Jockey Chris Antley Slain in Pasadena

Two-time Kentucky Derby-winning jockey Chris Antley, whose colorful career was marred by recurring struggles with drugs and frantic efforts to keep his weight down, was found dead in his Pasadena home Saturday night, the victim of an apparent beating, police said Sunday.

Antley, 34, died from “severe trauma to the head” in what police called a homicide. They declined to be more specific until an autopsy is conducted.

Sunday morning police arrested a 24-year-old Dana Point man, who neighbors said was a frequent house guest of Antley’s and whom police described as Antley’s friend. The man, Timothy Wyman Tyler Jr., was being held Sunday in lieu of $45,000 bail on three outstanding warrants involving drugs and driving under the influence.

Cmdr. Mary L. Schander, the Pasadena police spokeswoman, did not describe Tyler as a suspect in Antley’s death. But she told reporters: “We do not believe this was a random act. There is no one else we are actively seeking at the moment.”

Tyler’s father, Timothy Wyman Tyler Sr., who lives in Pasadena, was angry Sunday night that his son’s name had surfaced in connection with Antley’s death. He insisted that his son was innocent. “My son’s name should not have come up,” the father told The Times.

Antley, a high school dropout and onetime stable boy, made fortunes in racing and the stock market. He lived in Pasadena’s tony San Rafael neighborhood in a gray stucco, 3,000-square-foot house he bought for nearly $1.2 million in the summer of 1999.

A neighbor, screenwriter Jim Herzfeld, said Antley had seemed isolated and tormented recently. “He didn’t seem to be in control of his life,” Herzfeld said.

Antley’s friend and fellow jockey Gary Stevens also said Antley seemed disturbed when the two visited two weeks ago. “He talked about coming back and galloping horses again,” Stevens said. “But he did have fears, and he was depressed. I had the feeling when I left that he was not going to be around much longer.”

Antley won the Kentucky Derby aboard Strike The Gold in 1991. He won the sport’s premier race again in 1999, this time riding Charismatic, a colt that had run in relatively minor races and had bounced from jockey to jockey before Antley took over.

Although Antley won 3,480 races, he is known by many fans for a race that he and Charismatic lost.

After winning the 1999 Preakness, Charismatic was one win away from a rare Triple Crown sweep, but he suffered a career-ending leg injury while running third in the Belmont Stakes in New York.

Just past the finish line, Antley alertly jumped off his distressed horse, never losing hold of the reins, and calmed Charismatic until veterinarians and other track personnel could reach the scene. Bob Lewis, the Newport Beach beer distributor who owned Charismatic, credits Antley with saving the horse’s life.

Antley’s wife, Natalie Jowett, whom he met when she interviewed him as a field producer for ABC Sports, was reportedly in New York when he was killed. Antley and Jowett married in April and were expecting their first child next month, Herzfeld said.

Herzfeld said Jowett had become “so concerned about his condition that she arranged for Antley’s brother, Brian, to come out to see him.”

Brian, he said, arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday and was met at the airport by another friend of Antley’s, a real estate agent who had represented him in the purchase of his house. Herzfeld said the agent visited Antley on Saturday afternoon “to try to help him” and that Tyler was there at the time.

Several hours later, when she returned with his brother, they found Antley dead.

Another neighbor, Jerry Holt, who was house-sitting across the street, said he heard a car “screech away at high speed” from Antley’s residence about 9:45 p.m.

Police said that about 11 p.m. they received a call from the real estate agent saying she and Brian had found Antley dead.

Antley’s death jarred the racing communities in Southern California and New York, where the Florida-born rider’s career first flourished.

Antley was raised in Elloree, S.C., near Columbia. He got his first job in racing cleaning stalls as a 15-year-old. After dropping out of high school, he began riding professionally in 1983.

In 1987, Antley led the country by riding 469 winners. Late that year, he became the first jockey to ride nine winners in one day. Four of them came at Aqueduct in New York in the afternoon, the other five that night at the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

But he faced repeated battles against drugs, depression and weight gains. Expected to ride at about 117 pounds maximum, the 5-foot, 3-inch jockey had ballooned to nearly 150 pounds the year before he first rode Charismatic.

He voluntarily surrendered his racing license in 1988 after testing positive for cocaine and marijuana, and entered a drug rehabilitation program. With his racing career not going well in the early 1990s, he told the Washington Post: “I felt like a total failure.”

He entered a drug rehabilitation program in Pasadena in 1997 at the urging of the Winners Foundation, a group that helps people in horse racing with alcohol and drug-related problems.

Then he returned to his father’s home in East Columbia, S.C. He told The Times in 1999 that he was seriously depressed and did nothing but sit on a couch and watch television for two months.

Then, he said, after watching races on television, he got motivated. He brought his weight down to 114 pounds in time to ride Charismatic. He did it by running 25 to 28 miles per day through the streets of East Columbia.

He also put himself on a strict diet. Antley told ABC News that the diet was so tough that he could never eat bread. He used sweat boxes and diuretics and aspired to be a bulimic. “I’ve never been a good flipper,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be.” He estimated that 75% of jockeys are bulimics.

After the Belmont injury to Charismatic, Antley again battled to keep his weight down. He stopped riding in the fall of 1999, returning to the track briefly in early spring of this year after knee surgery.

His last race was on March 19 at Santa Anita. It was the 19,719th ride in a career in which his mounts earned more than $92 million.

With Antley’s weight again a problem, his father told a South Carolina newspaper that he did not know whether his son would be able to mount another comeback. “He is 34,” the elder Antley said, “and I don’t know if going through what he did before--not eating, dieting, the exercising and all that--would be worth it.”

Antley, nicknamed The Ant or the Ant Man, had only a ninth-grade education. But he said he made more than $1 million as an Internet day trader in 1998.

By early 1999, he had started a newsletter offering stock picks to a couple of dozen friends and colleagues at Southern California race tracks, then converted it into a daily e-mail service called The Ant Man Report that, the Houston Chronicle reported, he sent to 1,000 readers free.

Antley used the wee hours of the morning to research his stocks before heading to tracks for morning workouts and afternoon racing.

At one time, he monitored the market from the barn of Vladimir Cerin, a Santa Anita trainer who hired Antley to ride many of his horses. Antley told friends that he had made millions in the market. “I am devastated,” Cerin said Sunday. “He had his share of problems, but he had such a good heart.”

Herzfeld, Antley’s neighbor, said that, out of concern for Antley, he recently gave the jockey a dog, then became concerned because it did not appear that Antley was taking good enough care of the pet.

He said he began checking periodically to make certain that the dog was fed and that Antley was all right.

Herzfeld said he was worried about Antley in part because the jockey had stopped taking medication for manic depression and was abusing alcohol. Herzfeld said he also believed that Antley had a drug problem. He said Antley would sometimes go two or three days without answering his telephone.

Herzfeld described Antley as isolated, though he said Tyler often visited.

Herzfeld said Antley had been arrested for driving under the influence and met Tyler in jail.

Jockey Stevens paid tribute to his friend Sunday, calling him a “a perfectionist as a rider. When he was on the track, he was as fit as any of us. He had a rough-and-tumble career. He was on his own since he was 16, and he always seemed to be searching for something. I hope that what he was searching for has finally come to him.”

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Times staff writer Ted Rohrlich contributed to this story.

* ANTLEY CALLED GREAT ATHLETE

His friends had nothing but praise for Chris Antley. He was ‘one of the best,’ said Nick Zito. D1