Jockey’s Legacy: Warning--and Example

Mike Venezia would have turned 44 during Kentucky Derby week, but he would never have looked that old if he had lived twice as long.

The face that is so vividly missing from Liz’s Kitchen on the Belmont backstretch these mornings in New York was as shiny-bright last Oct. 13, when he fell and was fatally injured on the race track, as it was at Aqueduct on Dec. 7, 1964.

That was the day a wise-guy reporter saw that the nation’s leading apprentice jockey had arrived. He was “riding the card” --all nine races-- at The Big A.

“Mike,” the reporter asked, “do you think you’ll ever amount to anything?”

The big brown eyes widened. “I won’t know,” he said, “until I lose the bug.”

Mike Venezia amounted to something. He won six of the nine races that day, 177 for the year. He never won a classic, never led a meeting. He averaged a modest 100 winners in 25 campaigns.

But Mike amounted to something that can’t be measured in numbers. He was a friend and a leader, the kind you don’t know you have until he’s gone.

In Venezia’s bug-boy days there was a photograph tacked sloppily to the bulletin board in the jockeys’ room at Aqueduct. It showed 106 pounds of senior jockey Hedley Woodhouse, rolling in the dirt beside 1,000 pounds of thrashing, kicking, panicky thoroughbred.

It was a silly post-race accident and Woody crawled away unhurt. Nobody ever said anything about the picture, but nobody took it down. It stayed there, at jockey’s-eye level, for months.

If you ride, you will go down. But you don’t have to talk, or think, about it. Jake Mullins, an exercise rider who was a jockey briefly, stated the case in late one night last month in Louisville.

Yes, he had gone down. “Always with my eyes closed,” he said. “I didn’t want to see the ground when I was going down.”

You will go down. A jockey is never more than one jump away from paraplegia, or worse. Pat Lynch, who taught a number of bug-boy reporters the game, never aspired to Hemingway flights of prose, but when Black Hills crashed fatally at the quarter pole in the 1959 Belmont and left 44-year-old Eddie Arcaro face down in the mud, Lynch wrote this:

“Next time you’re inclined to boo a jockey, remember his is a tough trade. Most of them have wives and kids, and every time they unbutton from the gate there is an invisible starter leaving with them. His silks are all black.”

On May 29 at Belmont, Venezia’s wife and kids accepted the first Mike Venezia Memorial Award, for sportsmanship and citizenship, on and off the track. Gerry McKeon, the New York Racing Association president, cited Mike’s “devotion to family, his work for his parish and his concern for his fellow riders.”

All of that. Asked if she had anything to add, Helene Venezia shook her head. There was a long silence.

Something else was said in “The Men They Call Boys,” a story about jockeys in Sport magazine in 1968. It told of a 20-year-old apprentice who showed up at Saratoga, racing’s biggest league, in 1964, and somehow was allowed to ride.

“Horsemen use the expression ‘all over the track’ hyperbolically,” it said, “but this boy was, literally. . . . If the boy was frightened on the track, he was terrified back in the jocks’ room when two or three of his offended peers screamed imprecations at him.”

The 20-year-old sat alone, trembling, until another apprentice, 19, sat down beside him and spoke, quietly. “I can remember my first ride,” the visitor said, delving five long months into his past. “Jeez, I was scared. Everybody is.”

“Momentarily comforted by the empathy of the old pro,” the story went on, “the rookie then thought of a new terror. What, he asked, at the point of tears, would the judges do to him?”

“They’ll just talk to you,” the veteran assured him. “They’re OK.”

They were OK. They talked to the boy and suggested he pack his boots and saddle and take off for some place like Finger Lakes or Green Mountain, to learn to ride. He did not return.

Of course the comforter was Michael Joseph Venezia, who didn’t know whether he’d ever amount to anything.

“First annual” is always an optimistic concept, but the NYRA plans to present another Mike Venezia Memorial Award next May. Some jockey has a lot of living to do between now and then.