Elliott Is Cashing In Big on Smarty Jones

In a battered, weight-interrupted, booze-hampered, peripatetic career, Stewart Elliott has managed to win 3,286 races, but even in his best year, one of the recent ones at Philadelphia Park, the 39-year-old Ellliott never earned as much as $300,000.

Then in six weeks this year, Elliott rode Smarty Jones to a couple of wins at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas, tacked on a victory in something called the Kentucky Derby, and -- presto! -- more than $600,000 came his way. He added some chump change, about $65,000, with Smarty Jones’ Preakness win, and this Saturday in New York, Elliott could earn 10% of a second $5-million bonus if his horse wins the Belmont Stakes and becomes the 12th horse -- and the first since Affirmed 26 years ago -- to earn the Triple Crown.

“I’m going to invest the money,” Elliott said one recent morning at Philadelphia Park, where Smarty Jones trains and where the Canadian-born jockey, sober at last, has been the leading rider for the last four years. “There’s a lot of ups and downs in this game. You don’t know what’s going to happen next week, or even tomorrow. It’ll be nice to be able to put some money away. The pressure’s off.”

In Smarty Jones’ incredible 2004 run, that may be the only time the affable, what-me-worry? Elliott has used the p-word. Usually the word sidles into the conversation when a reporter asks him whether there’s a difference between riding here, where a Smarty Jones morning gallop has dwarfed the average race-day crowd, and competing before throngs well over 100,000 in million-dollar races. Philadelphia Park doesn’t charge admission, lets its customers park free and doesn’t even announce attendance figures. In the nutty era of simulcast betting gone amok, total handle is paramount, and betting on races at other tracks outdistances the action on the races that Elliott and others ride in Bensalem.

Before Smarty Jones, the undefeated colt who has been ridden by Elliott in all eight of his wins, Stew, or Stewie, as his friends call him, had never ridden in a race worth more than $200,000. Because he abused his body, he messed up the chance to regularly ride Jostle, the best horse trainer John Servis ever had before Smarty Jones landed him on the front pages. When the 3-year-old filly won two Grade I stakes at New York tracks in 2000, Mike Smith did the riding.

“I’ve had a lot of personal problems, and I’ve done some things that I’m not proud of,” Elliott said the day before the Preakness. “But that’s behind me. I want to just look ahead to the future and hopefully all that mess is behind me.”

Roy and Pat Chapman, who bred and own Smarty Jones, were told early on by Servis about Elliott’s brushes with police during his hard-drinking years. The Chapmans, sober for almost 30 years to Elliott’s 3 1/2, still believed in the jockey, and accepted Servis’ decision to keep him on Smarty Jones this year. Servis is more than Elliott’s employer in races; he’s a good friend.

“Stew’s like Smarty Jones, nothing fazes him,” Servis said. “He’s at a point in his life where he wants to forget some of the things that have happened, if only people will let him forget. If I went hunting and fishing 12 times last year, 11 of those times were with him. He’s very quiet, and he’s really a homebody. He’s a good guy.”

About the time Jostle’s career was peaking, Elliott severely beat up an acquaintance -- in what sounds like a mismatch, the jockey used a pool cue, a beer bottle and a wooden stool for weapons -- and pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. Another time, he punched a girlfriend and tried to break down her door. An earlier marriage failed, and now he’s engaged to Lauren Vannozzi, who also has ridden at Philadelphia Park. (She has never forgiven her fiance for the day his horse ran hers down in the stretch there.) They had planned to marry in August, but the nuptials have been postponed until early next year because Elliott has been given the chance to move uptown, from Philadelphia Park to Monmouth Park in Oceanport, N.J., this summer.

Elliott’s divorced parents are lifelong horse people. Dennis Elliott rode for more than 20 years, battling the scales long before his son had to, and Myhill, Elliott’s mother, is an assistant trainer at Woodbine, the track in suburban Toronto. When Elliott was 6, his father moved to Hong Kong, where jockeys are allowed to ride heavier than in North America, and six years later the family was in New Jersey, where Elliott quit high school to become a jockey.

Early in his career, Elliott injured his back at Calder Race Course in Florida and while recovering his weight ballooned from 110 pounds to 135. His back healed, but for 18 months he was too heavy to ride. He exercised horses in New England, even followed a horse dentist and a blacksmith around the barns, thinking he might learn enough to adopt one of those careers.

“But that wasn’t me,” Elliott said. “I really didn’t care. Riding was all I knew, or cared for.”

