Santa Anita Opener Is a Stevens Closer

As the mutuel payoffs for the 48th Malibu Stakes flashed on the infield tote board Sunday, jockey Gary Stevens and trainer Richard Mandella headed for the tunnel that leads to the jockeys’ room at Santa Anita.

With Stevens aboard, Mandella’s Desert Hero, returning after a five-month layoff, had finished sixth, beating only one horse in the Malibu. But there was more to the jockey-trainer exchange than what to do next.

“This is the end,” Stevens said. “I’m not riding anymore.”

“What?” an incredulous Mandella said.

“My knees are shot,” Stevens said. “This was my last race.”

“For how long?” Mandella said.

“For forever,” Stevens said.

Stevens didn’t return to ride a 2-year-old filly for Mandella in the eighth race, nor will he ride another horse for anyone again. Leaving Mandella, Stevens went straight to the jockeys’ room, showered, changed into brown slacks and a blue oxford shirt, sat on a bench in front of his locker and said that his riding career was over.

“This is pretty hard to give up,” said Stevens, a model of self-control while his 15-year-old son, T.C., buried his head in both hands and wept nearby. “If I rode anymore, I know I’d be cheating myself. For 21 years, I’ve enjoyed riding. I’ve lived to ride. But lately I haven’t been enjoying it anymore. It wouldn’t be fair to the horsemen, it wouldn’t be fair to the public and it wouldn’t be fair to me if I tried to go on.”

Stevens, who’ll be 37 on March 6, won 4,512 races and rode horses that earned $187 million. Some of the early winning came at outposts such as Les Bois Park in Boise, Idaho, and the now-defunct Longacres near Seattle, but starting in 1984, Stevens commanded the best horses at the biggest venues, winning Kentucky Derbies and Breeders’ Cup races with a versatility that made him just as dangerous from the front as it did from off the pace. His election into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1997 was an inevitable accolade.

“He was a fierce competitor and a great race-rider,” said Pat Day, who was third on Cat Thief as Love That Red won the opening-day Malibu before 44,018 fans. “He had a fire inside him that drove him to the heights.”

Day, who has won more than 7,600 races, had his run-ins with Stevens along the way. Winning Colors, the filly who gave Stevens his first of three Kentucky Derby wins, in 1988, was knocked around two weeks later by Day’s Derby runner-up, Forty Niner, in the Preakness, and acrimony flared from both camps. “That’s history--ancient history,” Day said Sunday. “That was many moons ago. Gary will be missed badly in the rider ranks. He’s been an example, on and off the track.”

Since 1985, when he was injured in a spill during a workout, Stevens has been in and out of hospitals because of knee problems. Earlier this month, he underwent surgery on the right knee for the fourth time. He has had two operations on the left knee. He looked at the X-rays after his latest surgery, and they told him how bad the damage was. “This is a tough guy,” Stevens agent, Ron Anderson, once said when the rider quickly returned from an earlier surgery. “You can’t imagine how tough he is.”

But even that patented Stevens resolve began to disappear in the last two weeks. He worked some horses in the mornings, preparing for Sunday’s return, but without the heavy-duty anti-inflammatory medication, Stevens said, climbing into bed every night was like going to sleep with a toothache in his legs. Warned about the side effects--potential liver and kidney damage--he went off the medicine for a day or two, to flashbacks of those grisly X-rays. He has degenerative arthritis, and despite his retirement still faces knee replacement in four or five years.

“You should see the scars on those knees,” jockey Joe Steiner said. “He’s got knees like some of the bad racehorses you sometimes ride. But he’s going out on top, as an example for all of us. As a rider, he’s done everything.”

In August, Stevens signed a lucrative long-term contract as the stable rider for Prince Ahmed Salman’s Thoroughbred Corp. Now, his status with Salman is unclear. “There’s a clause 1/8in the contract 3/8 that in case of injury, they’ve got a right to terminate,” Stevens said. “What I do will have to be decided in the near future, but whatever it is, it will be in racing. My first choice is to stay 1/8with Salman 3/8 in some capacity.”

It wasn’t until after Sunday’s fourth race, in which Stevens finished eighth with a Salman horse, that Richard Mulhall, general manager for Thoroughbred Corp., learned that Stevens was quitting.

“We’re going to have to do something, but I don’t know what,” Mulhall said Sunday night. “We thought we’d be getting a few years out of Gary riding for us before he moved into something else in the organization. We thought he’d ride at least three more years and then we’d bring him along gradually. I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

Stevens rode in the fifth, then took a leg up for Desert Hero in the Malibu.

“I was still chasing a dream,” he said. “Telling myself that I could win the Malibu. But in the last eighth of a mile, I was on a dead horse. That’s when I feel it the most in my knees. In this last operation, they told me they took out about a thousand pieces of debris. It’s bone on bone outside the 1/8knee 3/8 joint. All the cartilage is gone.”

Stevens’ other Derby wins came with the longshot Thunder Gulch in 1995 and Silver Charm in 1997.

“The first Derby 1/8with Winning Colors 3/8 is still the one I’ll remember most,” Stevens said. “That’s the one that set my career in motion. I think I got to be recognized as a top-class rider after that.”

He took his skills all over the world, riding in Hong Kong for about three months in 1995 and going to England, where Nicola, his second wife, comes from, to ride this year. But the horses in California kept dragging him back. Once he talked about relocating to New York, but trainer Bob Baffert, promising him first call on the horses in his high-profile stable, persuaded him to stay on the West Coast. With Baffert’s Silver Charm, Stevens won the Derby and the Preakness in 1997 and the Dubai World Cup the next year.

“There’s been some talk that he’d have trouble getting insurance 1/8in 2000 3/8 because of his knees,” Baffert said. “There might be something to that, but it’s really the pain from his knees. He’s in a lot of pain, and that’s the reason he’s getting out.”

The son of a trainer from Idaho, his father, Ron Stevens, put him on his first winner with his first mount--Little Star on April 21, 1979, at Les Bois Park. The 25,442nd mount came in Sunday’s Malibu, and afterward, kibitzing with another Hall of Fame jockey, 48-year-old Eddie Delahoussaye, Stevens stretched for some humor on a sad day.

“Didn’t I tell you, you old . . . ,” Stevens said. “I told you that you’d outlast me.”

Horse Racing Notes

Love That Red, ridden by Garrett Gomez, gave trainer Leonard Duncan his biggest career win in the Malibu Stakes. “I had a little trouble getting him back in the first part,” Gomez said. “Then I sat on him until the three-eighths pole, when I started creeping up. I slid through on the inside, and it worked. My horse was pure heart.” In Love That Red’s last Santa Anita start, Gomez rode him to victory in the California Cup Sprint in October. The seven-furlong time of 1:22 was the slowest for a Malibu winner since 1984.

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Gary Stevens at a Glance

Age: 36

Mounts: 25,442

Wins: 4,512

Purses: $187,035,468

Triple Crown victories: 6

(Kentucky Derby, 3; Preakness 1, Belmont 2)

Breeders’ Cup victories: 7

Elected to Hall of Fame: 1997

Eclipse Award: 1998