Tall in the Saddle : Once Again, a Racing Legend Shows an Also-Ran the Way to the Winner’s Circle

As horse races go, the ninth at Santa Anita on a recent Wednesday was inconsequential. No big stakes, no champion horses--just 10 habitual underachievers vying for a skimpy $12,000 purse.

But with jockey Laffit Pincay in a race--on a big, sulky 7-year-old who hadn’t won since July--there is always the chance that a small bit of history will be made.

The Panama-born Pincay, who has been riding professionally for 29 years, is closing in on his 8,000th victory--a landmark that has been achieved only by the legendary Bill Shoemaker. And he is within hailing distance of “Shoe’s” record of 8,833 trips to the winner’s circle.

Even a minor win is another step in Pincay’s historic long chase, which horse racing fans sometimes compare to Hank Aaron’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record.

On this day, the 46-year-old jockey, a short, muscular man with a canoe prow of a nose, listens patiently to trainer Bill Spawr’s pre-race instructions. And he studies Stylish Majesty, the restless horse that’s about to propel him down the track at speeds approaching 40 m.p.h.

“The horse is a chicken,” Spawr says. “He gets behind other horses and puts his head in the air so dirt won’t be kicked in his face.”

As the bugle sounds, Pincay mounts and directs the horse into the tunnel leading to the palm-studded main track. Somebody says he will see Spawr in the winner’s circle.

“It’s possible,” the trainer says without conviction.

Stylish Majesty comes out of the gate slowly, settling into a loping, spiritless pace 10 lengths behind.

Possible? Yeah, and maybe it’ll rain Mexican beer next Saturday.

But Pincay is keeping the horse on the outside, away from the flying divots kicked up by the leaders, trying to keep the big horse within striking distance.

“This horse sometimes has a mind of his own,” the jockey explains later.

Heading into the second turn, Pincay begins coaxing the horse forward, edging past six or seven others. Stylish Majesty is, at last, catching fire.

In the stretch, Pincay, crouched tensely on the horse’s back, seems to measure the distance to the finish line, like a hawk hurtling toward a field mouse.

Finally, just 30 feet from the line, Stylish Majesty, nostrils wide, mane flying, thrusts past the leaders to win by a neck.

“The rider made him win,” an exuberant Spawr says, as last-chance railbirds send up a ripple of applause for horse and rider.

Horsemen and track regulars, accustomed to sizing up expensive horse flesh, have been giving Pincay himself the old once-over lately--measuring the soaring trajectory of an extraordinary career against the distant target.

The come-from-behind win this day was number 7,914 for Pincay (and through Thursday, he had three more victories). By most estimates, it should take him four or five years to reach Shoemaker’s record. Can Pincay keep going until he’s 50? The jockey doesn’t talk much about it.

“If it comes, it comes,” is his usual comment.

Nobody doubts that, barring some career-ending injury, Pincay will continue pursuing the record. But it won’t be easy. The life of a jockey is a peculiar mixture of asceticism and glamour; of long hours of boredom and brief moments of extreme danger. Jockeys spend a lot of time with Porsche-driving horse owners, and they meet a lot of dazzling women. But they cannot spend the late hours, or eat the rich foods, that go with the high life.

Asked what he had to eat that day, Pincay talks about proteins and carbohydrates rather than meat and potatoes.

“I take some protein pills when I get up in the morning,” he says. “For lunch? Some carbohydrates.”

For Pincay, the struggle to keep from gaining weight has been interminable. Consume more than about 600 calories a day, Pincay says, and the pounds start creeping up over his riding weight of 117 pounds.

In his younger days, Pincay would sweat the pounds off in the steam room, then hit the track, weak and dehydrated.

“Sometimes I’d start dreaming during the post parade that there was a lake full of beer out there, and I would run and jump in,” he says.

But now, after years of trial and error, Pincay has a secret diet that works. All he says about it is: “It’s making me feel really good.”

Along with the discipline of staying light and sharp, year after year, the jockey faces the constant possibility of spills. Pincay has had 11 of them, most ending with broken collarbones.

“The only good thing about a spill is it’s fast, very fast,” the jockey says with a smile.

When you find yourself suddenly lying in the dirt, with hoofs hammering past, there is not much you can do.

“When you see yourself going down, you just try to get relaxed and let yourself go,” Pincay says.

But more than spills, Pincay says, he fears slumps.

“It’s tough when you’re used to winning and all of a sudden you can’t win a race,” he says.

Right now, Pincay is on a hot streak. His 29 wins for the year, as of Thursday, at Santa Anita are second to Gary Stevens, who has 40. Bob Meldahl, Pincay’s agent, expects him to reach 8,000 winners late this year, at Hollywood Park.

This is a light day for Pincay, carded for just four races. He rises early at his Glendale home and arrives at the track at 8:30 a.m., in time to watch the morning workouts and to chat with Meldahl. For a jockey, the busy early-morning scene around “Clocker’s Corner,” at the southwest edge of the track, where trainers time their horses in brief spurts down the track, is part social and part business.

“Sometimes somebody will tell you about a horse that can really run,” Pincay says.

By 1 p.m., post time for the second race, Pincay has jogged around the track, snoozed in the jockeys’ room, eaten some meticulously weighed amounts of food and studied the Racing Form.

“You want to keep track of which horses are going to show speed,” he explains.

His mount this time is a so-so filly named Her Mink Coat. As a jockey, Pincay likes to lay back rather than burst to the front. But Spawr wants him take this horse to the front and hope for a relatively slow pace. The strategy works fine--until another filly edges Pincay’s horse in a photo finish.

Back in the jockeys’ room, Pincay studies a television monitor showing a streaky freeze-frame picture of two thoroughbreds shoulder-to-shoulder, their legs frozen mid-stride, muzzles stretching toward the finish line. Pincay’s horse dips as the other one bobs. The jockey shrugs. “She ran good,” he says. “No excuses.”

Next, he’s on a maiden (winless horse) named Absolute Best, who is about to win in a furious stretch run, when the leader veers in front of him. The track stewards later rule that Absolute Best’s path was blocked. Pincay has his first win of the day.

The “jocks’ room,” as track regulars call it, is behind the paddock saddling stalls. It is a long room full of dressing areas, tack and TV sets. Pincay is a respected presence there, deceptively mild-mannered in the adrenaline-charged atmosphere. Jockeys leave the room in their bright silks and come back 20 minutes later, dirt spattered, snapping their boots with their whips and shouting to one another about the just-completed race.

There’s an aristocracy of money-makers in the room. Aside from a $45-a-race fee, jockeys get paid only for a win, earning 10% of the purse. Of the 50 or so jockeys at Santa Anita this meet, there are a dozen who win the majority of races. Pincay, with winning purses of about $171 million in his career, is one of the big money-makers.

But there’s an easy camaraderie, laced with sarcasm, that cuts across such lines. Pincay tells some fellow jocks that Jeanine, his wife of one year, has just learned that she is pregnant. There are handshakes all around. “All right, man,” Pat Valenzuela says as he grabs Pincay’s hand. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Shoemaker himself, a tiny man who trains horses from an electric wheelchair, drops by, and young jockeys encircle him respectfully. Asked about his record, Shoemaker, paralyzed in an automobile accident two years ago, smiles benignly at Pincay, his former competitor.

“If he breaks the record, more power to him,” Shoe says.

Pincay rides a long shot in the seventh race, coming in next-to-last. After his tough gallop around the track in the ninth, Pincay heads for the showers.

“He’s a very temperamental horse,” the jockey says of Stylish Majesty. “He makes you work like a son-of-a-gun.”

Pincay is tired, but he’ll be back.