Desormeaux Parlays Trip West Into Big Earnings

Kent Desormeaux’s basketball team, the Thoroughbreds, plays in a weeknight league at the Santa Anita YMCA in Monrovia. Kent also has a team in another basketball league at Arcadia High, not far from the Santa Anita race track, where he has been known to play a little H-O-R-S-E.

Your basic, 5-foot-3, 110-pound guard.

“Back when I was playing biddy basketball in Louisiana with 8 1/2-foot goals--I’m talking 9 or 10 years old now--every morning I used to pray to the Lord to make me six feet tall so I could be a real basketball player,” said Desormeaux, the prince of rides, thinking back to when his ambition in life was to become not a jockey but a jock.

“I had never sought a career in horse racing. I was raised on a farm and galloped them behind the barn from age 12 on, but it wasn’t what I pictured myself doing for a living. We had a bush track nearby--no rules, no regulations, races on Sunday--and this neighbor of mine, he had a number of jockey saddles and we’d go over there and race each other, just for laughs. I was, like, 13.

“Everything just happened so fast after that. When I was 14, I was working in the mornings at Evangeline Downs, then going to school all day, then riding at night. Not long after that, we picked up and moved to northern Louisiana, up by Shreveport, and I’m 16 years old and riding at Louisiana Downs. Everything just snowballed from there.”

Six years later, Kent Desormeaux is the hottest jockey--not just young jockey, but jockey--in the country, blazing in the saddle, permanently based in sunny (OK, with a chance of rain) California and ready to ride Best Pal, the favorite in Saturday’s $1-million Santa Anita Handicap.

He turned 22 last week, so Desormeaux’s career technically is in its infancy. Yet last fall at Hollywood Park he rode his 2,000th winner--the youngest jockey ever to reach that milepost--and it would not be totally outrageous to put up $2 that says Kent will overtake Bill Shoemaker down life’s backstretch someday the same way Pete Rose caught and passed Ty Cobb.

It would take him well into the next century, so Desormeaux will have to see. There is a 400-acre ranch near DeRidder, La., with his signature on the deed and his stallions in the hay that conceivably could call him home, but that’s too far away even to think about.

“I’d settle down and raise horses here in California when I’m older, but there’s one drawback,” Desormeaux says. “I can buy land back there for $650 an acre. Here, I’d have to spend about $650,000 an acre, if you know what I mean.”

Money might be no object eventually for someone who already, going by money won, ranks as not only Santa Anita’s but the nation’s leading rider. Desormeaux is having a phenomenal meeting, including victories in the rich Charles H. Strub and San Antonio stakes aboard Best Pal, the 1991 Kentucky Derby runner-up he inherited when Patrick Valenzuela drew a suspension.

Desormeaux himself is about to serve a five-day suspension for a riding incident last Sunday, but he will be able to ride Best Pal unless one of them is unfit by post time. Best Pal has a cracked hoof that is not expected to keep him out of the race but could hurt his odds and chances. Desormeaux scratched himself from Thursday’s card because of a sudden attack of stomach trouble that he feared might be food poisoning.

One thing about Kent, he isn’t eager to be known as a quitter. When a Racing Times article criticized him for occasionally neglecting to “ride out” a horse beaten for first and not trying to salvage place or show, the jockey, rather than taking umbrage at the claim, telephoned the writer to thank him for calling the matter to his attention.

He’s young and learning on the job, has been since moving to California a couple of Februarys ago after winning, while still in his teens, more races in one year--598--than anybody else, Shoe included.

Why California?

Because Desormeaux was freezing his saddle off in Maryland, that’s why.

Having moved from Louisiana, where he grew up in the warm climate near the Gulf of Mexico the same way jockeys such as Eddie Delahoussaye, Ray Sibille and Randy Romero did, Kent felt like a crawfish out of water. There were afternoons in Maryland when he needed a blanket more than his horse did. His face turned brighter colors than his silks.

“If any part of your face wasn’t covered, you’d be burned,” Desormeaux recalled. “I wore a ski mask when I rode. I had to grease myself before a race and sometimes it still didn’t help. Your face would be wind-burned, your hands would be cracking, your upper lip would freeze and break, you were miserable all the time. The ice would fly up from the track and cut you like a blade.

“So, when I had a choice of where to go next, New York or California, I figured I’d be a happier man here because New York gets cold, too. Maybe it’s just me, but I personally don’t think you should have to ride horses wearing a ski mask.”

Better to keep your game face on.