THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : Antley Hopes Move Revives Riding Career

There are houses with curses, and then there is the three-bedroom house that jockey Chris Antley has been renting in Duarte since last fall. No poltergeists there. Among the previous occupants are Corey Nakatani and Kent Desormeaux.

“The only thing that’s missing is if (Chris) McCarron lived there before those other guys,” said Antley, who is not particularly superstitious.

Since arriving on the Southern California circuit in recent years, Nakatani and Desormeaux have thrived. Last year, Desormeaux finished second nationally with $13.1 million in purses and Nakatani was ninth with $8.1 million.

Antley has been where they’ve been on the money list, and now he has moved from New York to California to revive a career that tailed off badly last year. From a high of $8 million in purses in 1991, the year he won the Kentucky Derby with Strike The Gold, Antley struggled to reach the $5-million mark in 1993.

“I think it was the slowest year I’ve ever had,” said Antley, 28, who has ridden more than 2,800 winners since he rode his first at Pimlico in 1983.

California, with its hefty purse schedule and chamber-of-commerce weather, might look like an oasis, but the palm trees have been mirages for a number of top Eastern jockeys over the years, including Steve Cauthen and Jose Santos. The current riding colony includes three Hall of Famers--McCarron, Laffit Pincay and Eddie Delahoussaye--and several younger jockeys who will have credentials good enough for enshrinement someday. This is how tough the circuit is: Going into this week, two established riders, Pat Valenzuela and Aaron Gryder, had won only twice out of 73 mounts at the Santa Anita meeting.

“When I decided to come out here, I knew there would be two big questions,” Antley said. “Number one, will I do any better than those other guys (from New York) who didn’t, and number two, am I in California to stay?”

It’s easier for Antley to address the second question first. He owns two homes in New York, one near Belmont Park and the other not far from Saratoga, and he’s put the one near Belmont up for sale.

Whether Antley sidesteps the East-to-West bugaboo will take more time to assess, but he has already sneaked up in the local riding standings, which are tallied according to total victories rather than money. Arriving in late October, Antley didn’t win any races during the closing days of the Oak Tree meet, finished ninth at Hollywood Park with 14 victories and now at Santa Anita he’s on a victory-a-day pace for the first 13 days, good for second place in the standings.

For Antley and his agent, Bill Barisoff, more encouraging is that the winners have come with horses that were generally overlooked by the betting public. Before Wednesday’s races, the average victory payoff on an Antley winner was more than $25; a flat $2 win bet on all of his mounts at the meet would have brought a profit of $176.

“I know I’ll have to ride a lot of longshots to get established,” Antley said. “Right after I got here, Bear (Barisoff) would say to me in the mornings, ‘Let’s go on another stable tour.’ Even though I’ve been in racing a long time, I was surprised at all the trainers that I didn’t know. Rodney Rash put me on three horses the other day, but I’ve been getting business from a lot of trainers, which is a good sign.”

Despite his success, Antley’s career has been an amalgam of surges and hard times. Still a teen-ager in 1985, he won 469 races, leading the nation. He set a record in 1987 by riding nine winners, four in the afternoon at Aqueduct and five at night at the Meadowlands. In 1989, en route to leading all New York jockeys with 234 victories, he won at least one race every day that he rode at Aqueduct for 64 consecutive days, which is believed to be a record. And 1991 brought the acme, with Strike The Gold in the Derby.

Drug problems stopped him three times. Antley said that those difficulties ended in 1990. Late that year, Antley suffered a broken collarbone when Mr. Nickerson apparently suffered a heart attack and went down in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Belmont, and even the Strike The Gold script had a sour ending. Antley and the trainer, Nick Zito, were bystanders as three owners fought for control of the colt. After finishing sixth in the Preakness, Strike The Gold lost by a head to Hansel in the Belmont Stakes, and two months later, by the time the horse got to Saratoga for the Travers, Antley was bounced as the rider.

“Because of all that stuff going on, that horse got more press than Secretariat,” Antley said.

The omens for Antley going west were not encouraging. In three trips to California in the last three years, he received stewards’ suspensions every time, once after the 1991 Santa Anita Handicap and most recently at Del Mar last summer.

“After that, you might say, ‘Why would I want to come here?’ ” Antley said. “But those three suspensions were only matters of circumstance. My horses did do some bumping. When I got the days at Del Mar, I hung around down there for five or six days, since I couldn’t ride back in New York, either. I got to know some of the people, I got the feel of what it was like to be out here. Two weeks after I got back to New York, I made up my mind. Every day’s a challenge, but I decided to go for the gusto.”

Horse Racing Notes

Winners of the 1993 Eclipse Awards will be announced a week from today. . . . Saturday is the early deadline for horses to be nominated for the Triple Crown races. The fee is $600 per horse. The fee for late nominations, which are due by April 2, has been raised from $4,500 to $6,000. The $5-million payoff remains for any horse that sweeps the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, but Chrysler Corp., sponsor of the $1-million bonus that was paid annually to the owner of the horse with the highest point total for the races, has discontinued that prize. Chrysler will make a donation of $300,000 this year to equine-related charities.

Kiaran McLaughlin, former agent for Chris Antley in New York and once an assistant trainer for the Wayne Lukas Stable, is now training for the Maktoum family in Dubai, where the horses have air-conditioning in their stalls. . . . Aqueduct officials, having difficulty coordinating five simulcast races from Gulfstream Park with their seven-race programs of live racing, have installed “quick official.” Quick official allows stewards to make races official before jockeys weigh in and requires riders to make foul claims before they dismount. Quick official is under consideration in California.