Junior Mint

By BILL CHRISTINE

Dec. 8, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Pete Rose may be baseball’s nonpareil hit-maker, but he’s a pariah in many quarters, starting with a commissioner’s office that has him No. 1 on its enemies’ list.

Babe Ruth, pre-Hank Aaron, was the home run champion, albeit a carousing womanizer who gave hot dogs a bad name.

Paul Hornung was truly the Golden Boy from Green Bay, but he outlasted the lights in many an NFL city, and did time on the sidelines for being too chummy with gamblers.

The list of scoundrels who wore boxing crowns didn’t start with Mike Tyson.

Then there is Laffit Pincay Jr., who very shortly will be the holder of perhaps racing’s shiniest record. When Pincay rides to his 8,834th victory this week at Hollywood Park, he will supplant another icon, Bill Shoemaker, as the jockey with the most wins.

Pincay could set the record today. He needs two victories to tie Shoemaker, three to pass him, and has seven mounts.

Unlike Rose and some others, Pincay is no tarnished hero. He is the white knight incarnate, one of a diminishing breed. He is the nice guy who finishes first.

Horse racing ranks high on the pettiness scale. Worse, it is a game that sometimes wears scams on its sleeve and occasionally--inexplicably--treats its best like an old shoe. In this difficult milieu, Pincay has not only survived but thrived since that first win, in Panama in 1964, and since he began riding in the U.S. two years later.

Will the enemies Pincay has made along the way please raise their hands?

Not unexpectedly, there are no hands. Making applause is the only work hands are doing today.

“He is a great rider and a great gentlemen,” said Don Pierce, the retired jockey who battled Pincay for years and wound up winning more than 3,500 races himself.

A couple of stories about Pincay the gentleman:

* This fall, the Daily Racing Form, as close as any agency comes to being racing’s official record keeper, announced that it was certifying an extra win in Sweden by Pincay, making the jockey’s eventual displacement of Shoemaker slightly easier. Thankful for the favor, Pincay politely informed the Form that two other wins that had been carried on the books actually belonged to his father.

* Later, one of the casinos in Las Vegas was trying to hire a name jockey for a one-shot appearance at a handicapping seminar. At least one rider demanded thousands of dollars. The casino called Pincay and he went for nothing, charming the audience with his humility and insight.

“He’s a true superstar,” said Tony Matos, the agent who booked Pincay’s mounts through most of the 1980s. “It was an honor to work with him. He’s as much a fine human being as he’s been a great rider. There are a lot of records in a lot of sports that stand above the rest. But Laffit’s passing Shoe is second to none of them.”

Linda Pincay, his first wife, was in ill health when she committed suicide in 1985. They had two school-age children at the time. Pincay and Jeanine, his second wife, are the parents of a son, Jean-Laffit, born six years ago. And Lisa, the daughter from the first marriage, made Pincay a grandfather in October.

At the time of Pincay’s second marriage in 1992, his riding career was in tatters. His battle with weight seemed hardly worth the fight, and breaking Shoemaker’s record had been reduced to an afterthought. All that changed.

“Jeanine has kept Laffit happy,” trainer Roger Stein said. “He’s happy to go shopping, he’s happy to do anything as long as they’re doing things together. He got a second chance, and he knows he’s lucky that that happened.”

Stein doubles as a broadcaster, and recently on his radio show, he had Pincay on to talk with some of his fans.

“When I look up the word ‘great’ in the dictionary, I expect to see your picture next to it,” one of them said.

You could sense the low-keyed Pincay blushing over the airwaves.

“I’ve been very relaxed,” he said. “I’ve been riding some nice horses, and they’ve been running good. What more could you ask for?”

In a perfect world, Pincay would post win No. 8,834 on Dec. 29, his 53rd birthday, with Bill Spawr saddling the landmark horse and Affirmed, via some time machine, being that horse.

In the late 1990s, Spawr was the light in the window, one of the few trainers who stuck with Pincay in the September of his years. Affirmed, says Pincay, is the best horse he ever rode.

“He was horse of the year when I rode him in 1979,” Pincay said. “I was very proud of what I did that year. My horses earned [$8.1 million], and I broke the record [for purses]. That was the biggest year I’ve ever had. Affirmed was a fighter and a runner. He was a dream horse to ride. He had speed, but you could also take him back if you wanted to. Every time I rode him, I was confident.”

In 1978, when Affirmed became the last horse to sweep the Triple Crown by winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, he was ridden by teenager Steve Cauthen, but toward the end of the year the colt was in a four-race losing streak.

At Santa Anita in the winter of 1978-79, Affirmed’s owners, Louis and Patrice Wolfson, took Cauthen off the horse, leaving trainer Laz Barrera overcommitted to both Angel Cordero and Pincay as the replacement. There was actually a coin flip to determine the rider, and Pincay won.

Affirmed never lost another race. He and Pincay teamed to win seven straight, a run culminated by a three-quarter-length victory over Spectacular Bid, with Shoemaker, in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park in October.

But Pincay wasn’t perfect with Affirmed. In the summer of 1978, with Cauthen sidelined by injury, Pincay was called in from California to ride Affirmed in the Travers at Saratoga. Affirmed won by 1 3/4 lengths but was disqualified for interference and the number of his archrival, Alydar, was hung up.

