Living in Danger One Thing; Surviving Is Another

What would you say is the most one-sided competition in the world of sports? Tyson vs. Spinks? Notre Dame vs. Southern Methodist? The Ruth Yankees vs. the Cubs? Anybody vs. the Dallas Cowboys? The Christians vs. the lions? A guy with a burned clutch vs. Indy?

Multiply it by two.

And you have some idea of the odds a 100-pound jockey is bucking trying to handle a 1,200-pound horse.

Everyone talks about the dangers of auto racing. And they are real. The pull in the weights is the same. At least, horses don’t burn.

But cars don’t hate you. They don’t kick, buck, bite, jump shadows, shy at the starting gate. The last thing in the world a racehorse wants is somebody on his back telling him what to do. He’s high-strung, inbred, ill-tempered and a case of arrested development. If he were human, he’d be in prison.

You get points and money if you stay on a rodeo animal eight to 10 seconds. Of course, thoroughbred racehorses are not bucking horses or Brahmas; they don’t spin. But you have to stay on them for two or more minutes as they try to run right out from under you or into a fence, whichever is quicker. As a place to be, a starting gate ranks right along with the deck of the Titanic.

They don’t keep up-to-the-minute statistics on racetrack fatalities. It is not running neck-and-neck with holiday traffic, but there have been three so far this year--and about that many every year. The stretch at Santa Anita is no bridle path in Griffith Park.

Great riders have been killed on horseback: Georgie Woolf, whose riding style was so unhurried he was known around the backstretch as “the Iceman;” Jackie Westrope, who hit the rail at Hollywood Park, and Alvaro Pineda, who was mortally injured when a horse’s head reared into him in the gate.

Almost every jockey riding today has had a brush with death. Some of them get back to ride a horse again. Others have to settle for a wheelchair. Or a dialysis machine.

Chris McCarron makes anybody’s top-five list of premium jockeys today--or ever. Trainers clamor for his services. He won his Kentucky Derby and Preakness on Alysheba in 1987. He won a Belmont in 1986 on Danzig Connection. In 1974, he set the one-season win record of 546.

But Chris McCarron almost didn’t get to ride in the most important race of his life, the only Kentucky Derby he was to win. That was because, only a few months before, he had broken his leg in four places on the track and had been on so few mounts before Alysheba that speculation was rife at Churchill Downs that trainer Jack Van Berg would go to another jock.

It was during the time he was aground, learning to move with crutches, that McCarron began to reflect on the fragility of a riding career and to wonder what a less-successful rider would be able to do after a calamitous accident.

If the public doesn’t realize how dangerous race riding is, the insurance companies do. McCarron could reflect on the fact he could afford the $15,000 a year his premiums cost him. His mounts have made millions on the racetrack.

But what about the riders on claiming horses at Queen City Downs? How about the guys who get on 40-1 shots at Beulah Park? What do they do when their legs get broken in four places? When their necks go in a brace? Their lives go on hold?

You probably never heard of Timothy Stroud, Stanley Wolfe, John Alleman. You never will. They were race riders, but they will never get on a Derby mount. They were killed on the track this year--Stroud, 25, at Bandera Downs, Tex.; Wolfe, 38, at Queen City, and Alleman, 28, at a leaky-roof oval in Louisiana.

You have heard of Ron Turcotte. He rode the great Secretariat. He rode consecutive Kentucky Derby winners. Ron Turcotte was crippled on a racetrack.

There are hundreds like him. One day it’s roses in the winner’s circle, the next it’s flowers in a hospital vase. That’s why the Don MacBeth Memorial Jockey Fund came into being.

It all began when that eminent horseplayer, Tim Conway, the TV funnyman, was doing a show at Canterbury Downs racetrack near Minneapolis. He wanted to donate his fee to a fund for jockeys down on their luck. There wasn’t any.

There is now. Conway got together with Judy McCarron, Chris’ wife, who saw at first hand what an end to a riding career might bring.

The MacBeth Fund, named for the late rider who rode Chief’s Crown in the 1985 classics and who died of cancer last year, began modestly enough with Conway’s $1,000 but now tops out at more than $500,000, for which there’s plenty of use.

The fund has provided monies for an ex-rider who had a heart transplant but had no way to pay for the post-operative medication that had to be taken to prevent rejection of the organ by the body.

A rider, paralyzed at Rockingham Park in New Hampshire, needed regular treatments from a machine that contracted and relaxed his dormant muscles by electrical impulse. The only trouble was, he faced a 200-mile commute to the only place in the area that had the machine. So, the fund bought him one. For $18,000.

The fund purchased mobile homes for homeless veterans, ex-riders or ex-exercise boys or girls. It has paid for surgeries, therapies.

It is almost the first time the racing industry has moved to provide for its indigent or incapacitated horseback set. Jockeys are the only athletes in the sport of kings. “They shoot horses when they break down; maybe they figure they should shoot riders, too,” McCarron laughs.

The McCarrons instituted a “Jockeys Across America” program last summer, a promotion in which riders contributed their fees for a day to the MacBeth, bringing in more than $100,000. This Sunday, a very important baseball game is going to be played at Arcadia County Park. It won’t feature Jose Canseco, Will Clark or Kevin Mitchell, but it will star a cast of jockeys and movie stars.

There isn’t a jockey alive who doesn’t secretly think if he had grown five more inches he could have been another Ricky Henderson, and the jockeys will get their chances to prove it, playing celebrities like Tim Conway, Bob Uecker, Harvey Korman, Steve Edwards, John Bynum. The money raised goes to the MacBeth Fund.

It may not be Oakland and the Giants, but to a lot of ex-riders sitting in rented rooms wondering how to afford heating pads for the arthritic joints where the horse kicked them, it’ll be a World Series, all right.