The Legacy : Sal Gonzalez Jr. Is a Prodigy Who Is Progeny of a Racing Family, Which Might Explain His Quick Success as a Jockey

The boy was 6. He sat on the old quarter horse, which might have been older than he was, in a rickety starting gate at a Mexican farm. His father, a former jockey, had strapped the boy into the large, conventional riding saddle so that he wouldn’t fall off, and now the father was also astride a horse, in the stall next to his son.

The improbable match race was scheduled for 200 yards, and the stakes were big: The loser would buy the winner a Coke.

The horses broke, the 6-year-old’s going to the front in the opening strides, and they never looked back.

“I never thought he was going to come back,” said Sal Gonzalez Sr. “I pulled my horse up, but his horse just kept going. It was a long time before they came back.”

That was Sal Gonzalez Jr.’s first competitive ride. Now, at 17, he’s winning races right and left at Hollywood Park for thousands of dollars, and trainers all over the backstretch can’t wait for his agent, John DeSantis, to arrive at the track in the morning.

Gonzalez, a 5-foot-3, 106-pound upstart, is the most talked-about apprentice rider in California since Pat Valenzuela, who won 83 races at Santa Anita in the winter of 1980. Gonzalez could become the first West Coast apprentice to win an Eclipse Award since Steve Valdez in 1973.

“He’s a good rider,” said Charlie Whittingham, California’s premier trainer. “He could be one of the top ones. He’s good on a horse, and off a horse, he’s quiet, he’s not a smart-aleck. And he doesn’t look like the kind of a kid who’s going to have a weight problem. He should stay light.”

About 30 years ago, Whittingham would occasionally employ another good apprentice rider from Mexico. Miguel Yanez won the 1964 Will Rogers Handicap at Hollywood Park aboard Whittingham’s Count Charles. A year earlier, Yanez had won 44 races, finishing third in the

Hollywood standings behind Bill Shoemaker and Milo Valenzuela. In the summer of 1963, Yanez, despite a 10-day suspension, led the Del Mar standings with 59 victories, becoming the first apprentice to lead that meet since Shoemaker in 1949. In 1968, Yanez won the Santa Anita Handicap with Mr. Right.

Miguel Yanez, who rode under his mother’s maiden name, is Sal Gonzalez Jr.’s uncle. Another uncle, Paco Gonzalez, is a prominent California trainer who won the Hollywood Turf Handicap this season with Bien Bien, and who finished third in all three Triple Crown races--the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes--with Mane Minister in 1991.

And Sal Gonzalez Sr.--the father of the apprentice and the guy who paid for the Cokes after the quarter horse match race in 1981--is Paco’s aide de camp, an assistant trainer and exercise rider who gallops some of the barn’s top horses, including Bien Bien.

Considering his bloodlines, Sal Gonzalez Jr. was even money or less to wind up in racing.

The only son among the three children of Sal and Eva Gonzalez, young Sal was born in Arcadia, not far from Santa Anita, and grew up in Guadalajara. Sal Sr., who rode at Caliente before he started doing backstretch jobs at California tracks, would stuff magazine and newspaper articles about famous jockeys into his letters home. Young Sal kept a scrapbook, and the jockey he fancied most was future Hall of Famer Angel Cordero.

“I didn’t push him to go to the track,” young Sal’s father said. “The main thing I wanted him to do was finish high school.”

The apprentice has done that, having recently received his diploma from Duarte High with the help of tutors.

Sal Gonzalez Jr. has thick, quarter-moon eyebrows, dark, distinctive features and a toothy smile. He does not appear intimidated by his role in a jockey colony that is the most competitive in the country.

His eyes danced as he recalled his debut at Santa Anita in February, that first ride--a fourth-place finish--and the first victory, six mounts later, on Feb. 18. The horse was Acredittohisrace, a 3-year-old gelding. Bettors knew little about the jockey and thought little of the horse. Acredittohisrace paid $300.20 for a $2 win ticket and combined with another longshot for a $2,823.80 exacta payoff, second highest in Santa Anita history.

