STILL RIDING : Jockey Ronnie Franklin Now Races at Pimlico

Ronnie Franklin recently rode a horse named Proud Conscience to victory at Pimlico in Baltimore.

The 28-year-old Franklin is proud of what he accomplished on the back of Spectacular Bid nine years ago, and these days, despite a long-time drug habit that has threatened three times to end his riding career, his conscience is clear.

Franklin says he is clean now and has been for almost two years. Still, he lives with the possibility that he will backslide, knowing that his next slip in racing will be his last. “This is my last comeback,” he said. “I know that I either have to quit for good or not ride horses anymore.”

Franklin was arrested while cutting cocaine in a Disneyland parking lot. He spent two months in a Kentucky detention home for trying to receive cocaine by mail. He was suspended by Maryland racing authorities for 14 months after testing positive for marijuana. The next time he fails a urinalysis ordered by the stewards, he’ll no longer be allowed to ride.

That finally seems to have registered with Franklin, who knows that dumping a cocaine habit isn’t as easy as swearing off chocolate. He must submit to urinalysis three times a week at Pimlico, and that doesn’t count the random checks by the stewards. He also has counseling one hour a week, attends a group therapy session another hour, and periodically drops in on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Franklin calls those aids his safety gadgets.

“This is a disease that’s hard to deal with, and I want to stay straight,” he said. “Riding horses and having winners are important, but what comes first before anything else is staying sober.”

The Ronnie Franklin story started as if it had been written by Horatio Alger. At 16, Franklin, a Baltimore native, showed up at Pimlico’s stable gate unannounced and said he was looking for work. He didn’t want to wind up in the American Can Co. plant, where his father had spent a lifetime. Young Franklin’s only previous job had been as a busboy in a fast-food restaurant.

Over the backstretch public address a few minutes later, horsemen heard that there was a teen-ager outside who wanted to become a hot walker, a bottom-rung race track job cooling off horses after workouts.

Franklin wound up working for Bud Delp, one of Maryland’s most successful trainers. Two years later, Franklin was not only riding horses, but he was also bringing home so many winners that he was voted the Eclipse Award as the nation’s best apprentice jockey.

That was 1978, the same year that Delp introduced Franklin to Spectacular Bid, and together they would win 10 straight stakes races, including the 1979 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the first two legs of the Triple Crown.

Franklin also was introduced to cocaine. Delp’s son, Gerald, was also hooked on the stuff. Gerald went to jail in Kentucky in 1982 when he and Franklin were caught waiting for a package of contraband from New Orleans.

“Cocaine controls you.” Franklin says now. “There’s no way just to do it in moderation. The first couple of times you try it, it really feels good. It takes the tension off, so you just keep doing it.”

Franklin says that he never rode Spectacular Bid while he was high. But he says he used cocaine the night he celebrated their win in the Preakness. The party was at Bud Delp’s house, there was a large crowd of people and it seemed like the natural thing to do.

More than any other horse, Spectacular Bid had given Franklin the wherewithal to buy cocaine whenever he wanted it, but that teaming was about to come to an end.

Spectacular Bid had won the Florida Derby despite a strange ride by Franklin, and already there were whispers that the Meyerhoff family, which owned the horse, was leaning on Delp to use a more established rider.

But the Bid and the kid kept winning, right on through the Derby and the Preakness, so the opening for a jockey switch was never there.

Spectacular Bid looked like a cinch to win the Belmont and sweep the Triple Crown. In the field were three horses he had beaten in the Preakness, plus four other starters. Spectacular Bid went off at 3-10, the shortest-priced favorite since Secretariat six years previous.

Spectacular Bid took the lead after 5 furlongs in the 12-furlong race, stayed on top until the stretch, then faded to third, finishing more than 3 lengths back as Coastal won. Soon afterward, Franklin was fired.

“It wasn’t because of drugs, it was because of the way they thought I was riding him,” Franklin said. “I noticed there was something funny in his stride in the Belmont. He wasn’t himself that day.”

There was laughter all around when Delp announced the next day that Spectacular Bid had run despite having stepped on a large safety pin, used to secure bandages, in his stall the day of the race.

“I believe that that’s what happened,” Franklin said. “They brought him back to Maryland the next day, and I was there when they were looking at him. He had a big pus pocket, and it squirted way up into the air.”

Franklin prefers not to discuss the bust at Disneyland, which occurred later. His only marriage ended in divorce recently. “That was a big mistake,” he said. “I figured I had seen the light, but that only made things worse.”

He had earned about $1.4 million when the Pimlico stewards caught him using marijuana in 1986. “This isn’t an excuse, but my father was real sick at the time and my head was messed up,” Franklin said.

Franklin is engaged to Mary Jane Rettailatia, a former race track regular now studying to be a nurse. He lives in a house that has an adjoining six-horse barn on the outskirts of Baltimore.

Richard Delp, Bud’s brother, is among the trainers who have given Franklin some business since his return. “If he stays straight, he’s going to do awfully good,” Richard Delp said. “He’s a good little rider.”

Franklin’s weight shot up to about 130 pounds during his drug battles, but he’s down to 110 now. When he returned to the track last year, it took him three months to get physically fit and get his timing back.

Away from the track, Franklin tries to keep busy. He goes crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay, he rebuilds automobile engines and he’s currently clearing 2 acres of woods behind his home.

On May 21, nine years after he had won the Preakness as a 19-year-old, Franklin watched the Triple Crown race on television from the jockeys’ room. Away from riding for several days until a week ago, Franklin hears the rumors every time he’s absent, but he says he was suffering from a cyst on his inner thigh.

On Preakness day, Franklin climbed on four horses, winning with none. “You always have to hope you’ll come up with another Spectacular Bid,” he said. “He was the best thing that ever happened to me, but also the worst. Horses like that are few and far between.”