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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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and Arcaro |
 Willie Shoemaker |
'Shoe' was born to ride --
and rode 8,833 winners
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
The death of the great jockey Willie Shoemaker last week at 72 woke up the echoes of an old argument: Who was the better jockey, Shoemaker or Eddie Arcaro?
If you were an East Coast race tracker, i.e. horse player, you swore by Arcaro. If you were from the West there was no doubt that the Shoe was the greatest of them all.
In my case, it came down to first impressions. Arcaro was the greatest when I first started going to Belmont and Jamaica as a kid in the late 1940s. Shoemaker came along a decade later.
The feeling was that if
Arcaro had a horse up close as he approached the wire, you could
count on old Banana Nose with his powerful wrists and shoulders
to carry the horse over the finish line. Arcaro on a horse was
one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders charging up San Juan
Hill. Part of his history was that Arcaro was so good that people
bet on his mounts and made them the favorite when they didn’t
have much chance. They would then boo Arcaro when he came back
to dismount.
I am sure people often bet on Shoemaker’s mounts only because
he was riding them. But I don’t think the losers booed Shoemaker
the way they did Arcaro. Westerners are more respectful than
the railbirds of the East. And Shoemaker was a sweet man who
didn’t have the rough exterior of Arcaro.
There’s an aspect of horse racing that is different from just about all other sports. Though jockeys are spirited rivals on the track, they are almost cheek by jowl in their dressing quarters. They all dress in one room, side by side. They go out to their mounts together and walk pretty much in a group back to their quarters after the race, frequently chatting about the action on the track.
It is also of note that Arcaro and Shoemaker were friends. Arcaro was a tough customer, so it must have been because of Shoemaker’s good nature that Arcaro did not resent the guy who rivaled him as the best of all jocks--at least in this country.
Here’s Arcaro on Shoemaker: “He had the finest hands in the game…He had great rapport with horses. He had great balance. Horses would run for him, and I’ve always wanted to know why. I always thought you had to make horses run. But not Shoemaker. He got them to run without pushing them.”
Shoemaker was born to ride. He seemed to flow into the horse. A trainer said, “He rode a horse as if he was riding a swan.” Writer Frank Deford says, “He was poetry at rest.”
A significant aspect of
the Arcaro-Shoemaker rivalry came in 1955. Shoemaker and the
front-running Swaps beat Arcaro on the favored Nashua in the
Kentucky Derby. Nashua then went on to win the Preakness and
Belmont Stakes. Because Swaps did not run in those races, there
were demands for a match race between the two. This came to pass
late in the summer. Arcaro cannily burst to the front with Nashua--front-runners
usually win match races--and held on the whole way to win. Everybody
had expected the speedy Swaps to grab the early lead.
Shoemaker was 4-foot-11 and rode at a few pounds over 100. He
won his first race April 10, 1949, in his third race aboard Shafter
V. He rode his last race, Feb. 3, 1990. He finished with 8,833
victories, which led all jockeys until Laffit Pincay came along
to pass him in 1999. He won 11 Triple Crown races, regretting
only that he never won the Triple Crown with one horse. Arcaro
rode 17 Triple Crown winners and had two Triple Crown winners,
Whirlaway and Citation.
Shoemaker regarded his victory aboard the 17-1 shot Ferdinand
in the 1986 Derby as his greatest triumph. Ferdinand was crowded
by horses from the outside and almost thrown over the fence in
the dash to the first turn. Shoemaker withstood that pressure,
then daringly squeezed Ferdinand throw a narrow hole in the stretch
to win the race. At 54 he was the oldest jockey to win the Derby.
It saddened Shoemaker and the world of racing to learn earlier this year that Ferdinand wound up in Japan slaughtered for horse meat.
Part of the Shoemaker legend is his gaffe aboard Gallant Man in the 1957 Kentucky Derby. He misjudged the finish line, standing up in the stirrups before the finish line and wasn’t able to get his mount moving again as Iron Liege went on to win the race. Because of this many race tracks put up a bulls-eye like marker over the finish line post as an aid to jockeys.
Shoemaker had success as a trainer after retiring from riding. But in April, 1991, after playing golf and having drinks with friends, he was involved in a car crash that left him a paraplegic. Shoemaker’s blood-alcohol level was found to be in excess of the legal limit. He received a settlement from Ford estimated at $2.5 million. He drew some criticism for filing a lawsuit as well against the state of California, a hospital and the doctors who treated him. The suit was dropped in 1997.
Shoemaker was married three times, all to tall women. He left a daughter from his third marriage.
Bill Christine, the crack racing writer for the Los Angeles Times, cast some light on the legend of his birth. He was born prematurely, weighing one pound, 13 ounces. The doctor said he had little chance to survive. Shoemaker said he had been told that his grandmother put him in a shoebox and used an open oven as an incubator to save him. Some say this was apocryphal. He said that his grandmother in her 90s told him that when he was an infant she wrapped him in a warm blanket and plopped him on a pillow that rested on the stove door.
©2003 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
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