Hail to Jockey and Agent

As a boy in Hot Springs, Ark., when he would mosey a few blocks over to Scully Drive to shoot baskets in eighth-grade classmate Roger Clinton’s driveway, it certainly never occurred to Gene Short that his friend’s big brother Bill would grow up to become President of the United States. And yet. . . .

“Even then, Bill had that easy smile of a born politician,” Short is saying. “He’d be home from college or wherever, and he always had that way about him--that relaxed self-confidence, I guess you’d call it. Whereas Roger is like me. He’s a clown. He’s loud and he believes in having a good time. Roger did the partying, the drugs, the whole bit. Then he ended up paying for it in prison, whether he deserved to or not. But, as brothers, you couldn’t have found two people less alike.”

Predicting what someone young will amount to is as tricky as gambling on a horse. It was no easier in 1986, when Short found himself in a particularly bucolic region of Louisiana and got acquainted with a banty teen-ager who sure did look comfortable astride a fast horse. No more than he could know how those Clinton kids would turn out, could Short guess that within six years, Kent Desormeaux would be horse racing’s leading rider, or that he would tag along as the jockey’s agent and legal guardian.

Sipping an iced tea--the beverage “Steel Magnolias” playwright Robert Harling referred to as the house wine of the South--inside a dining room Thursday at the Santa Anita race track, Short is taking a break after a crazy couple of days.

“Congratulations,” a guy says, stopping by Short’s table.

“For what?”

“I hear you got a grandson.”

Short, 37, laughs his cheerful laugh and says in his folksy voice: “Yeah, that’s ‘bout how it feels.”

The previous day, in a sequence of events right out of a soap opera or slapstick comedy, Short had gone to a medical center in Inglewood to pick up Desormeaux, who was being released by doctors with a warning to go straight home. Having been kicked in the head by a horse after a spill last Friday at Hollywood Park, the jockey was suffering from multiple fractures of the skull and broken blood vessels.

It was Short who notified Desormeaux’s parents in Louisiana to pack a bag and stand by in case their son’s condition turned for the worse. One look at the jockey’s face was enough to make anyone shudder--the swollen brow, the raccoon-like eyes. Short swears that upon first gaze at Desormeaux’s face after the accident: “His eyeballs were bulging out beyond his nose. He looked like somebody wearing one of them scary Halloween masks.”

Desormeaux, 22, a natural at doing things at unnatural speeds, recovered in record time. Even his doctors were amazed. They agreed Wednesday to release him from Centinela, provided the patient go home, lie still and do nothing.

The patient nodded, got into Short’s car and drove directly to a second hospital, Arcadia Methodist, not far from Santa Anita, where staff members were startled at the sight of this five-foot, two-legged raccoon. Desormeaux got to the hospital just in time to hold his wife Sonia’s hand after the month-premature birth of Joshua Jason Desormeaux, their first child, who tipped the scales at a jockey-worthy 4 pounds 1 ounce.

Asked Desormeaux of Short:

“Wouldn’t it have been weird if I’d died?”

Yes, his agent answered, whereupon the two of them half-laughed and half-wept their way through a morbid conversation in which they discussed how traumatizing it would have been to have one life end while another was just beginning.

Ever since they formed an alliance, Desormeaux and Short have shared practically everything. It has kept a bond between them, even as other jockey agents attempted to woo Desormeaux away, behind Short’s back, once he began winning race after race. It has made them more than a couple of Southerners who horse around together.

As agent, Short is the one who arranges Desormeaux’s schedule and mounts. He also was the one who steered the then-teen-age jockey to an Eastern track so that he could step up in class, go where the quality of racing was so much better. Not that Desormeaux needed much convincing.

“Kent? If you’d told him he had to go to Saudi Arabia to go ride a string of horses there, a week later he’d have been wearing a turban,” Short says. “If you’d told him he had to go to Argentina to ride ostriches, he’d have been down there ridin’ ostriches.”

Instead, they went to Maryland, which led to California, which led to Short’s urging the jockey to let him know before they left, and not once they got out West, whether theirs was a relationship that would linger. So that he could work professionally at 16, Desormeaux had accepted Gene and Kathy Short as his legal guardians until his 21st birthday. Although they all were eager to try the other coast, the Shorts didn’t want to travel 3,000 miles and then get left at the gate.

Out here, one of the advantages for Short has been renewing his longstanding friendship with the First Brother-to-be, Roger Clinton, who now makes his home in Burbank. Schoolmates through high school, they parted when Short enrolled at the University of Arkansas. Nor was there much personal contact during the 15 months Roger spent in a federal prison after a 1984 arrest for cocaine distribution.

“Roger lived with us for a month before settling in Burbank,” Short says. “He’s a sharp guy and, except for the drug thing, I’ve always felt we had an awful lot in common. Even our birthdays are the same day.”

Drug-free for seven years now after kicking a seven-gram-a-day habit, Roger is barely a month away from attending the inaugural ball of his brother. He also enjoys playing the horses, although not nearly as much as his and Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, with whom Short used to split $2 wagers at Oaklawn Park. The race track was where Hot Springs’ highest- and middle-classiest society mingled for three months of every year, and rarely did a race go by without Virginia getting down a couple of bucks.

“She’s been out to Santa Anita, too,” Short says. “Back since we was boys, that lady has always been pleasant to myself and everybody she ever met. And, trust me, you won’t ever see her any happier than when she’s out playing the horses.”

And Bill?

“Far as I know, no,” Short says. “But I’d have sure liked to have had a bet down on him.”