Pincay Blazes a Silver Streak to Top : Jockey Will Celebrate 25th Anniversary of His First Victory Today

The 17-year-old jockey was having trouble with his helmet. It was borrowed and it was too big.

As he moved his horse to the lead at the head of the stretch, the helmet slipped down over his eyes. He tore it off, flinging it into the Panamanian night.

Then he drove to the wire, his dark hair fluttering in the breeze, on his first winner.

Today, 25 years and more than 7,000 winners later, Laffit Pincay Jr. remembers the exquisite feeling of that first victory.

“I’ll never forget the feeling,” Pincay said. “I was so excited I couldn’t get to sleep that night. All the big races I’ve won since, I never had that same feeling again.”

Today, Pincay will celebrate the 25th anniversary of that first winning ride at Hollywood Park. After a quarter-century of endless dieting, intense competition and more than his share of personal tragedy, he stands at the pinnacle of his sport, with 7,152 winners--only Bill Shoemaker has more--and $141 million earned by his 32,676 mounts.

But sometime today, Pincay might let his thoughts wander back to where it all began.

It was the evening of May 19, 1964, in Panama City. That week, Marco Aurelio Robles had been elected president in what Time magazine called a “stunning upset.” The defeated candidate, charismatic Arnulfo Arias, was crying foul. Tensions ran high. Business as usual.

The election was the talk of the capital, but politics were the furthest thing from the mind of ambitious young Laffit Pincay. He was thinking about a horse named Huelen.

“I had ridden him the week before, my first mount ever, when he was coming back from a long layoff,” Pincay said. “He finished last, but he closed real strong. When he came back the next week, I liked my chances a lot.”

Huelen was a decent horse, perhaps a high-priced claimer by today’s standards. But to Pincay he was a champion.

Never mind that he paid $58 to win that night. Forget that Pincay took home just $64 in prize money, kept $10 and gave the rest to his mother. Huelen freed Pincay from years of being little more than an indentured servant around the race track, a life of mucking stalls and walking horses after workouts. Suddenly, it was all worthwhile. He was a jockey. A winning jockey.

A few months later, Pincay was a star on the rise. He became Panama’s leading rider, earning as much as $1,000 a week. He bought a white Mustang.

And two years later, he was in the United States, under contract to owner Fred Hooper, and riding in Florida, Chicago and New York. In 1968, he chose California as home, to the everlasting gratitude of West Coast racing fans. In the words of one veteran race goer, “Pincay has never changed. He will never give you a sanitized ride.”

Sitting in the den of his new hilltop home in Glendale, Pincay is surrounded by 25 years worth of irrefutable evidence, which includes five Eclipse Awards--the first from 1971, the most recent dated 1985. No other jockey can match his day-in, day-out level of high performance over such a long period of time.

Jockeys measure the success of their peers in terms of winning rides against the best competition. More specifically, they covet the meeting titles, those mini-seasons within the year that produce the champions of Santa Anita Park, Del Mar, Belmont Park.

Pincay won his first major California title at Hollywood Park in 1968, when he was 21. Besides the reigning king, Shoemaker, his competition included Don Pierce, Jerry Lambert, Bill Mahorney and John Sellers, all regarded among the best in the business.

This year at the Santa Anita Park winter meeting, the 42-year-old Pincay won his 33rd California championship, defeating the likes of Chris McCarron, Gary Stevens, Eddie Delahoussaye and Patrick Valenzuela. Even Pincay was impressed.

“I was a little surprised to be leading rider,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, there’s no better feeling. And I don’t care how hard people say it is to win a Breeders’ Cup race or a Triple Crown race, winning the championship at a meet like Santa Anita is the hardest thing to do. You can never let up. Not for a day.”

Let up? Those closest to Pincay--both friends and competitors--maintain that Pincay is riding better than ever.

“I think so,” said trainer Eddie Gregson, for whom Pincay has ridden major stakes winners Super Diamond and Tsunami Slew. “He never seems to be satisfied with his own level of excellence.”

Said Tony Matos, Pincay’s agent for the last eight years: “Laffit called me one night about 9 o’clock and said, ‘Listen, I found two or three things I can do different, that can make me ride better. Watch me close tomorrow and tell me what you think,’ ” Matos said.

“Can you imagine that? So he won three races the next day. That’s the trait of a true champion--when you’re already the greatest, and you’re not satisfied until you find something that makes you do even better.”

Said McCarron: “That doesn’t really surprise me. I remember Shoemaker saying something similar not long after I first came out here. I was surprised at the time, because I was hearing it from a guy who was 45 who I thought had already learned it all and forgotten more than the rest of us would ever know. That left an indelible imprint. This is the type of game that you never stop learning.”

