Tracking Down This Jockey Is Difficult--Except for the FBI

About 7,389 wins ago, jockey Dave Gall was stranded 50 miles outside Phoenix, his 10-year-old jalopy a worthless heap.

This was 1959, when Gall was a teenager and when a gallon of gas wasn’t more expensive than a hamburger.

“I had left Bay Meadows,” Gall said, “and I was headed for a track someplace on the East Coast, but I wasn’t sure exactly where. I didn’t have much money, and any time I’d see a sign for gas less than 20 cents, I’d stop and fill up.”

At Bay Meadows, near San Francisco, Gall had shared the jalopy with three stablehands. One of them, owing Gall some money, gave him the car when Gall said he was going to try the East Coast.

Out of money and minus a transmission, Gall hitched a ride with a few farmers, whose truck got him as far as Phoenix.

“I remember it was very hot and I was very thirsty,” Gall said.

From Phoenix, he called his grandmother in Vancouver, Canada, and she wired him a few dollars.

“I can’t remember how much,” Gall said. “Fifty, maybe 100 dollars. Whatever it was, it seemed like a lot of money.”

Gall bought a bus ticket to St. Louis. Why St. Louis?

“I don’t know,” Gall said. “Maybe the money I had would only get me that far.”

He got off the bus and started riding horses at two tracks in Southern Illinois--Fairmount Park and the now-defunct Cahokia Downs--and he hasn’t left. Call Gall the King of the Minors. He has won 7,389 races, more than anybody except Bill Shoemaker, Laffit Pincay and Pat Day, and he’s done it without ever riding in a Kentucky Derby or a Breeders’ Cup, or ever getting a vote for an Eclipse Award or the Racing Hall of Fame.

At 57, Gall’s career will end Saturday night when he rides in nine of the 11 races at Fairmount. “It’s time I got in the slow lane,” Gall said on the phone Thursday. “The fast lane’s got too fast for me.”

He said he’ll train a few horses. Mary Gall, the jockey’s wife, is the daughter of a jockey, and her brother also rode.

“I’m thrilled that he’s quitting,” she said of her husband. “It was his decision, he alone had to make it, but I’m glad that he’s doing it. That last spill [in the fall of 1997 at Hawthorne in suburban Chicago] was a real bad one. He broke six ribs. He broke his back and he broke his jaw on both sides. They had to put five pins in him. He said this spring that he’d probably retire, and now he’s going through with it.”

Long ago, at Cahokia Downs, the track announcer, Tod Creed, referred to Gall as “General D. Gall” in the winner’s circle. Once in a while, someone will come up to Mary Gall and say, “How’s the General doing?”

At first, she didn’t know what they were talking about.

“Then it sunk in,” she said. “I think it’s kind of clever that they call him that.”

Gall has ridden in 41,690 races, winning 18%, and his horses have earned almost $25 million. He has won two national titles, riding 479 winners in 1979 and winning 376 races in 1981.

“The year I won 479 means more to me than winning 7,000,” Gall said. “Getting to 7,000 was more about just staying around than anything else. There was no time frame to it, because you just kept riding. But the 479, that was something you had to do in 365 days and that was it.”

It was not a record, Chris McCarron having ridden 546 winners in 1974, but no one rode more winners than Gall for the next 10 years, until Kent Desormeaux broke McCarron’s record with 598 wins in 1989.

When Gall was hot, there was hardly room for anybody else on the card. In 1978, at Cahokia Downs, he won with eight of 10 mounts. Three times he has won seven races on a card.

Early in 1997, Gall won his 7,058th race, which moved him into third place, ahead of the retired Angel Cordero, on the career list. The retired Shoemaker is No. 1 at 8,833, Pincay is next with 8,788 and Day, going into this week, has 7,450.

All three are members of the Racing Hall of Fame. Racing hasn’t figured out what to do with a horseman like Dave Gall, and don’t look for Gall to beat his own drum.

“I don’t even know how it works,” Gall said. “I’ve never even given it a thought.”

His riding career started in his native Saskatchewan, Canada. When he was 9, his uncle, who was in the lumber business, made a trade, lumber for horses, and became the owner of several thoroughbreds. He sent the horses to Gall’s father’s farm, and Gall started riding them. That led to two summers of riding on the prairie circuit in Western Canada. Gall’s first winner, a filly named Trompeta, was in Edmonton in June 1957.

The only time Gall has seen Santa Anita is on a vacation.

“I never thought about trying the bigger tracks,” he said. “I’ve had a tough enough time, sometimes, around the tracks where I’m known. I’ve only had two agents for the last 27 years, and I’m happy the way things have gone. I can’t imagine the schmoozing, the campaigning, that goes on all the time with the [big-time jockeys]. They’re on a nonstop campaign. My head hurts just thinking about it. I know how to work hard, but I’ve never worked hard to sell myself.”

Not long after Gall’s bus reached St. Louis, a couple of FBI agents visited the jockeys’ room at Fairmount Park. They were following up a report about a car, found abandoned in Arizona, that had Gall’s name in it.

“I guess they thought I was a fugitive,” Gall said. “I guess they thought I might be a killer or something.”

*

Almutawakel, who’s run only once, finishing seventh, since winning the Dubai World Cup in March, returns to dirt Saturday when he makes his U.S. debut in the $500,000 Woodward at Belmont Park. Jerry Bailey will ride.

Others in the field are Black Cash, Barter Town, River Keen, Stephen Got Even, Running Stag and Gander.

*

The National Thoroughbred Racing Assn., budgeted to spend $30.8 million in its second fiscal year, will have to make a $3.2-million cut after rescinding an unpopular 1% tax on buyers who purchase horses at auction sales.