HORSE RACING : Journeyman Jockey Finds Way to Kentucky

An investors group recently approached Shelley Riley, owner and trainer of Casual Lies, with an offer to buy a 49 percent interest in the Kentucky Derby hopeful.

The deal would have allowed Riley, and her husband, Jim, to continue training the colt and retain a controlling interest. There was just one condition--Casual Lies’ regular rider, Alan Patterson, had to replaced by a better known jockey, preferably with experience in Triple Crown races.

“I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t ask them how much they were offering. I didn’t want to know,” Shelley Riley said. “I was not going to take off a rider who has done everything right on this horse.”

The Rileys’ decision has meant a lot to Patterson, a Vietnam veteran who put his riding career back together upon his return from the war in 1969.

“What do you say to people like that? I mean, thank you is just not enough,” said Patterson, looking to make his first trip to Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. “I’m just going to do the best I can for them. I guarantee you that.”

Patterson, a native of Colorado City, Texas, has had a varied career in 23 years as a jockey, having ridden at 52 tracks in the United States and Canada.

The son of a rodeo rider, Patterson learned his trade in the mid-1960s from Kent Roberts, a quarter horse trainer who was based in Albuquerque, N.M.

“My dad took me by his barn at the fairgrounds and said, ‘Here, make him a jockey,’ ” Patterson recalled. “So I started galloping horses, anything I could do to be around horses, I did it.”

He began his riding apprenticeship in 1967 but it was cut short by the Vietnam War. After getting his draft notice, he joined the Marines for a two-year tour, seeing duty in Vietnam as a “tunnel rat.”

“I was the smallest guy in the company and somebody had to do the job,” Patterson said of the wartime task of checking underground tunnels and bunkers for booby traps and enemy troops. “I never met nobody down there though. They were all going out the other way.”

Patterson said he made two promises to himself while in Vietnam.

“The first was sort of a foxhole confession, ‘Good Lord, help me out of this mess and I’ll do right,’ because at times you didn’t know if you were ever going to get out of there,” he said. “The other was, I had time to think about my career and I was going to go to the smallest race track I could find and work to be leading rider there.”

When he got home in 1969, he went to Rillito, a track in Tucson, Ariz., and sure enough became leading rider there.

“I was making $300 a week and riding every race. That was my way of making up for lost ground,” Patterson said. “I just kept going from there until I worked my way up to New York and then California. It took me all those years.”

Over the years, Patterson developed a reputation as a competent and determined journeyman. But he was struggling to get mounts in the competitive riding colony at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields.

Casual Lies came along at just the right moment, giving Patterson a personal and professional boost.

“Personally, I believe it was a godsend,” said Patterson, who inherited the mount after the jockey for Casual Lies’ first two starts left the area to ride elsewhere and the agent for a second never responded to the Rileys’ request for his services.

Since last September, Patterson and Casual Lies have teamed up for four wins in six starts.

“The first time I was on him, I knew I was on a winner,” said Patterson, who registered the biggest win of his career when he rode Casual Lies to victory Jan. 25 in the $300,000 El Camino Real Derby at Bay Meadows.

Most recently, Patterson guided the 3-year-old colt to a win in the March 7 Sausalito Stakes, a $100,000 race, at Golden Gate Fields in Albany. The horse will next run in either the April 4 Santa Anita Derby or the April 11 California Derby as a final prep for the Kentucky Derby on May 2.