A LONG RIDE HOME

It has been his greatest year -- purses of more than $13 million, two wins and a second on the Breeders’ Cup card, 26 stakes victories and a total of 229 wins as one of the country’s hottest and most coveted jockeys, and all of that, said Garrett Gomez, is strictly a bonus, an interpretation hard to dispute.

After all, when drugs and alcohol have been the morning-line favorites for half your life, when the roller coaster is about to crash and you spend 40 consecutive days in jail and don’t ride for 21 months, and when your wife is waiting for the divorce papers and certain the next call will be from a crack house or morgue, there’s a crushing need to reprioritize, to somehow get the help enabling you to become husband and father first, jockey second.

After all, wasn’t all of it -- the family, the talent, the career that began at 16 and had so much promise -- so close to swirling down the drain, as he said, as she said?

What is the area code at the bottom?

“So many times he would call in desperation and say, ‘You’ve got to get me out of this place I’m at,’ ” Pam Gomez, Garrett’s wife, said at the dining room table in their Duarte home. “The problem was, I couldn’t get him out of that place because he had to get himself out. I could only provide the car. I could only give him a ride.”

It is Thanksgiving week of an amazing year, and one day at a time their marriage and life are back on track, his career on track as never before.

On Thursday, Garrett and Pam will take Jared, 4, and Amanda, 2, to his parents’ house in Riverside, where his sister and brother and many in-laws and cousins will share a festive dinner, Gomez sober and taking the whole day to be with a family drawn closer by his problems, the parents and others who so often had to join the search for him before he ultimately found himself.

It will be a rare Thanksgiving when he hasn’t been riding or in rehab.

A rare Thanksgiving, Pam Gomez said, “on a happy and healthy note rather than the stress and worry we’ve been through at times.”

Garrett Gomez relaxed on a couch in the jockey’s room at Hollywood Park and shook his head.

“I’ve been shaking my head for the last eight months,” he said. “Every time God has put something positive in my life and I acknowledge what he’s done, he’s put something else that’s positive in my life.

“And, you know, he may not be doing it just for me. He may be doing it for some other person who needs the help and strength and gets it from seeing what he’s done for me. Cool. Maybe I’m just along for the ride.”

If there is an unintended pun in that, if Gomez also had to learn to put God in the saddle with him as a major element in coping with the addiction -- the alcohol and the cocaine, speed, marijuana and crystal meth -- it is a God, Gomez said, that he can relate to and understand.

“I’m not a religious person and I don’t go to church,” he said, “but when I got involved in the program I’m now involved in, I had to find a higher power of my understanding that was caring and forgiving and while it took a while, I came to learn and to believe that there is such a God, and that’s a great thing. ...

“I’ve always known I’ve had the ability, and there were times when I had the opportunity to make something happen in a positive way, but either I’d fall apart or they never came together. I rode and won big races, but I just never reached the magnitude of this year, or the confidence of this year, and obviously I just never handled many of those previous situations as smoothly as I could have.”

Now, Gomez said, he has better coping skills, is better able to balance family and career, and has a better understanding of Garrett Gomez, the person.

“He’s sent me down a road where I’ve met that person,” Gomez said, “and think he’s a pretty good guy.”

All life is a learning experience and maybe, as Jim Peagram, Gomez’s agent, suggests, it just took his client 16 years to get it right and now “there has been a 180-degree swing in self-esteem and personality.” Previously, Peagram said, Gomez had “always been something of a prima donna,” only wanting to ride certain horses for certain trainers and complaining loudly when he didn’t get his way or was bumped by a trainer. People had the impression, the agent said, he would just as soon be playing golf as working horses.

“He’s come to grip with the realization that he was hurting the people around him as much as he was hurting himself,” Peagram said. “Now he doesn’t complain about anything and I get calls from owners and trainers appreciative of how he rode their horse out to get second or third money. I used to represent both Garrett and David Flores and I would tell them that the sky was the limit for both of them. Garrett has gone beyond the sky.”

At 33, re-licensed in September 2004 after a 21-month drug hiatus and rehab, Gomez has been the leading rider or runner-up in a succession of meets and won 26 stakes this year for 19 trainers, illustrative of the demand for his services. He has won five Grade I stakes compared with a total of nine previously, and the $13.1 million in purses is $4 million more than his previous high.

In one stunning weekend in early October, he won Belmont Park’s $500,000 Grade I Vosburgh on 26-1 outsider Taste Of Paradise and the $1-million Grade I Jockey Club Gold Cup on Borrego, then returned to California to win the $250,000 Grade II Lady’s Secret on Healthy Addiction.

That, of course, was a prelude to the Breeders’ Cup, where he won the Mile with Artie Schiller and the Juvenile with Stevie Wonderboy. The latter could be at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby on the first weekend in May, or as Gomez said, “He’s the best 2-year-old I’ve ever ridden, and hopefully he’ll be the best 3-year-old.”

