Fittingly, a Legend Rides One

Whether you’re a horse owner, horse trainer or horse player, you’re all right if you have Gary Stevens riding for you.

Go bet.

Whether it’s the Kentucky Derby or a $5,000 claimer in Juarez, you get the same impeccable trip around the track. Gary rides your horse as if he were Man O’ War.

You know how baseball managers like to say of their players, “He’s my professional”? Casey Stengel always referred to Whitey Ford as “my perfessionalpitcher.”

Well, Gary Stevens is your professional race rider. You get the same all-out, intelligent, dedicated performance every time. Not flashy. Not headlined. Just there in the winners’ circle. Lou Gehrig, if you will. Not the Babe.

Riders hate to see him coming. It’s like getting an Unser in your rear-view mirror. Stevens rides to win. But he has no reputation for using up a horse, asking him for more than he’s got.

He sits on a horse the way the horse should be sat upon. Not scratching all over the place like a Hartack or a Ycaza. Not busting through a wall of horses like a Cossack. Looking for the hole, saving the run for the psychological moment. He has the concentration of a diamond-cutter, the peripheral vision of an NFL quarterback.

He doesn’t always get the best stock. When he arrived at Santa Anita more than a decade ago, that went to other riders. The track was still known as “Shoemaker Downs,” or “Pincay Park.” Those were the jocks who got the 3-to-2 shots.

Stevens won anyway. By 1986, he was the leading rider on the circuit, winning meet titles at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Oak Tree. He was a money player. His horses won $13,881,198 in 1990, first in the nation.

Stevens was born near Boise, Ida., where Dad saddled horses at the three-quarter-mile track, (Le Bois) and he proved early on that horses ran for him, not from him as they did with so many other riders. “There’s a telepathy between horse and rider,” Stevens says. “You can’t teach it. It’s there. Or, it isn’t.”

With Stevens, it was there. He took the act, not to the big time, but the bigger time--Longacres in Seattle. He immediately became leading rider. In a jockey colony that was as good as most, he set the meet and stakes record--168 victories in 1983, 232 in 1984.

Great riders had come out of Idaho before, most notably the elegant Laverne Fator, who had been leading money-winner in the 1920s, when the storied Earl Sande and Mack Garner and Sonny Workman were also in the irons. By the time Gary came to Santa Anita in 1984, he was hailed as a new Fator.

“I came to California in October of ’84 intending to ride a weekend and go back to Seattle,” he says.

That was a long weekend. Stevens is still here.

Every jockey wants to add a Kentucky Derby or two to his dossier, the way a golfer wants to add a Masters, a ballplayer a World Series or a driver an Indy 500. One Triple Crown victory is computed to be worth 20 or more ordinary firsts.

One of Stevens’ strengths as a rider was his ability to have a calming influence on younger horses. His success with 2- and 3-year-olds is legendary. He won his Kentucky Derby on his fourth try on the filly, Winning Colors.

Fillies are supposed to have their minds on other things in the spring, but Stevens kept her mind on business, her head straight and gave her a masterful ride to prevail by a nose. Stevens had done something Laverne Fator never could--win a Kentucky Derby.

Stevens’ record in Kentucky is noteworthy. In his last four Derbies, he has never been worse than fourth and has been second twice. A first, two seconds and two fourths in nine Kentucky Derbies is pretty impressive. They write poems about riders who do that.

Stevens’ record in the Santa Anita Derby, which will be run this Saturday, is even more extraordinary. He has won the last two, three out of the last five, and five out of the 10 he has ridden in. He has been second twice and never worse than fourth.

He rides Larry The Legend in the Santa Anita Derby on Saturday, a Horatio Alger horse bought out of a bankruptcy sale for $2,500. Owner-trainer Craig Lewis didn’t want the horse exactly, but he was the only collateral the debtor had left. It was either that or a truck.

Gary Stevens is not distracted by Larry The Legend’s penniless beginnings. “He looks like a very professional horse to me,” he says.

That would be a happy coincidence. Two professionals for the price of one. A true daily double.

Stevens’ professionalism was proved to be recognized worldwide this January, when he received a call from the Crown Colony of Hong Kong offering a contract he couldn’t refuse to come ride there. He went.

He returned for one weekend to win the Santa Anita Handicap--on board a British horse who had never run in this country or on dirt before. Urgent Request had been described as “strong-willed” and “unmanageable,” which around a racetrack means he is the next thing to a serial killer. Stevens had him as mannerly as a butler by the clubhouse turn.

If Stevens can do that on a rogue, what comfort can the competition take in the fact he will be riding a “professional” horse Saturday? Even a horse they got, so to speak, out of a remnant barrel is a threat with Stevens aboard. He may wind up with more Derbies than Parliament on a rainy day, but before he’s through, you know one thing: Larry The Legend better keep his mind on business or Gary The Legend will remind him of it. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s unprofessionalism.