“When the track gets muddy, you never know,” Gonzalez said. “Longshots can win on that kind of a day. I got lucky. I was able to ride him on the rail all the way.”

A couple of weeks earlier, in Gonzalez’s first race, John DeSantis was working as a commentator for Santa Anita’s in-house television station.

“I liked what I saw so much that I ran down to the track to introduce myself,” said DeSantis, who soon was back in the agent business with his first important jockey since Sandy Hawley.

Gonzalez has a riding style that some trainers have compared to that of another Hollywood Park regular, Alex Solis. Both sit low on a horse.

“I like to be low,” Gonzalez said. “I think you have a better chance to cut the air that way.”

Almost two months after his first victory, Paco Gonzalez believed his nephew had progressed quickly enough to rate a stakes assignment on April 11. With permission of owners John Toffan and Trudy McCaffery, Sal was given the mount on Visible Gold in the $154,400 Santa Anita Breeders’ Cup Handicap.

“I knew that Sal had talent,” Paco Gonzalez said. “The whole family is in the business, and my brother Miguel had helped him. He gave him lessons on how to break a horse out of the gate. Some people had even said that I should have given him a chance last year. But I wanted to wait until I really thought he was ready.”

A couple of years ago, Toffan had shown a special interest in young Gonzalez. The co-owner of Bien Bien and Mane Minister had seen the teen-ager around the barn, sitting on a bale of hay, pretending it was a horse and switching his whip hands. Toffan ordered Gonzalez a mechanical horse from Canada, so he could better simulate being on a horse’s back.

Visible Gold was the real thing. At 23-1 the longest price in the field, the 5-year-old mare got a winning wire-to-wire ride from Gonzalez. It was the first time an apprentice had won a stake at Santa Anita since Fernando Valenzuela, Patrick’s cousin, in 1989.

“That filly had been training real good coming up to the race,” the jockey said. “If I can ride live horses, I should do all right. Right now, I am riding horses that can run, and a lot of the trainers are giving me the chance. My uncle is my base, but many other trainers want me to ride for them, too.”

As an apprentice, Gonzalez is known as a bug boy, a term that comes from the asterisk next to his weight in the daily racing program. Horses ridden by apprentices are allowed to carry five pounds less than their assignment, and Gonzalez will have this advantage until early April of 1994.

Before Friday night’s program, he had won 41 races, fifth in the standings at Hollywood Park. The jockeys ahead of him--Kent Desormeaux, Eddie Delahoussaye, Corey Nakatani and Gary Stevens--are all among the national leaders in purses.

Gonzalez has been winning at a 15% clip for the meeting, a good percentage, but since mid-June has won 26% of his races. On June 24, he won four races, none of them on favorites and none of the horses trained by his uncle. On June 30, he registered another four-victory day, none of the winners trained by Paco Gonzalez and none saddled by any of the four trainers he won for six days earlier. Last Monday, Gonzalez had a three-victory day, and for the year, his horses have earned more than $850,000.

“I thought he would be good, but I didn’t think he would be this good,” Sal Gonzalez Sr. said.

Around Paco Gonzalez’s barn, the hired hands are flabbergasted over Sal Jr.’s flash-fire beginnings.

“It seems like just a few days ago that he was just galloping a few horses at Santa Anita,” one of them said. “Then--boom!--he’s set sail.”

Trainer Richard Mandella hasn’t used Gonzalez much, but he is watching.

“He’s got a good seat, good hands and he doesn’t look like a green rider,” Mandella said. “He’s had a lot of experience around him, and it shows. He’s sure of himself, but in a quiet, modest kind of way. He should be a hot commodity at Del Mar.”

Mandella was referring to the season that starts on July 28, at the track where Miguel Yanez won all those races 30 years ago.