Win Or Lose, Jerry Bailey Is Still An All-Star Jockey

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - On a wet, dark day in the foothills of the Adirondacks, Ruby Hill is winning the second race at Saratoga and Jerry D. Bailey is stuck with an obstructed view.

Atop JoJo's Express, slithering 10 horses behind the leader, Jerry can see through his goggles only mud and muscle. His red and white silks have faded to gray. Though a Hall of Fame jockey with more than $100 million in winnings, Jerry Bailey is riding a loser. Those in front will share in a purse of $34,000. He'll get the jockey's basic trip fee, 60 bucks.

Jerry is a hero here in Saratoga, where organized horse racing began barely a month after the Battle of Gettysburg. But on the 19th day of the five-week meet, nature has played trump.

A hard morning rain has turned the venerable dirt track into a sloppy, gruesome gruel. Worse, the grass inside the oval is soggy and unsafe, and track managers are forced to move one of the day's featured races from turf to mud.

"It's a tough day to be a jockey," mutters Jerry as he stares at the roiling clouds.

In a career of more than 22,000 races and counting, Jerry Bailey has learned to take the long view, even through muddy goggles.

This son of an El Paso dentist has won the Preakness, the Belmont and twice the Kentucky Derby. The Woodward Stakes three times. Four Breeders' Cup Classics. The first $4 million World Cup. He rode the fabulous horse Cigar to 16 straight victories, tying a hallowed racing record.

Jerry has built his career slowly and carefully, like a career politician or corporate executive, with a focus on the moment and an attention to detail. A recovering alcoholic, he eschews the seductive shortcuts, the binge-and-purge jockey lifestyle of bulimic excess. Twice president of the Jockey's Guild, he campaigns for track safety and jockey welfare.

The consummate professional, he rides fast horses and slow horses, winners and losers. He rides early-morning exercises with horses that may win everything or nothing. Still, at 40, no matter what horse he sits on, Jerry Bailey is at the top of the racing world.

A quirky place

The Saratoga Race Course lies in the heart of Saratoga Springs, just across the street from the site where filly Lizzy W. won the resort's first organized Thoroughbred horse race in August, 1963. A year later, 10,000 people jammed onto a new 125-acre course to witness the first Travers Stakes.

In an age of sleek modern tracks built like airport terminals, Saratoga is a quirky scatter of green-trimmed white buildings, red-and-white-striped tents and awnings, picnic grounds and trees, orderly crowds and beer and ice cream. A state fair without pigs.

The jockeys' quarters lie in the middle of that scatter, a cluster of first-floor rooms cramped with the undersized belongings of racing's top names: Day, Chavez, Stevens, Velasquez, Smith.

At 8 a.m., there is the putter of uniformed groundskeepers and the sweet smell of rain. The air is thick with drizzle and the distant thunder of hooves. Though late for the morning workouts, Jerry stops to weigh himself on an old freight scale. "Not bad. A hundred and twelve," he mumbles, deducting four pounds for his baseball cap, knit shirt, windbreaker and wallet, as well as the knee-high riding boots he's wearing under his jeans.

Moments later, he heads his Chevy Blazer past the track's vast backstretch into the broad, peaceful acreage of GreenTree, a grand old farm where Bill Mott and his horses are already at work. Jerry had assumed that the rain would curb the morning's workouts, but it hadn't. Still, he's soaking in the smell of wet trees.

"My dad always asks me if I'm moving back to Texas when I retire. But I tell him I think I've died and gone to heaven. Coming from El Paso, I didn't know that grass was supposed to stay green until I came here."

He parks and emerges with a flak vest under the windbreaker and a helmet on his head. He loosens his shoulders and wonders aloud about Bill Mott's mood.

At 44, Mott is one of the world's best horse trainers. In a bright blue rain suit and a baseball cap, he looks more like a football coach than the trainer of Theatrical and Cigar.

Grooms walk a circle of horses while Mott checks them over. He turns and tells Jerry to stretch Glok, the tall brown horse standing next to him, for a single turn around the farm's practice track.

Glok is owned by Allen E. Paulson, the Kentucky-based breeder who owned Cigar. Glok and another, better-known horse, Geri, are training for major races at Arlington International Race Course, outside Chicago. The races are scheduled for Travers weekend, and the plan is for Jerry to ride Behrans in the Travers at Saratoga that Saturday. After the race, he'll fly to Chicago to ride Glok, Geri and Memories Of Silver on Sunday for a total $2 million in purses.

This morning, however, he's riding Glok for nothing.

