Mandella Finally Gives Day a Bone

Both men were hard-pressed to remember the exact year.

“My wife Randi and I were thinking about this,” trainer Richard Mandella said. “We figured [our son] Gary must have been about a year old. That would have made it 1972, 1973.”

Finally, after some thought, jockey Pat Day put it together.

“It had to be 1973,” Day said by phone from Gulfstream Park. “I worked there about a month, then I rode my first winner, at Prescott Downs, later in the year. That would make it 1973.”

Saturday’s $1-million Santa Anita Handicap, with Mandella and Day and Gentlemen hoping to beat Silver Charm in an early-season showdown between a couple of heavyweights, has the two horsemen looking back to a day when their futures were wispy things.

Mandella was 22 and Day was 19, and chance had brought them together at Farrell Jones’ Riverside Thoroughbred Farm. Mandella, trying to support a young family, would work long hours to pay bills, and Day, a rodeo rider from Colorado, was not sure what was around the corner. He hired on with Gene Cummings, the farm manager, for about $300 a month.

Now Day and Mandella have been reunited because of Gentlemen, who’s on the brink of his most important race in a career of important races. Last week, Mandella called Day after learning that Gary Stevens, who had been riding Gentlemen, was going to ride Silver Charm in the Big ‘Cap.

“We’ve seen each other over the years, coming and going,” said Mandella, a trainer since 1974--the year after he met Day--and trainer of horse of the year Kotashaan in 1993. “Pat was always in the wrong place at the wrong time to work together. I ran some horses in Chicago in the 1980s, after the fire at Arlington Park, and put Pat on a few. But they weren’t anything like Gentlemen.”

Most of the time that Day would run into Mandella, he’d chide the trainer by saying: “Hey, when you going to throw me a bone?”

In Gentlemen, Mandella has tossed Day one of the best horses in training, picking the Florida-based rider over a roomful of talented jockeys at Santa Anita.

“This is about more than an old friend doing another old friend a favor,” Mandella said. “It starts with Pat Day being good enough to ride Gentlemen. Pat’s a national rider, and his strengths should fit this horse perfectly.”

Since his debut at Prescott Downs, a half-mile bullring about 100 miles north of Phoenix, Day has gone on to more than 7,000 wins. He has won four Eclipse Awards and was enshrined in the Racing Hall of Fame in 1991.

A conversation Mandella had with Day, 25 years ago at Riverside, came rushing back the other day.

“We were just sitting around, talking,” Mandella said. “Then we started to imagine where we were going. ‘Some day,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be training somewhere and I’ll have a good horse and I’ll get you to ride him.’ ”

What did Day say?

“We just sat back and laughed at the possibility,” Mandella said.

Farrell Jones, 75, is long retired after a successful training career on the Southern California circuit. A heart condition forced him off the track prematurely.

“I was D.O.A. at Arcadia Methodist Hospital,” he said. “Then they got me started again. I lived next door to a nurse, and she saved me. She threw a sack over my head before the ambulance got there.”

From the days in Riverside, Jones remembers Mandella more than Day.

“Dick was great at breaking horses,” Jones said. “He and another guy, Neal Aravi, were the best I’ve ever seen. You could give them real bad horses and they could handle them. Dick has carried on into training. He can ‘read’ horses like no one else, and that’s what makes him so successful. He’s one of the best around.”

And Day?

“I didn’t see him much, because I was busy training at Santa Anita. He was around Gene Cummings more than me. But the kid had to be a fast learner, because he got good within a year. He got good in a hurry, and that’s very unusual for a rider.”

Day was riding in local Colorado rodeos when he was 9. He competed in something called the Little Britches Rodeo, and earned money growing up by riding bulls and broncos while also working at the family gas station.

“My dad taught me real horse sense, which is the basis for my success,” Day said.

When Day arrived at Riverside, he didn’t know why he was there or what he was preparing himself for.

“I didn’t know racing,” he said. “I was very naive about the game. I guess I knew about Bill Shoemaker, Johnny Longden and Eddie Arcaro, and I had heard of the Kentucky Derby, but that was the extent of it.”

After a month, he left. The hours were long and most of Day’s chores menial: He would muck stalls and hotwalk horses that Mandella and others had been riding.

“I had no patience whatsoever at the time,” Day said. “I was pretty much convinced that being a jockey wasn’t for me.”

In Las Vegas, at a training center, Day galloped some horses while waiting for the next stop on the rodeo circuit. Because of his size (4 feet 11, less than 100 pounds), he was always being told to be a jockey, and someone sent him to Prescott Downs. A few months later, on July 23, 1973, in a seven-furlong claiming race, he won with a horse named Forblunged. The winner’s share of the $631 purse was $347, and Day’s pay was 10% of that--$34.70.

Day has won a record nine Breeders’ Cup races, and in 1992, after nine tries, he nailed down an elusive Kentucky Derby win with the lightly regarded Lil E. Tee. If Gentlemen wins Saturday, the winner’s purse is $600,000 and Day would collect $60,000.

“I’ve seen tapes of eight or nine of his races,” Day said. “I thought his last race was the most impressive by far. Gary was pulling him up at the wire. This horse is a free runner. My forte is never to fool with horses that much, and for that reason I think Gentlemen and I will get along fine.”

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Santa Anita Handicap

WHEN: Saturday

TIME: 4:15 p.m. (first post, noon)

TV: FSW (5:30)

PURSE: $1 million