“That bareback stuff might go over in California, but it doesn’t cut any ice in New York,” said Alydar’s trainer, John Veitch, commenting minutes after the race about Pincay’s tactics.

Pincay was crushed by the disqualification.

“It was the biggest riding disappointment I ever had,” he said recently. “That was really one bad trip I had to take back to California. I didn’t even feel like riding [at Del Mar] the next day. But it was a good thing I did. I won four races.”

In 1984, an ailing Linda Pincay was back in California when her husband, after 10 unsuccessful rides in the Kentucky Derby, finally won the big race at Churchill Downs with Swale. Four weeks later, Swale and Pincay also won the Belmont Stakes, only a few days before the colt collapsed at the barn and died. Trainer Woody Stephens saddled five consecutive Belmont winners, the first three--Conquistador Cielo in 1982, Caveat in 1983 and Swale--partnered with Pincay.

He seldom lists Caveat’s Belmont as one of his most memorable rides, but many Pincay-ophiles consider it the quintessence of his three-plus decades of horsemanship, a combination of coolness and courage that carried him through more than 44,000 races. At the top of the stretch, Au Point, a longshot ridden by Gregg McCarron, came over and slammed into Caveat, knocking Pincay’s horse into the fence. As Caveat ricocheted off the rail, Pincay somehow kept the colt on his feet and they marched to a 3 1/2-length win.

“Laffit was very strong and very aggressive,” Pierce said. “He wasn’t afraid to come through on the rail. When Shoe retired [in 1990, with 8,833 wins], I really didn’t think anybody would ever break his record. But you have to factor in that there’s so much more racing than there used to be. More dates, more races. That’s the big difference.”

Shoemaker rode for 40 years, and climbed on 40,350 horses, to reach his total. Pincay is in his 35th year and has ridden in 4,282 more races than Shoemaker. Nor is Pincay’s record likely to fall soon. Pat Day, 46, is in third place with 7,608 victories through Saturday.

Pincay’s agent, for the last nine years, has been Bob Meldahl.

“I had Pat Valenzuela’s book when Laffit called me,” Meldahl said. “It was a lifelong dream to work with Laffit. He’s a true professional. He’s like Lou Gehrig--he goes out there every day and you get his very best. That’s why everybody likes him. You can’t find anybody who doesn’t. When he got to 7,200 wins, he said, ‘Get me to 8,000 and maybe we can go for the record.’ ”

A few years ago, a slumping Pincay considered riding in Northern California, where the circuit isn’t as salty, or at third-rate Emerald Downs near Seattle. It was one of several times that Pincay entertained quitting.

“Then he changed his mind about moving up there,” Meldahl said. “He said to himself that if he was going to break the record, he wanted to do it in Southern California.”

Pincay sorted out the options and decided that although the riding opportunities would be greater, the horses wouldn’t be as good.

“If I had gone up there, I would have had to leave my wife down here,” Pincay said. “I was also in the process of selling and buying a house. I also thought that people might say that if I broke the record, I still didn’t do it in Southern California.”

Pincay’s way guarantees no asterisks.

“I’m not surprised that he’s had this success,” Fernando Eleta said from Panama City. “He’s always been a good boy. From the start, he was very disciplined, very professional and very competitive.”

One of Panama’s leading breeders for more than 50 years, Eleta is president of the breeders’ association in Pincay’s homeland. At Presidente Remon, the track where Pincay scored his first win, there has been a large sign standing next to the tote board for the last several weeks, with the numbers changing daily as the public is updated on Pincay’s attack on the record.

“He went to the jockeys’ school down here, and he learned his lessons well,” Eleta said. “In the beginning, he and the other Panamanian riders were influenced by the Chilean riders, who always rode with longer stirrups. In America, Eddie Arcaro was riding in those days with a seat that put him way up in the saddle. Our jockeys took the middle position. They wouldn’t be up on the horse’s neck, but they wouldn’t be back in the saddle, either. When Laffit left Panama, he was smart enough to modify what he had learned at home. He started using shorter stirrups when he got to the U.S.

“He always had an excellent sense of distance. He needed the discipline that started in Panama in order to keep his weight down. He and Braulio Baeza came along at the same time. They both became experienced riders, but were also known by the manner in which they conducted themselves off the track.”

That first win, on May 19, 1964, came aboard a horse named Huelen, at Presidente Remon. Like a golfer with total recall for every round, Pincay remembers Huelen well.

“I was 17 years old,” he said. “It was the last race of the day, and the horse was a big longshot. It was getting dark. When I got to the wire, I was so excited. I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep the whole night.”

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Made to Be Broken

These sports records, once considered safe, lasted at least a decade but eventually were surpassed. Bill Shoemaker, who finished with 8,833 victories, has held the jockey mark since 1970:

57 YEARS

HITS, CAREER

Set by: Ty Cobb, 1928 (4,191)

Broken by: Pete Rose, 1985 (4,256)

39 YEARS

HOMERS, CAREER

Set by: Babe Ruth, 1935 (714)

Broken by: Hank Aaron, 1974 (755)

37 YEARS

HOMERS, SEASON

Set by: Roger Maris, 1961 (61)

Broken by: Mark McGwire, 1998 (70)