"It's a courtesy, but it's also part of the business," Jerry explains later, a matter of keeping owners and trainers happy. "If I'm not there to work the horse, somebody else will get the mount."

Dr. Hiram Polk is chief of surgery at the University of Louisville Hospital in Kentucky. He owns a few horses trained by Bill Mott. He has admired Jerry for a couple of decades, but believes he is now riding at the top of his game.

"I've been coming here for 20 years," Polk said. "I don't think I've ever seen a guy dominate like Jerry has this year."

Glok and Geri suddenly burst out of the horizon. Geri is on the outside, a nose ahead. Jerry is cocked like a handgun, horizontal in the saddle, his body motionless over the fury below.

As he glides past, Polk is describing in detail a race just a few days before. On the far turn, Jerry saw an opening on the rail and went for it. The move was so sudden, so decisive, he said, that it saved 30 yards on the turn. Jerry held on to win by half a length.

"It's uncanny," Polk said.

Joe Hirsch, the dean of American horse racing writers, says bluntly, Jerry Bailey "is the best we have."

"When (Eddie) Arcaro retired in '62, I never thought I'd see a rider that I would compare with him," said Hirsch, who has worked at The Daily Racing Form for 49 years. "Some riders have the strength. Some have the intelligence. But very rarely is it combined. It was in Arcaro's case, and it is in Bailey's case."

A way to make money

Jerry began riding at age 12 in El Paso, where his father, dentist James D. Bailey, owned a small string of quarter horses he had purchased in claiming races.

"It was my first job, a way to make money," Jerry said. He shoveled manure and rode exercises. By the time he was 17, still a senior at El Paso's Coronado High School, he was riding Thoroughbreds at nearby Sunland Park and Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico.

After graduation in 1975, he moved to Omaha and rode there for a season. Then on for a stay in Detroit.

He returned to ride for a while in upstate New Mexico, in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. He tried, for a time, attending college, as he had promised his mother before her death. He quit after an unhappy semester at the University of Texas at El Paso.

He traveled east and south to work the tracks in Arkansas, New Jersey and Florida. He was the leading rider for several seasons at Hawthorne and Tropical-at-Calder.

In one stretch, he won four major stakes races on four successive Saturdays. On the fifth Saturday he broke his collarbone in a training mishap.

But he was getting noticed by the major stables, and in 1982, he moved permanently to New York to be closer to Belmont, Aqueduct and, of course, Saratoga.

A horse of deceptive speed

Back on the main oval, Jerry is riding Ajina, an experienced Mott-trained filly, on the turf track.

There is a click of watches as Jerry and the filly rip across the turf at the backstretch.

"One-thirteen," mutters one timer.

"He hit the mark. It's perfect," another squeals in delight.

Ajina is a horse of deceptive speed. The idea of the workout was to push the horse, but not exhaust her. She wouldn't have time to recover before the Chicago race. Jerry had hit the perfect pace.

"It's like being in a Mercedes. You look down and suddenly you're going 80," Jerry said. "A lot of times I'll go too fast."

He has already won with Ajina. But in recent years, he has won with many of the best. Home At Last won him his first million-dollar race. On Sea Hero, he won the Travers and the Kentucky Derby. On Grindstone he won the Derby again. Hansel won the Belmont and the Preakness. Black Tie Affair won the Breeder's Cup Classic.

While his career is still nomadic, Jerry and his wife, Suzee, have tried hard to reduce the chaos. They have a home in New York on Long Island, where they stay through Christmas. By the new year they are in Florida, where they own another home.

Jerry met Suzee in Florida at Hialeah. She was Susan Chulick, a 26-year-old actress and model from Illinois who was trying to break into television. She had been to Hollywood and filmed commercials, in which she sold mufflers and cars. But she had studied journalism at the University of Missouri and wanted to be a television reporter.

Hired by the fledgling Sports Channel and assigned to a show on horse racing, she was sent south to cover the Flamingo Stakes. She did not know who Jerry Bailey was.

"I knew nothing about horse racing, so I had focused all my research on the favorite," recalls Suzee, a high-energy blonde child of the Midwest. "The favorite didn't win. Jerry's horse did."

The horse: Time for a Change.

They were married in December, 1985.

Suzee settled fitfully into the migrant life of the jockey, traveling with him from Long Island to Saratoga to Florida and Kentucky and California. They struggled to produce a child, but were faced with ongoing problems of fertility.

And there were other problems.

