Wire Might Be Near for Career of Cordero, 49 : Horse racing: He mulls whether to resume riding after being seriously injured in January spill.

Angel Cordero’s father trained horses. He liked sayings, and one that he repeated to his son around the race-track barn in their native Puerto Rico was: “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.”

When Angel Tomas Cordero Jr. came to the United States in the early 1960s, hoping for a career as a jockey, he needed that fatherly advice to strengthen his resolve. Twice Cordero ran out of money in New York and had to return home to retrench.

Once, unable to get enough riding assignments, he took a bus out of Saratoga, the track he later dominated by winning 11 consecutive seasonal titles starting in 1976.

The last time he went back to Puerto Rico, Cordero sold his house and furniture to raise enough money to return to New York. And that time, he stayed.

Four years after his first U.S. victory, he scored his first stakes victory, at Delaware Park during the summer of 1966. Cordero has won 7,057 races and his mounts have earned $164.5 million. In 1988, he was elected to the Racing Hall of Fame at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., the town where he had dejectedly boarded that bus nearly 25 years earlier.

But Cordero hasn’t won a race--or even ridden in one--since Jan. 12, when he was seriously injured at Aqueduct in one of several accidents that have intermittently derailed his career.

Cordero’s mid-section is covered with elongated scars, one a reminder of the surgery that removed his spleen after this latest spill. His right collarbone, broken three times, juts to a point halfway across his shoulder. He cannot bring his left arm directly back and touch his shoulder.

Cordero, now 49 and twice a grandfather, sat in the family room of his suburban Long Island home Tuesday and recalled the spills that have caused him so much pain. He also thought about his father’s advice about winners and quitters.

The worst spill for Cordero before this year might have been the one at Hollywood Park in 1978, when he suffered a broken back. But the four-horse pile-up at Aqueduct was the worst of all.

Cordero was catapulted through the air and hit a post that supports the inside rail. He suffered a broken right elbow and four broken ribs. Besides the spleen, his small intestine and a kidney were damaged. He was hospitalized for more than a month, the first nine days in intensive care.

In 1975, a more resilient Cordero actually had cut off an arm cast himself, and then he and his agent at the time, Tony Matos, pulled off a backstretch ruse. They persuaded trainer LeRoy Jolley that Cordero could ride Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure in the Marlboro Cup, one of New York’s biggest races.

“Are you sure you’ll be fit enough?” Jolley asked several days before the race.

“Sure,” Cordero lied. “I got on three or four horses (for workouts) just this morning.”

Actually, Cordero’s arm was too sore for him to exercise even one horse. A day or two later, though, Matos went by Jolley’s barn.

“He’s ready,” the agent said. “He got on another four or five this morning.”

Wajima, later voted that year’s champion 3-year-old colt, won the Marlboro, edging Foolish Pleasure and Cordero.

Cordero wants to return to the saddle one more time, to ride two or three more years, but his body is telling him no mas and Marjorie Clayton, his second wife, has repeatedly told him what she did herself several years ago--quit riding and get a trainer’s license.

“Marjorie has said all she’s going to say,” Cordero said. “Now the decision is up to me.”

Cordero might decide in the next two weeks, after another trip to the doctor. He quit taking pain pills about three weeks ago.

“The longer I wait to come back, the better I’ll feel,” he said. “But that might be by the end of the year. At my age, time is valuable. It means much more than if I were younger. I’ve either got to get back to riding or start training. I’ve said all along that if the doctors don’t let me go back and ride by Saratoga (in August), I’ll retire.”

Long ago, Cordero envisioned a training career, following the path of his father, both of his grandfathers and some uncles, but he is a proud man, with a sense of theatrics, and doesn’t like the idea of retiring in a dark business suit, over cocktails at a Manhattan restaurant.

Most of the educated guesses are that Cordero has ridden his last race. Other than France’s Arc de Triomphe, in which he once finished third, there are no other races that have eluded him. The two floor-to-ceiling trophy cases in his home are chock full of bric-a-brac, bronze awards and silver pieces from most of the sport’s important races. Cordero has won two Eclipse Awards. He has won the Kentucky Derby three times--with Cannonade in 1974, Bold Forbes in 1976 and Spend A Buck in 1985--and has won four Breeders’ Cup races.

Cordero can count on support from horse owners when he turns to training. At Keeneland last week, there was a report that owner-breeder Thomas Mellon Evans, who won the Derby with Pleasant Colony in 1981, is planning to send some horses Cordero’s way.

“I’ll like training,” Cordero said.

Many former jockeys don’t. The hours are longer, the discipline radically different. There’s a whole new work ethic to be applied.

“Even if you’re in Japan for a race, you’re responsible for the horses you have at Belmont Park,” Cordero said. “Each level of racing gets more difficult, from a groom, to a hot-walker, to an exercise rider to a jockey to a trainer.

“And a successful trainer accomplishes more than a jockey does. When you train a horse, you’re everything--his father, his coach, his physician. I want to train, but I didn’t think it would come this quick. It will be a big disappointment to me if I don’t ride again. If I’m forced to quit, it won’t help me mentally.”

A jockey generally earns about 10% of his horses’ purses, which should make Cordero a wealthy man, but his divorce reportedly was expensive. He and Clayton have lived together for seven years, their marriage delayed until 1988 because his divorce languished in court for eight years.

Cordero’s second family consists of three children, from a boy 22 months old to a 6-year-old daughter. Cordero was at Saratoga Springs, being inducted into the Hall of Fame, when Clayton was in downstate New York hospital, delivering their younger daughter.

The hospital called the Hall of Fame Museum, trying to get Cordero to come to the phone.

“I don’t think he can,” said someone at the other end. “He’s making a speech.”

It’s difficult to tell who gets the most enjoyment, the parents or the children, out of the small zoo the Corderos have gathered behind their two-story home. It includes a horse, a dog, a few rabbits and a pig. Cordero has named the pig Jorge, after his friend, jockey Jorge Velasquez.

Cordero was asked how old the pig was.

“Two or 3, I guess,” he said.

“How long do they live?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “In Puerto Rico, not long. Too many people are hungry back there.”