At 61, This Jockey Still Rides Determinedly

Jockey Ray York, packing 120 pounds, finished last in a derby at Del Mar the other day.

“Wait a minute!” you say. “Ray York? What kind of a time warp is this? Ray York hasn’t been on a racetrack in 10 years. What is this, 1953?”

Besides, Ray York wouldn’t finish last on a rocking horse. He won the Kentucky Derby, no less. Not many jockeys can make that claim. Ray rode the great Determine in his best years.

Well, of course, the “derby” Saturday was the Del Mar Rocking Chair Derby, a kind of old-timers’ game for retired jockeys. Not exactly a senior tour--a one-shot go-round the track for race riders from another time or place.

York rode with the best of them. In his time, it was nothing for him to look up in the starting gate and see Willie Shoemaker on one side of him, Eddie Arcaro on the other and John Longden down a stall or two. Bill Hartack would be in the field. Even the great ones kept an eye on York when the flag dropped.

He won the Santa Anita Derby and then the Kentucky Derby on Determine in 1954. Determine, like his rider, was one of the most underrated figures in thoroughbred history. He was small, not particularly fast--his Kentucky Derby on a fast track was run in 2:03. He was the first gray to win the Kentucky Derby. He was 900 pounds of pluck. He wasn’t Willie Mays or Ty Cobb. He was more like Eddie Stanky or Pete Rose. All he did was beat you.

He ran an incredible 29 times in his 2-year-old and 3-year-old seasons. At 3, he ran 15 times, won 10 and was second three times and third twice. His owner, automobile dealer Andy Crevolin, would have run him down Wilshire Boulevard if the price and weight were right, other owners grumbled. He regularly gave eight to 10 pounds to the opposition.

He was not the first to parlay the Santa Anita Derby into the Kentucky. Hill Gail did that first. But Hill Gail was a Calumet horse slumming around the West Coast. Determine was as native as a surfer.

They didn’t nominate him for the Triple Crown but the Preakness was won by Hasty Road that year, a horse Determine had run down in the stretch at Louisville even after being roughed at the start. The Belmont that year was won by High Gun by a neck over Fisherman, a colt Determine had beaten by 11 1/2 lengths in Kentucky.

Ray York was the Determine of jockeys. You had him to beat. You got to the winner’s circle through him.

He rode for 38 years but had his only other real shot at immortality in 1959 when he rode the classy filly, Silver Spoon, to victory in the Santa Anita Derby. She became the first filly to run in the Kentucky Derby in 14 years--and only five have run in the 35 years since. She ran fifth.

“She was not disgraced,” York recalls. “She was outrun. She made them beat her.”

The reality of the track in those days was that York and his agent got to pick a horse only after Shoemaker, Longden or Arcaro got through with them.

“There was only one Bill Shoemaker,” York acknowledges today. “There was Shoemaker, Longden--and then there were the rest of us.”

A result was, York had to win with the third and fourth choices. He did so--3,080 times. He was second 2,910 times and third 2,740 times. He won one out of every nine races he rode. If he has a regret, it is that it wasn’t more.

“I could have won twice as many races,” he confides ruefully. “I drank.

“It cost me races. It cost me mounts. I could have won 6,000 races as I look back on it. I got to messing around and drinking. Cost me two marriages. Might have cost me a couple of Kentucky derbies.”

Winning one Kentucky Derby has been advantageous enough.

“You can go somewhere and say you were a race rider and they just nod and look away. But you say, ‘I won the Kentucky Derby in 1954,’ and they say, ‘Oh, you won the Kentucky Derby!’ Now they know you were a race rider.”

Many great riders never have won one--Laverne Fator, Sandy Hawley, Johnny Adams, Manny Ycaza, Sonny Workman, Ralph Neves.

“You got to get that one horse,” York says.

So, at 61, Ray York was back on a racehorse at Del Mar last weekend. As usual, it was not the best horse in the race. And it was not Determine.

But it was no bridle path canter. These easy riders moved the 5 1/2 furlongs in 1:03.4. The track record is 1:02.1.

They all stayed on. They whipped and slashed and pumped as if it were the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs.

Longden and Shoemaker were there, but for them it really was a rocking chair event. Trainer Shoemaker, of course, is in a wheelchair, the result of a traffic accident, and Longden did not ride.

It was of Longden, though, that York, at a testimonial, once said, “He was rough competition. You could get to him. You couldn’t get by him.”

Well, if Ray York had the horse under him--and the bottle corked--you couldn’t even get to him.