A Lightweight Champion on Steady Diet of Victories

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire ... “

Not for history’s winningest jockey, they’re not.

Laffit Pincay Jr. eats nuts only long enough to spit their gnawed remains into the sink.

“While visions of sugar plums danced in their ... “

Wrong again.

It’s been decades since Pincay ate anything that sweet, and then only because he knew he would soon be vomiting.

“So bring us some figgy pudding ... “

Don’t even think about it.

Pincay would have maybe one bite of one fig for breakfast. Maybe.

The holidays are the hardest time for the sporting world’s reigning freak of nature, a 54-year-old man with a soft smile and a fruitcake-hard will.

He loves to eat. But he loves to ride.

“So for now,” he said, “I will ride.”

Two years after surpassing Bill Shoemaker in all-time victories, Pincay is winning society’s two most difficult battles--against weight and time--having reemerged as one of the best jockeys in the country.

Pincay has won or tied for the riding title in five of the last six meets at major Southern California tracks.

“It’s crazy, unheard of,” said trainer Bill Spawr. “If this were any other sport, he’d be on the front page of every paper in the country.”

Today, in the $460,750 Hollywood Futurity at Hollywood Park, he will be on Yougottawanna, one of the top 2-year-olds in a race that has produced five Kentucky Derby winners in the last 20 years.

Which, to expand the point, is like saying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be leading the Lakers Sunday against the Golden State Warriors. Only, Pincay is a few months older.

Said jockey Kent Desormeaux, “We’re in awe. We’re like those kid basketball players coming to work every day with Michael Jordan.”

Standing in the large, sparkling kitchen of his sprawling San Fernando Valley home recently, Pincay looked at all the food-filled cabinets and sighed.

“I can eat anything I want,” he said. “I just can’t swallow it.”

Two numbers, two shakes of the head.

Laffit Pincay has a record 9,271 victories in 37 years of riding.

Has anybody, in any sport, ever won 9,271 of anything?

He maintains a riding weight of 117 on a blocky 5-foot-1 frame that could normally hold 140 pounds.

Remember the last time you tried to lose 23 pounds? Now try doing it every day of your life.

With no tricks.

This is what has won Pincay the admiration of everyone in the backside, this discipline without diet pills, without forced vomiting, without depression.

“The way he does it, I could last maybe four or five days,” said Desormeaux. “But, like most jockeys, I need help. Out of about 40 in this room, only four can do it without help.”

Pincay has tried that “help.” It nearly killed him.

Four years ago, having gone through addictions to everything from diet pills to sweat boxes, he celebrated a 50th birthday that felt like his last.

Trainers were no longer using him. Horses were no longer flying under him.

He was so exhausted by goofy regimens, such as a two-year diet of only nuts and cereals, that he could barely climb out of his chair at the end of the racing day.

“The minute I would close my eyes, I would go to sleep, and I hated that feeling,” he said.

He trailed win leader Shoemaker by enough that he was considering leaving his beloved Southern California and heading to less competitive tracks up north in hopes of catching him.

“Yeah, people gave up on me,” Pincay said. “Hey, I also thought I was finished.”

Then, watching television one day, he saw a show featuring a 70-year-old woman espousing the virtues of a fruit diet.

And he thought, if it works for somebody that old ...

So he started eating bits of fruit for breakfast.

“Not whole bananas or apples or anything like that,” he said. “But just bits of them.”

Then for lunch, he would have bits of turkey and bread.

And for dinner, a little plastic bowl of puffed cereal.

Everything weighed on a little electronic scale. Everything eaten slowly. An ounce here, an ounce there.

If he is craving anything fattening, he will chew it for the taste, then spit it out in the sink. It may be unsightly, but it’s not unhealthy.

“It is very hard, because I love food,” he said. “But it worked.”

The weight stayed off naturally. The wins came more easily.

“He had slowed a lot,” said Eddie Delahoussaye, fellow Hall of Fame jockey. “Then all of a sudden, he woke up.”

As Pincay closed in on Shoemaker’s record of 8,833 wins, the trainers came running.

At 52, he broke the record. Then, he just kept getting better.

“You ask me, he’s at the top of his game right now,” Delahoussaye said. “Everybody was wondering where he went. Turns out, he was always right here.”

While Pincay still suffers from blatant age discrimination when it comes to big races--he’s ridden in one Kentucky Derby in seven years and he didn’t have a mount in October’s eight-race Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park in New York--the local guys love him.

For them, he’s not Tony Gwynn, or Cal Ripken Jr., but both.

Spawr remembers the afternoon at Santa Anita when it rained so hard, many jockeys didn’t show up.

Pincay was there and won the first race for Spawr before the rest of the card was canceled.

“That’s him,” Spawr said. “Nobody wants to get on a horse, and he says, ‘I’ll ride.”’

He is known for rarely complaining about a bad horse, rarely showing up less than four hours before the first race.

And now, he is also known for his tattoos.

“Jeanine” is scripted on one bulging biceps. That’s his wife.

There is a pirate on the other bulging biceps. That’s one of his nicknames.

The common thread being, both were inked in the last couple of years.

“Everybody thinks tattoos are only for young people,” he said with a grin. “Why not me?”

At about that moment, his 8-year-old son, Jean-Laffit, walked into the award-filled family room with a handful of colorful holiday candies. The boy offered one to me. I didn’t dare.

Ten minutes later, I summoned him back for one of those nice juicy red ones.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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Winner’s Circle

Thoroughbred racing’s winningest jockeys:

1. Laffit Pincay Jr. 9,271

2. Bill Shoemaker 8,833

3. Pat Day 8,131

4. Russell Baze 7,631

5. David Gall 7,396

HOLLYWOOD FUTURITY

Ninth race on card that begins at 12:30 p.m.