He Was the Little Big Man at Tracks

Eddie Arcaro was a little man, not that you ever noticed. Like all great jockeys, he stood tall.

One memorable night in a Baltimore restaurant, Arcaro fell into a rowdy argument with trainer Johnny Campo, a strong man the approximate size and shape of a hippopotamus doing a handstand.

Across the crabcakes, insults flew. Oaths were exchanged. Declarations of mean intent were made. Before dessert, loathing.

“Arcaro wouldn’t know a race horse if you put one in front of him,” is what Campo said.

“You’re a bad trainer who got lucky with one decent horse,” is what Arcaro told Campo.

“Bet you $100,000 I’ve won more stakes than the best trainer you can name,” is what Campo told Arcaro.

“I don’t have that much on me, but I can get it by morning,” Arcaro fired back, “and let’s put all this in writing.”

“I thought they were going to punch each other out,” said a witness, the bemused Billy Reed, who now writes for Sports Illustrated.

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The tale of the tape that night showed Eddie Arcaro as 65 years old and outweighed by 140 pounds. But no surprise, his fury. Anyone who ever saw Eddie Arcaro at work had seen it when it mattered most.

“The riding style of Eddie Arcaro has ameliorated considerably in recent years, but it was originally modeled on Bronko Nagurski,” New York columnist Joe Palmer wrote in 1950. “This got him a great deal of exercise, walking on the ground, but even at his peak Arcaro seldom hung an opponent on the fence without the justification that either he wanted to win or the guy had done something to him yesterday.

“He has, he admits, sometimes found an alien saddle cloth clutched in his hand. He has occasionally found another jockey’s leg firmly locked in his own, and he has used his whip for purposes not authorized by the rules of racing. But his justification is simple and, I think, sound.”

That justification, in Arcaro’s words: “If a jock showed the slightest trace of cowardice, it could get awfully rough out there. You were competing with men who were aware their own particular suns were fading, and they resented your moving into the places they would leave. They fought you, and you fought them back.”

Time’s mists obscure history. When Arcaro died last week at age 81 of liver cancer, he may have been known primarily as a television commentator on racing. More’s the pity. For in Ted Williams’ time, in Joe DiMaggio’s, when Joe Louis left men cold on the canvas and Ben Hogan invented golf, Eddie Arcaro moved with those immortals. We’re talking BT--before television. When the NFL couldn’t get out of its own way. The NBA? A laughingstock. The big deals were baseball, boxing, college football and horse racing, the game that gave an Italian immigrant taxi driver’s little boy a way out of school at age 13.

He crossed the Ohio River from his hometown Cincinnati and galloped horses for 75 cents a day at a Kentucky track. Three years later, in 1932, he rode his first winner. By 1962, retired at 46, he had ridden 24,092 races and become the greatest big-race rider ever. It was said that aboard a zebra, bettors would make Arcaro 8-5 at worst.

He’s the only rider to win the Triple Crown twice, on Whirlaway in 1941 and Citation in 1948. He won the Kentucky Derby five times and the Preakness and Belmont Stakes six times each. Like Tilden in tennis, Grange in football and Dempsey in boxing, Arcaro’s name became symbolic of his game.

Young and hungry, Arcaro won his first Kentucky Derby in 1938 on Lawrin. His lasting fame began in 1941 when Calumet Farm trainer Ben Jones, three days before the Derby, hired Arcaro to ride Whirlaway, then an underachiever.

Jones had an idea. Hoping to persuade Whirlaway to run straight rather than veer to the outside, he devised a one-eyed blinker to cover the right eye and allow the horse to see only to his left. To test the blinker, Jones rode his stable pony to a place four feet from the rail and ordered Arcaro to gallop Whirlaway through the gap.

“I figured if the old man was game enough to sit there,” Arcaro would say later, “I was game enough to run him down.”

Instead, Whirlaway threaded that needle and on Derby Day won by eight lengths in record time, his long tail waving, Arcaro driving, a picture as pretty in the mind of race trackers today as then.

Again in 1948, circumstances were unusual. Calumet’s regular rider of Citation died two months before the Kentucky Derby, victim of a storm that capsized his fishing boat. Again, Ben Jones went to Arcaro, who rode Citation to two prep-race victories and then faced a Derby choice of Calumet horses: Should he ride Citation or the mighty Coaltown?

“Eddie,” Ben Jones said, “if I thought Coaltown could win, you’d be on him. . . . Citation can beat Coaltown doing anything.”

Once six lengths behind Coaltown, Arcaro rode Citation to a 3 1/2-length victory. After winning the Triple Crown, with only one defeat in 20 races as a 3-year-old, Citation to this day is regarded by some as the best racehorse ever. Louisville racing columnist Mike Barry once said, “Citation could beat Secretariat pulling a wagon.”

One more story, pure Arcaro. On a failing horse, he was clearly beaten when the onrushing winner shoved him toward the rail and danger. The offending rider stood high in the stirrups, his hind quarters a temptation irresistible to a wronged man with a whip in his hand.

Explaining himself to stewards, Arcaro’s defense was that of a master who has been there, done that. “If it had been a tight finish, I wouldn’t have minded. But he was going to beat me by two lengths anyway. He didn’t need to do it.”

A full swing of Arcaro’s bat had left the winning jockey with tears running down his cheeks, even as a braided welt rose across his cheeks.