THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : Don Pierce, 57, Is Ready to Ride 3,547th Winner

“Who’s going to be riding?” trainer Neil Drysdale asked Terry Lipham, the agent for jockey Eddie Delahoussaye.

“Lots of guys,” Lipham said. “Guys like Pierce are going to ride.”

“Pierce?” Drysdale said. “Which Pierce is that?”

“Don Pierce,” Lipham said.

“Don Pierce!” Drysdale said. “Don Pierce is going to ride?”

Trackside at Santa Anita, Don Pierce lifted up his jacket to show how svelte he is.

“I know one thing,” he said, ‘I’m fit. I’m dead fit.”

Somebody asked the 57-year-old Pierce when he last rode in a race.

“This year, at Del Mar,” he said with a straight face.

Well, yes. But that was the Rocking Chair Derby, an exhibition race for retired jockeys. Pierce’s horse finished fourth.

The last time he really rode in a race was at Santa Anita in January of 1985, just before he announced his retirement and became a trainer.

Now Pierce, who has struggled on the training side, is preparing to become a replacement jockey at Santa Anita, should most of the regular riders walk out Sunday in support of a disagreement between the Jockeys’ Guild and the nation’s racetracks over health and accident insurance. The guild’s three-year contract runs out at midnight Saturday.

Santa Anita is one of 41 tracks that plan to run races with replacement jockeys. In New York, jockeys who plan to strike have been told they should clean out their lockers at Aqueduct by Saturday night. They will also be barred from working out horses at Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga until they resume riding.

Most of the top jockeys in South Florida have also indicated they won’t be riding on Sunday if the contract issue isn’t resolved.

If it comes to that, Pierce, besides being one of the oldest, will be one of the most famous of the replacement jockeys. He rode for 30 years, winning 3,546 races, and his mounts earned $39 million. He won more than 250 stakes, 113 of them at Santa Anita.

In the 1960s, he won both the Santa Anita Derby and the Santa Anita Handicap with Hill Rise, and he won the Big ‘Cap four times. He won the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1968 with Princessnesian, on a day that he won five races. Pierce won a second Santa Anita Derby, with Flying Paster in 1979.

If these sound like Hall of Fame credentials, they are, but inexplicably Pierce has never been enshrined at Saratoga Springs, N.Y. When they rode together, his good friend Bill Shoemaker said Pierce was the most underrated jockey in the country.

“You ready to ride nine (races) Sunday?” Lipham, also a former jockey, asked Thursday as he kidded Pierce.

“No, I’m not ready to do that yet,” Pierce said.

When Triple Bend won the Santa Anita Handicap with Pierce in 1972, the colt carried 119 pounds. Pierce said Thursday that he weighs 119 or 120 pounds, and he might be a pound or two lighter by Sunday. The heaviest jockeys at Santa Anita can make 118 or 119 pounds, including equipment.

“I’m only going to be doing this until the regular riders come back,” Pierce said.

Santa Anita announced a short list of local jockeys expected to ride Sunday even if there’s a mass walkout by most of the riders. Pat Valenzuela, who has ridden more than 2,800 winners, is the best-known on the list, which also includes John Atherton, Goncalino Almeida, Matt Garcia and Polo Sanchez.

Because the Jockeys’ Guild is not a union, walkouts will theoretically occur individually. Valenzuela’s membership in the guild was suspended by the jockeys’ group a few years ago, after he was suspended by California stewards in a drug-related case, but John Giovanni, national manager of the guild, said that Valenzuela had long since been reinstated.

“You got to do what you got to do,” said Eddie Delahoussaye, Lipham’s client, who won’t ride without an insurance contract.

Lipham won’t be working either.

“I wouldn’t take another rider,” the agent said. “That would be defeating the purpose of the message the jockeys are trying to send out. When Eddie comes back, that’s when I come back.”

Giovanni said Thursday that he hasn’t spoken with Brian McGrath, commissioner of the Thoroughbred Racing Assns. tracks, in more than a week, and no bargaining session is scheduled.

“We’re still looking at the possibility of making deals with individual tracks,” Giovanni said.

Chris McCarron, a member of the guild’s board of directors, said that would be difficult. A track that might want to make a deal with the jockeys could also be a track simulcasting its races to tracks that don’t have a deal, he pointed out.

At the heart of the disagreement with the TRA is the guild’s insistence that the jockeys have television rights, which include the simulcasting of races.

Three years ago, the guild and the tracks settled less than an hour before the contract expired.

“Maybe we’ll pull a rabbit out of the hat again,” said Giovanni, sounding weary and unenthusiastic. “I’m expecting the worst and hoping for the best.”

Meanwhile, replacement jockeys trickle in to Santa Anita from all directions, including Turf Paradise in Phoenix.

“Somebody said to me that the Phoenix jockeys weren’t going to be riding there Sunday,” Lipham said. “That’s because they’re all here. And why wouldn’t they be? This is where the purse money is.”

Horse Racing Notes

Call Now, winner of the Del Mar Debutante and second to Serena’s Song in the Oak Leaf Stakes, faces five rivals Saturday in the $75,000 Pasadena Stakes. Others entered for the six-furlong Pasadena are Lovely Fantasy, Blind Trust, Denim Yenem, Laguna Seca and Dancin At The Wire.