was a teen, neighbors were paying her to train their horses. Her specialty was a horse with problems such as bucking and bolting.

“It’s tougher to connect with a problem horse, but once you do, he’s yours,” said Scott, who considers herself a “master” at breaking supposedly unbreakable horses.

Scott’s childhood was “the best, and some of the worst,” she said.

She described herself as stubborn, headstrong and hyperactive, “but always strong physically, mentally and emotionally.”

She said that she never knew her father and was raised by her mother, who moved so often that Scott attended 17 schools before she was out of elementary school. When she was 11, she left her mother and moved in with her grandmother.

Despite a talent for art, she stopped going to Van Nuys Poly High School and attended Valley Alternative School in Northridge.

“I was around a negative element at that time, but I didn’t absorb it,” Scott said. “I’m able to keep the wrong people from getting too close.”

For Scott, joy riding never meant racing cars. Leader of a neighborhood pony club, Scott at 5 could ride standing on the back of the animal. When she was 15, she started competing in local match races and once rode a 50-mile endurance race bareback.

She’s so in tune with horses, she says, that today she can ride Tiffany, her 23-year-old blind pony, without either saddle or bridle, guiding the animal with voice commands and subtle shifts in weight, even over mountain trails.

By the time Scott was 16, she was exercising thoroughbreds at Southern California race tracks.

Her win at Santa Anita last October represented the lifetime of experiences and boosted the value of her name. Trainers began approaching her about riding their horses, she said.

In December, she guided Smooth Bid to another victory, reinforcing positive name recognition.

Then irony rode in. Her husband told her to start behaving like a housewife instead of a jockey, she said. He wanted her to stay put in San Filipe, Mexico, and take care of the baby.

Scott thought about it for a while. On the one hand, she loved this guy, a Baja California fish merchant named Jesus Sanchez. But on the other, she knew herself.

In late January, the situation boiled over. Scott and her husband fought and she left him, driving to Los Angeles with little Jesus Jr., then 6 months old. “Latins are used to women being subservient so there’s a lot of cultural conflict,” she said at the time. “But I’m not going to be a Mexican mama.”

Scott rented a small apartment in Burbank and began going to the track almost every day, working out horses for trainers in the morning and trying to get back into competitive shape. She planned to resume racing by March.

But her marriage, she ultimately concluded, was even more important than her “obsession with being a jockey,” so she put her career on hold once again and moved back in with Sanchez this month.

“It tears me apart to be in limbo, and I’m very unhappy,” she said recently. “But right now I have to be a wife and mother.”

Scott hopes to begin competing soon at Caliente in Tijuana, then move up to Del Mar in the fall. Her goal is still to become a regular at Santa Anita, but she has lost her momentum, the edge she built for herself by winning those races last fall.

“She had a chance and blew it,” Burke said.

But despite continuing resistance from her husband--”Our main problem is him not appreciating the sacrifices I’m making”--Scott is confident, almost cocky, that her career will eventually get back on the right track.

“I can pick it up and be successful any time I want,” she said.

Fred Wilson isn’t so sure. “She needs to get serious about the business,” he said.

Burke has another solution. “What that girl needs is a kick in the pants,” she said.