Doug O’Neill, who trains Stevie Wonderboy, views horse and jockey as “a perfect fit.”

“Much like Eddie Delahoussaye,” O’Neill said, “Garrett has an amazing way of saving his horse to the end, an amazing ability to get his horses to pick up the bit when the real running starts. He’s blessed with something in his hands, and I say that because not all jockeys have it.”

Gomez learned the secrets from his father, Louie Gomez, who rode on small tracks in Santa Fe, N.M., El Paso and elsewhere. How to sit a horse, use the whip, create a mental clock. He grew up in the jockeys’ room, a boy among men, rode bulls for $50 jackpots, sampled his first beer and drug -- “White Crosses, sort of a crushed-up diet pill that we snorted,” he said -- in high school, got his apprentice license at 16 and made a quick mark with 215 wins, then rode mainly in the Midwest and East before making California a full-time business in 1997.

The limelight is tricky, the roller coaster dangerous, and there are varied outlets when the intense 70 or so seconds of a six-furlong sprint is over.

Gomez had varying success amid the substance spiral, but a first marriage with two children dissolved, and he took close to a year off in the mid-1990s when riding in Kentucky and Arkansas to deal, in part, with alcohol abuse. He met Pam at Santa Anita in 1998 when she was working as an assistant to trainer Kathy Walsh.

“He told me about the alcohol problems,” Pam said, “but he was young at the time of those problems, and I wasn’t aware of the severity.”

It was while pregnant with Amanda in the fall of 2002 that she became aware he was using drugs again and basically kicked him out -- “No one wants an alcoholic and drug fiend around kids, and I didn’t blame her,” Gomez said -- although she doesn’t put it in terms of an ejection.

“He chose a lifestyle that didn’t include a wife and kids, so there was no ultimatum that needed to be said,” she said. “It was either what life do you choose ... where you are today or do you want your family and your career?”

She thought she had an answer when Amanda was born. Gomez surprised her by showing up at the hospital and slept in a chair overnight. He was gone the next morning, however, and a friend drove Pam home.

Gomez went to New Mexico for a time after that to ride and work on personal issues. Subsequently, facing warrants in three counties, he was arrested in Temecula in October 2003 on suspicion of possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia. He spent 40 days in jail before being released on the condition he enter a rehab program. Pam Gomez thought their marriage was over.

“I pretty much had no thought of us being together,” she said, up until they began talking on a meaningful basis again in the summer of 2004 when he was in a Pasadena program called Impact.

“Until then I was just hoping that one day we could be friends for the benefit of the kids,” she said. “I was just waiting for [divorce] papers to be filed, and a lot of my sadness was fueled by the thought that our children would never really know him or see him ride. He’s such an amazing rider and my daughter is such a horse lover and I kept thinking she would never see him except in the films we had. Now she’s his biggest fan and the whole thing is pretty amazing.”

Bob Fletcher, a former addict who works for the horsemen’s Winner’s Foundation, has been an important counselor for both Garrett and Pam, who calls him “a pivotal reason our marriage was saved.” Fletcher and the foundation helped prepare Gomez for Impact.

“It’s the toughest rehab program there is with the highest success rate,” she said. “At that point there was no sense in a gravy program. At that point it was a matter of life and death.”

Gomez still attends a meeting when he feels the need, sometimes five a week, sometimes stopping on his way home from the track. He is less apt to worry, he said, about what people think or say, or worry about what mounts he gets or doesn’t. “I work on myself on a daily basis now and I try to stay in the moment, not get too far ahead,” he said. “I let things roll. I. know now that if I’m successful as a husband and father it translates to success at the track, and that’s where my priority is because the racing success is strictly a bonus.”

Said trainer O’Neill: “I really didn’t know Garrett that well before, but you can see how much he enjoys coming to the barn in the morning. ... The whole package has come together, and all of us hope that continues.”

On Breeders’ Cup day, Gomez won the Bill Shoemaker Award as the Cup’s outstanding jockey. Shoemaker was an idol, and Gomez couldn’t help but remember that two years before, on the day Shoemaker died, he had deprived himself of going to the funeral because he was in jail on the drug charges, alone, tears in his eyes, a sad and depressing portrait he recalled now while looking forward -- one day at a time -- to a Thanksgiving of redemption.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Top jocks

Jockeys with the most earnings this year (through Monday):

*--* JOCKEY STARTS 1ST 2ND 3RD EARNINGS John Velazquez 1,110 239 173 142 $19,756,456 Edgar Prado 1,440 296 222 204 $18,414,772 Jerry Bailey 643 166 102 90 $18,082,992 Rafael Bejarano 1,265 247 240 194 $13,647,370 Garrett Gomez 1,196 229 199 159 $13,121,653

*--*

Source: Equibase.com