So Elliott got his weight down and went back to riding. In 1989, in New England, he won 381 races and finished third nationally, behind Kent Desormeaux and Pat Day. Desormeaux, who finished third aboard Imperialism in the Kentucky Derby, was one of several jockeys at Churchill Downs who lauded Elliott for his chilly ride on Smarty Jones.

“Maybe a lot of people hadn’t heard of [Elliott] before the Derby,” Desormeaux said, “but he’s a mature veteran. He sat on Smarty Jones like a lizard on a log. He never lost a beat.”

Jerry Bailey, the premier jockey in the U.S., missed the Derby because his horse, Wimbledon, was scratched. Bailey watched the race he has won twice on TV in the Churchill jockeys’ room.

“You’d have thought [Elliott] had ridden in this race a thousand times,” Bailey told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Elliott was the first first-time Derby jockey to win the race since Ron Franklin aboard Spectacular Bid in 1979. He was the first so-called rookie rider to take the Preakness since Pat Valenzuela with Sunday Silence in 1989. The last jockey to win the Belmont Stakes on his first try was Rene Douglas with Editor’s Note in 1996.

Jockeys don’t get many chances to ride in 1 1/2-mile races, like the Belmont, and jockeys outside New York are not exposed to 1 1/2-mile circumferences, like Belmont Park’s. Elliott, who had ridden only one race at Churchill Downs before the Derby, has ridden occasionally at Belmont. Because of the makeup of the small field, Smarty Jones, who usually stalks the leaders, could find himself as the pace-setter Saturday. There hasn’t been a gate-to-wire winner of the Belmont since Swale in 1984.

“If we’re up front, that’s fine,” Elliott said. “This is a horse with tremendous ability, and he’s learned how to control his speed.”

Elliott didn’t have another mount at Churchill on Derby day. He was in the jockeys’ room, killing time, for more than six hours before the Derby.

“I can’t image how he sat there all that time,” said Joe Servis, the trainer’s father, who carved out a hardscrabble living much like Elliott during his riding days. “He’s got to be one of the calmest guys around.”

Asked what he did on Derby day, Elliott said that he signed autographs and watched the other races on TV.

“The time went fairly fast,” he said in his halting, nonchalant way. “Before you knew it, it was time to ride in the Derby.”

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Triple Crown Ratings

Tribune Company ratings for 3-year-olds leading up to the Belmont Stakes:

*--* N. Horse Trainer Jockey St W P S Last Race Next Race 1. Smarty John Stewar 8 8 0 0 Preakness Belmont Jones Servis t (1st) Stakes Elliot t 2. Rock Jason Undeci 4 2 1 1 Preakness Belmont Hard Ten Orman ded (2nd) Stakes 3. Lion Patrick Mike 7 3 3 0 Preakness Swaps Stakes Heart Biancone Smith (4th) 4. Kristin Kent 17 5 4 2 Preakness Swaps Stakes Imperialis Mulhall Desorm (5th) m eaux 5. Mark Jerry 7 2 2 3 Preakness Belmont Eddington Hennig Bailey (3rd) Stakes 6. The Nick Zito Shane 9 4 2 1 Kentucky Undecided Cliff’s Seller Derby (5th) Edge s 7. Purge Todd John 5 3 1 0 Peter Pan Maybe Pletcher Velazq Stakes (1st) Belmont uez Stakes 8. Ashado Todd John 9 6 2 1 Kentcuky Oaks Mother Pletcher Velazq (1st) Goose uez Stakes 9. Todd Jose 10 5 0 3 Kentucky Ohio Derby Limehouse Pletcher Santos Derby (4th) 10. Tapit Michael Ramon 5 3 0 0 Kentucky Undecided Dickinso Doming Derby (9th) n uez

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Triple Crown panel: Bill Christine, Los Angeles Times, Dave Joseph, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Tom Keyser, Baltimore Sun, Neil Milbert, Chicago Tribune and Paul Moran, Newsday.

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Belmont Facts

*--* * What: 136th Belmont Stakes, the final leg of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown. * Where: Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y. * When: Saturday. * Post Time: 3:30 PDT. * TV: Channel 4 (coverage starts at 2:30 p.m. PDT). * Purse: $1 million. * Distance: 1 1/2 miles. * Record Time: 2:24 by Secretariat in 1973. * Post Position Draw: Wednesday, 8 a.m. PDT (Fox Sports Net, TVG)

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