COMMENTARY : Shoemaker Will Be All Right

It sounds funny to say your abiding memory of a jockey is how small he was, but Bill Shoemaker was remarkably small. Even in the jocks’ quarters, amidst all the long legs and short backs and the stumpy legs and broad backs, Shoemaker looked tiny. And every part of him was in proportion. He was the perfect miniature.

Sixty years ago this August, the 17-year-old wife of a feed store clerk delivered a 1-pound 13-ounce son in a bedroom in west Texas. Unable to pry a squeak from him, Doc McClain despaired. “That will never live,” Doc said. Not “he” will never live. “That” will never live.

But the boy’s grandmother was stubborn. “He’s cold,” she whispered. After cleaning him at the sink, she wrapped him in a doll’s blanket and snuggled him in a shoe box. Turning the heat on low, she placed the package on the oven door and drew up a kitchen chair. The warmth made her drowsy. When she awoke, it was to the sound of a field mouse crying.

With breast milk and an eyedropper, they managed to feed the toy child who never grew any larger than 4 feet 11 inches, 98 pounds, but became the greatest athlete, ounce for ounce, in history.

“On this job two questions are inevitably asked,” Red Smith wrote in his final column. ‘Of all those you have met, who was the best athlete?’ and ‘Which one did you like the best?’ Both questions are unanswerable, but on either count Bill Shoemaker, the jockey, would have to stand high.”

During a 41-year run that closed just 15 months ago, Shoemaker mounted 40,350 horses and won 8,833 races, both records by miles, and those rides earned $123,375,524. Three weeks ago, under the influence of alcohol, he flipped his car -- a Bronco, of all cars -- down a 50-foot embankment near Los Angeles. As another Derby Week rolls around, both the Shoe and the sport are paralyzed.

For a mortal man, he made passage on a lot of clouds. They had names like plucked strings: Swaps, Gallant Man, Round Table, Sword Dancer, Kelso, Northern Dancer, Tom Rolfe, Damascus, Arts and Letters (“Hearts of Lettuce” to the stable boys), Dr. Fager, Ack Ack, Forego, Spectacular Bid, John Henry and Ferdinand.

Shoemaker won the Kentucky Derby four times, the first three aboard Swaps (1955), Tomy Lee (‘59) and Lucky Debonair (‘65). Lucky Debonair was not a hard call for backsiders who beat the dawn to Churchill Downs earlier that week to find Shoe in a tuxedo and patent leather pumps (size 2D) galloping a colt for a friend. Shoe had come straight from the party, looking both lucky and debonair. He liked parties, and was not opposed to vodka.

Nearly 30 springs after misjudging the finish line on Gallant Man and losing by a nostril to Iron Liege, Shoemaker brought the 17-1 shot Ferdinand to Louisville in 1986. When Ferdinand drew the rail, he was dismissed entirely.

Shoemaker was 54, after all. His days of punching through treacherous holes were said to be long over. Anyway, he never had been a fire-eater in a bully sense. While most jockeys’ hands are incongruously rugged, his were incalculably delicate. He did it with meter, rhythm, patience. Shoe was a musician.

The pinch at the start of the stampede was so precarious that Shoemaker had to stand straight up in Ferdinand’s irons to keep from going over the fence. Outweighed by exactly half a ton, he yanked Ferdinand out of an anxiety attack and soothed him into last place.

Moving up surely, going around some and about others, Shoe made his crucial pass through just the needle’s eye he had been needled about all week. “I saw a little spot,” he said, “and decided to take a chance on getting through. One, two, three, boom! I made it.” The old man won the Derby again.

He was on his way to The Derby, a restaurant near Santa Anita, when the accident occurred.

Shoemaker and Don Pierce, another ex-jockey, had played golf that afternoon. According to Pierce, they paused at the 19th hole for “one or two beers,” then agreed to meet at The Derby for dinner.

The Derby once belonged to a famous rider, George “The Ice Man” Woolf, who slipped off a horse in Santa Anita’s first turn and was killed. Surrounded by Woolf’s mementos, the jockeys at dinner sometimes discuss the kindness of death. They prefer it to paralysis.

“Jockeys think of paralysis,” said Ron Turcotte, Secretariat’s old friend, sitting in his wheelchair in Canada. “It’s the first thing they think of.” In 1978, when Turcotte was catapulted from Flag of Leyte Gulf, he hit the ground and instinctively reached for his legs. “They felt like someone else’s legs,” he said.

“If you asked me the day before I got hurt, I’d have told you I’d rather be dead than paralyzed. But I’d have been wrong. When you lose your legs, you miss being independent. You miss so many things. Just being alone in the woods. But you gain a strength, an appreciation for life, you never had before.”

When Turcotte first heard of Shoemaker’s broken neck, and of the possibility that both the upper and lower extremities were affected, he reacted as reflexively as a rider in the dirt. “What would I do,” Turcotte gasped, “without my hands?”

But his next thought was: “Shoe’s a fighter, always was. I’ve never seen him down, ever. Such a gentleman rider too. He’d give up the race if he had to hurt somebody to win it. He has always known how to put the good things in his mind and leave the bad ones behind. Somehow, Shoe will be all right.”

The doctors say he is able to shrug his shoulders but unable to move his arms or legs or to breathe very long without the respirator. At Churchill Downs this week, where the cold breath of the horses hangs in the morning air, a lot of other things will be hanging in the air. Prayers and things.