McCarron, newly inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame--Pincay was elected in 1975--has been a keen observer of Pincay since he first saw the Panamanian ride in the mid-1970s.

“When I first started riding against him, the first words that came to mind were, ‘No wonder!’ ” McCarron said. “No wonder this guy has won so many races and been leading rider for so many years. I could see right off the bat what kind of strength he had, what kind of know-how.

“He leaves you with an immediate impression, whereas with Shoemaker, it’s more, ‘How does this guy do it?’ The reasons for Laffit’s success are very obvious.

“And yes, he has gotten better over the years,” McCarron said. “There was a race just the other day, a maiden filly race, and he just left a lot of us in awe.

“He looked beaten the whole way, but he just kept driving and persevering. He overcame the feelings of being on the second-best horse. Sure enough, he got the job done. It’s the kind of thing he does time and time again. I still get a great feeling of satisfaction whenever I’m lucky enough to beat him.”

Said Dan Smith, Del Mar’s director of marketing, who has watched Pincay ride from the beginning of the jockey’s California career:

“He has a great capacity for knowing just how much horse he has under him, and he’ll ride accordingly. He has such great instincts, and reactions and reflexes, he’ll go inside or outside, depending on how much horse he thinks he has, and invariably he’s right.”

Pincay can explain precisely why he has been so successful.

“Someone might say a jockey is so good because he’s got good hands,” Pincay said. “Or they might say it’s because he takes his horses back and makes one run, or because he’s great out of the gate and always on the lead.

“Sure, you win races like that. But to me, the better shape you are in, the better you will do. Horses will run for you if you are fit. And it gets harder as you get older. Yes, I’m smarter now, but I’d rather feel like I did when I was in my 20s or 30s. There were horses back then that I could make win. I don’t know if I could make them win now.”

Pincay knows every crease and ripple in his anatomy. By necessity, he has become obsessed with the discipline of losing weight without losing strength. In keeping his stripped weight at 115 pounds, he has gone through practically every diet fad. Friends have caught him contemplating a peanut in a Zen-like trance, willing the tiny morsel into a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner.

For the last several years, Pincay has been successful with a precisely measured diet of fish, chicken, salad and vegetables. He keeps his muscles toned and his heart strong with 2 1/2 miles of race-walking every morning at a high school track. When he “cheats,” he takes a bite of pastry or steak, chews it for the taste and spits it out. He loves to watch other people eat.

“The times I get the most frustrated are when I’m doing everything right, and I still am having trouble losing weight,” Pincay said. “I think about it all the time.”

However, Pincay watchers insist that his obsession with weight has given him unique strength and focus.

“I’m not surprised he’s still riding so well,” said Don Pierce, who retired from riding in 1985. “What does surprise me is that he’s still riding at all, fighting his weight the way he does. I had to do the same thing, but just to keep my sanity, once in a while I had to let myself go. Laffit never slips.”

Robert Kerlan, team physician for the Lakers and the Rams as well as medical supervisor for Hollywood Park, puts Pincay in a class by himself.

“He has never broken under the stress of his program, which probably makes him the strongest jockey that I know,” Kerlan said.

“He has a superb body--tremendous musculature. He has so little subcutaneous fat that you can almost see through his skin to his muscles. It is unbelievable the muscle structure he has throughout his whole body--arms, legs, back, neck, everything. He actually looks like a little linebacker.”

And because of that strength, said Kerlan, Pincay appears to be more in control of a horse than any other rider.

“He’s the only one who seems like he can force the issue, actually make the horse do what he wants him to do,” Kerlan said. “He can hand ride and pump, often times not using his whip, pushing down on that horse’s neck to get the job done. Sometimes I think the horse is surprised.”

When Pincay started riding in California, jockeys and officials also got a rude awakening. He was a tornado.

“Laffit got a lot of suspensions in those first days,” said Del Mar’s Smith. “He was using some kind of big stick. He would hit these horses and they would stagger, then he’d switch and hit them the other way, and they’d stagger the other way. They’d stay hit for an eighth of a mile.”

Steward Pete Pedersen traces the younger Pincay’s style back to his Panama days.

“In the early days when he was suspended, he really took it personally,” Pedersen said. “He came out of a school of riding where they were very, very aggressive. That’s the way they survived. He was as aggressive as any, and he did pose concerns in his early years in California. The other riders had to take care of themselves--that’s what his philosophy amounted to.

