The Ride of His Life Just Keeps on Going

They aren’t torn in two like a losing parimutuel ticket. They aren’t tossed in the wastebasket like yesterday’s tout sheet. Nobody sends them to a faraway field when they’re too old to run.

In the disposable world that is horse racing, they are the only ones who hang around long after their final race is over.

They are the retired jockeys.

You only think they’ve disappeared.

“When you’re done riding, it seems like you get put in the back seat,” Ray York said. “Everybody loves a winner. But when you’re done, nobody knows who you are.”

Right about now, racing fans are saying . . . oh yeah, Ray York.

Oh yeah. The former Kentucky Derby winner and top Southland jockey is not dead; he is 66 and working on a ranch up north.

Oh yeah. And Thursday afternoon at Santa Anita, he is riding again.

In the eighth and final race, against men less than half his age, he will ride a 4-year-old maiden named Culebra.

Six furlongs later, he will become the first jockey in history to have ridden in parts of seven decades.

A real race with real horses bouncing along at 35 mph.

Let’s see how fast you forget that.

“This will be just another thing to show we’re tougher athletes than they have in baseball or football,” York said.

Unlike those other sports, jockeys can’t live off their fame after retirement. They don’t do commercials, they aren’t hired as commentators or speakers, nobody is paying for their autographs at sports shows.

Only a few of them become trainers because, after all those years dealing with quiet horses, it’s not so much fun also dealing with loud owners.

The only thing most jockeys get after retirement is old.

Thursday will be a chance for one jockey to get something else.

“This will be history,” York said with a cackling, 113-pound laugh, the sort of laugh mostly heard around racetrack barns at dawn.

“Yeah,” said Alex Maese, another former jockey with the same laugh. “History.”

The men were sitting around a Solana Beach restaurant Tuesday with several dozen of their best friends during one of the quarterly meetings of the Del Mar Paddock Club, a group of retired racetrackers who get together for laughs and hugs.

Bill Shoemaker was there. Bobby Yanez was there. Even Johnny Longden was there, and he’s 92.

Say this much for jockeys. They don’t forget each other.

“I could ride a horse right now,” said Longden, smiling and tapping his cane.

A couple of other jockeys laughed, because they know it’s not that easy.

York, who retired from full-time duty in 1985 and has not competed in a real race since 1991, has trained four months for this day.

He has been exercising horses every morning at Santa Anita during the week while living out of a nearby Motel 6.

After the first 10 days, he was so sore he could barely walk.

“Everything hurt,” he said.

But at $10 a head, he kept galloping.

This was a man who, in his 25,153-race career, had broken his tailbone, collarbone, ribs and bones in his face. To him, hurt is relative.

With guys like Gary Stevens retiring in their 30s, it is not surprising that today York could be what experts are guessing is the oldest rider ever at Santa Anita.

“There’s always a risk, there’s always danger,” he said. “But if I was scared, I’d never be able to go out there.”

If York were scared, he would never have accepted an owner’s offer to ride his horse in a desert duel in the late 1940s.

A cowboy living in East San Diego at the time, York agreed to jump on the thoroughbred’s back and give racing a try.

His horse won, but he didn’t know how to stop it, so it carried him up into some nearby mountains before he finally slowed it down.

He was 13. And he was hooked.

He dropped out of school in seventh grade and followed that horse’s owner to Northern California, where he rode his first real race in 1949 at 15.

Since then, of his 3,080 wins, he says two have been unforgettable.

The first was the 1954 Kentucky Derby victory aboard the adopted California gray named Determine.

The other victory occurred about the same time, in a race with a memorable post parade. Before the horses reached the starting gate, Longden’s horse leaped a fence and landed in a nearby water-filled ditch.

York jumped off his horse, jumped the fence and helped pry Longden from underneath the animal.

“He saved my life,” Longden said.

Now for the rest of the story: York returned to his horse and won the race.

Ironically, it was the presence of Longden and Shoemaker that helped prevent York from reaching the top of his field. That, and the bottle.

“I had a pretty good drinking problem,” he admitted. “Finally, I just decided I had to stop.”

He said it was the love of a woman that convinced him. His girlfriend, Michael McKay, agreed to hang around only if he quit drinking. So in 1986, he quit. And she’s still around.

As you will see Thursday, so is he.

“This is a tough business, but Ray’s got the body of a 45-year-old,” Shoemaker said.

A tough business. When York’s horse steps on the track Thursday, it will not be for an old-timers’ game. It will not be an exhibition. This will not be a few standing-still swings from Minnie Minoso.

This will be a full-speed, flesh-pounding reminder:

Just because a jockey is no longer riding for your money doesn’t mean he is not worth your time.

“I don’t know what the odds will be,” York said, cackling again. “But if I was you, I bet the horse.”

Me, I’m betting the man.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.