He May Be Best Rider You’ve Never Heard of

If you were told an athlete was coming West to join forces with the greatest group of athletes ever collected in his sport, what would you conclude? He was joining the San Francisco 49ers? How about the Oakland Athletics?

Maybe you’d figure he was joining Magic Johnson and the Lakers. Darryl Strawberry and the Dodgers? USC footballers? UCLA basketballers? You might even wonder if we were getting tennis back from the Swedes and the Germans.

Actually, he wouldn’t be joining any of the above. He would be coming West to hook up with the Santa Anita jockey colony--probably the finest set of horsemen gathered in one place since Geronimo.

These guys are the real Murderers’ Row. The Four Horsemen times three. Whatever you want done on horseback, these guys can do it. If Custer had a troop like them, he might have lived. Cossacks couldn’t do the things these guys can with a charging horse. This is the greatest charge of a light brigade any race track has ever seen.

You can talk of your handy guy like Earl Sande, your Sonny Workmans, Eddie Arcaros, Ted Atkinsons and the other glory horsemen, but it’s unlikely one tack room ever held the likes of Lafitt Pincay, Chris McCarron, Jose Santos, Kent Desormeaux, Eddie Delahoussaye, Jorge Velasquez, Ray Sibille and Alex Solis. And, remember, Bill Shoemaker only recently left this list. Eleven Kentucky Derby victories are represented in that group. To win in that company is to be an elite of your profession. To even get a mount is achievement enough.

That might go a way toward explaining why Gary Stevens is as taken for granted as he is.

Gary Stevens sits--and fits--a horse as good as anyone. He won more money last year--$13.8 million--than any rider in the United States. He was in the money in half the races he rode and he won a fifth of them. This in a tack room that included nearly a dozen Derby winners, a rider who won 599 races only a year ago, and a rider who may be a statue in the paddock one day. Out-riding--or at least out-earning--this bunch is a little like outscoring the 49ers or outpunching Mike Tyson.

Yet, Gary Stevens might not even get the coveted Eclipse Award, racing’s Oscar, this year. The favorite is the Eastern rider, Craig Perret, who won 111 fewer races than Stevens last year but one of them was the Kentucky Derby.

You are not said to be a great rider till you have won the Derby--great jockeys such as Manny Ycaza and Laverne Fator never won one--but Gary Stevens, 27, has already won his. On only his fourth try.

He has done everything to merit his name going up in the same lights with the Shoemakers and Arcaros and Hartacks but, chances are, if you asked even the most-dedicated exacta player to name the top jockeys, he would frown and say “Well, there’s Cordero. And Pincay. And Chris McCarron. . . . “ If you said, “What about Gary Stevens?” he’d shrug and say, “Oh, yeah. I forgot about Stevens.”

Trainers don’t forget about him. The charm about Gary Stevens is, he fits the ride to the horse. Some riders slash and squirm and kick all over the horse’s back and coax performance by sheer terror. Others sit chilly and romance their mounts to the finish line with sweet talk and soft hands. Stevens can do either. Only three fillies have won the Kentucky Derby in its 116-year history. Stevens brought home one of them, Winning Colors, in 1987. In the Breeders’ Cup that year, over a track as greasy as a truck-stop skillet, he narrowly missed beating the older and undefeated swifter Amazon of the east, Personal Ensign.

Like Laverne Fator, Stevens comes out of Idaho and he comes from a long line of people who did everything on horseback from cutting cows to delivering the mail. His dad trained race horses and his brother Scott rode them. Gary was on one as soon as he could sit up.

But when he first came to Southern California (for an Oak Tree meeting in 1984), Stevens thought he was merely down here on a kind of sightseeing tour. Even though he set a record at Longacres in Seattle of 232 victories, he thought he might get only a rear view of the legends of the track he found in the starting gate.

He hardly got the best stock to ride. By the time the Shoemakers and Pincays and McCarrons got through sorting through the entries, Stevens found himself on a lot of 20-1 shots.

He found himself winning on a lot of them, too. Within a year, the kid from Les Bois Park in Idaho and and Portland Meadows in Oregon was the leading rider at Santa Anita. Within two years, he was winning Santa Anita--and Kentucky--Derbies.

“He rides every horse as if he were a 4-5 shot,” trainer Wayne Lukas has said. He so resents any suggestion he doesn’t, he once climbed into the stands after a heckler and, even though the fan was about 80 pounds heavier, held him for the security forces. “I don’t like somebody saying I’m doing less than my best--at anything,” Stevens explains.

He is tied (with McCarron) for the riding lead at Santa Anita, a title he has won three times in his six years on the track. He is almost the cleanup hitter in the toughest lineup to crack in the game. He may never get a poem written about him, but the day might come when a guy claiming to be a jockey will be asked two questions, “Did you ever win the Kentucky Derby?” and “Did you ever ride against Gary Stevens?”