“A transition came over Pincay’s riding several years ago. There was a time, when a rider bothered him on the first turn, Laffit would really wipe him out on the second turn. In recent years he’s been a model, as far as not causing calculated interference. He is just as aggressive, trying just as hard to win, but he doesn’t take that real advantage.”

McCarron has also noticed a change.

“He’s probably a lot more easygoing now than when I first came out here,” McCarron said. “Still, he’s a very intense competitor, but he seems to be able to cope with the hard losses better than he used to. Not that he’s turned into a good loser, but he’s learned how to handle the disappointments a lot better. And that’s another key to his ongoing success.”

The last five years have been full of achievements for Pincay, beginning with his first Kentucky Derby victory, in 1984 aboard Swale.

In 1985, he had the richest single payday in thoroughbred racing history when he pushed and cajoled the weary Spend a Buck to victory in the Jersey Derby. Pincay earned 10% of the $2.6 million in purses and bonuses that day, and still considers it his best ride.

In 1986, he won the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic at Santa Anita on Skywalker, upsetting horse-of-the-year candidates Turkoman and Precisionist.

On March 14, 1987, Pincay became the first jockey to ride seven winners in one day at Santa Anita. Then, last Nov. 9 at Hollywood Park, he joined Shoemaker as a winner of 7,000 races. No other riders have reached it.

Pincay, however, is rarely aware of his statistics. He was surprised to learn that the 25th anniversary of his first victory was coming up. He prefers to concentrate on his weight and on his riding.

However, the milestones of the last five years have coincided with some troubling times for Pincay.

Pincay’s wife, the former Linda Radkovich, committed suicide in January of 1985. He has spent the last four years soothing the wounds and raising his two children, Lisa, 19, and Laffit III, 13.

“I blamed myself for a long time after Linda died,” Pincay said. “I thought, ‘I should have seen it coming. I should have done something.’ But there was really nothing I could do. I know that now.”

Linda Pincay had both a personal and family history of suicide attempts, of which her husband was painfully aware. But after her death, Pincay’s guilt sometimes was debilitating. Despite his success on the track, Pincay would find himself brooding. Finally, the very real needs of his children pulled him back to the surface.

“It’s something we’ll never get over,” Pincay said. “But it was time to go on. My daughter was a very big help. Very strong. We talked about it a lot. We had to remember their mother as someone who loved us all very much. But now she was gone and there was nothing we could do about it.”

Actress Phyllis Davis has been Pincay’s companion for the last three years.

“Laffit has had to become both father and mother to his kids,” she said. “It’s not easy for him because he’s got such a soft heart. He might ground one of them for a week, then change his mind the next day. But he knows he has to be firm.”

Pincay sold the Los Feliz home that he Linda had lived in. He busied himself with the renovation of the stylish new house that clings to a ridge in the hills above Glendale, complete with enclosed pool, observation deck, and a trophy room that looks like a wing in the Hall of Fame.

“I had to get out of that other house,” Pincay said. “Too many bad memories. I want to keep only the good memories, and I can do that here.”

Pincay’s personal life still is unsettled, however. After nearly 20 years with his business manager, Vincent Andrews--during which time his mounts earned more than $125 million--Pincay discovered that he was not nearly as wealthy as he thought he should be. In March, he sued.

According to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court by attorney Neil Papiano, former counsel for Hollywood Park, Andrews’ management company committed a breach of fiduciary responsibility when it allegedly put Pincay’s money in limited partnerships that were designed more as tax shelters than investments.

Robert Andrews, Vincent Andrews’ brother and partner in the firm that represents several other leading jockeys, declined to comment on the specific allegations made in the complaint.

The Andrews’ attorney, Jim Hicks, said: “I think the Andrews brothers gave Laffit very good advice for 20 years. If there was a problem, I only wish he had come to us to work it out, rather than filing a lawsuit.”

Pincay also got a rude 41st birthday present in the form of a bill for more than $400,000 in back taxes based on disallowed shelters.

“I don’t know if I could retire right now, even if I wanted to,” Pincay said. “I’m still straightening out a lot of things. Maybe it’s better that I keep riding to take my mind off those problems. That’s one thing I never do--I don’t take anything like that to the track with me.”

California racing without Pincay would seem strange. Although Shoemaker, who is retiring at the end of the year, always has been the recognized king of the colony, Pincay is the undisputed crown prince and quiet enforcer.

“He sets the standard for the other riders,” said steward Pedersen. “And he’s a great force in the jocks’ room, among the two or three greatest I’ve ever seen. I don’t know of anyone who keeps better order without having to actually do anything. He just has to be there. Whatever he says, you know he means it. They don’t mess with the gorilla.”