Jerry seemed to have grown accident-prone. The effortless grace of the Thoroughbred makes it easy to forget the danger. A typical race involves eight or nine small athletes poised over six tons of furious bone and muscle moving, quite literally, at breakneck speed. And Jerry inventories his injuries with a sense of pain and relief. A broken jaw, three cracked vertebrae, a broken collarbone, a foot broken in three places, 15 broken ribs. When he and Suzee were married, he was only shortly removed from a cast.

A wounded jockey earns nothing, so each fall can be costly, if not fatal. So a jockey with a problem is living on the edge, and Jerry Bailey was already there. He was an alcoholic.

"A lot of people don't know that because Jerry wasn't a party kind of drinker," Suzee said.

"I was a home drinker. I didn't want anyone to discover the problem that I had," Jerry said.

On days off, he was slurring his words by midafternoon. She thought it was blood sugar. She found a glass full of vodka she had assumed was 7-Up. She thought he had quit.

"I was sneaking," Jerry said.

The problem reached its peak in Florida, where a house they rented came with its own bottle of gin. Jerry hated gin, couldn't stand it. But he drank it anyway. His mother-in-law had marked the bottle. A policeman friend helped them find an outpatient group. Jerry went.

"From the moment I walked in there, I knew that I belonged," Jerry said.

He learned how to put down the celebratory glass of champagne rather than drink it. To give away the free cases of Moet and Budweiser. To talk to his wife.

Jerry quit drinking on Jan. 1, 1989. That year, he was elected by his peers as president of the Jockey's Guild, a post he relinquished only last year. His game got better. The purses got richer. And in a remarkable, steady climb Jerry Bailey made the transformation from talented jockey to superstar jockey. He won the Eclipse Award as the nation's best jockey two years in a row. In 1995, he was elected to horse racing's Hall of Fame.

"When I first saw him (in the early 1980s), I thought, `Seen better,"' said Bill Boland, a Corpus Christi, Texas, native who works as a placing judge at Saratoga. "Now, I can't say I've seen many better."

"He rides fillies good. He rides 2-year-olds good. He rides all the horses - short, long, turf. He's got a good head."

And now a clear one.

"Jerry says that it feels good, when he is in the middle of a race, to see clearly. He feels like he has an edge," Suzee said.

The change is apparent to horse racing writer Joe Hirsch.

"For the last five years, he's been riding as good, or better, than anybody in the country," Hirsch said. "Maybe the world."

Having beaten back the alcohol problem, the couple went after the infertility problem. In 1992, with the help of a Florida fertility specialist and an elaborate and expensive fertilization process called gamma interfallopian transfer, Suzee became pregnant with their son, Justin. She considers that nothing less than a miracle, given their peripatetic life and frenzied pace.

Justin, now nearly 5, is the focus of their lives. They try, as much as possible, to have him travel with them.

`He sticks to his job'

Jerry is passionate about racing, but not about horses. When he describes them, he sounds as though he is giving employees a year-end job review.

Part of the reason is the business. He answers to trainers such as Bill Mott and Shug McCaughey and D. Wayne Lukas, not to their horses. But part of the reason, as Jerry explains it, is Jerry himself. He rides for money. He rides for competition. He rides the way a runner runs or a ballplayer hits or a boxer fights.

"I'm not the kind of guy who rides a horse just to ride it," Jerry said. "I like to get in the gate with six or seven other guys and say, `Let's race.' "

"I don't know that he's ga-ga over horses, like girls kind of get," Bill Mott said. "He likes the competition and he likes the race. And that's fine. I suppose at times you could become too involved in the emotional part of the horse. He sticks to his job."

There was an exception, however, and that exception was and is Cigar.

Between October 1994 and August 1996, Cigar won 16 straight races, tying the record set by Citation in 1950. Jerry rode Cigar in all but the first of those races, and Cigar pierced the jockey's customary aloofness toward rides.

The streak built over two years, and in that time Jerry found himself harboring a fondness for a horse that he had felt neither before nor since. What he loved in Cigar was his competitive fire, his grit and determination. What he saw in Cigar was a focused, talented equine version of himself.

"Before Cigar, I would never go to check out a horse to see if he was OK the next day," Jerry said. "Not that I didn't appreciate what they do, I just didn't think like that.

"So many horses have ability, but no heart, no desire . . . I hate horses like that."

Through Cigar's historic run, Jerry said, his favorite moments with the horse were their morning exercises, the two of them in the relative silence of a practice track. No pressure. No crowds. Two great athletes appreciating their extraordinary fortune.

When they lost, at California's Del Mar Racecourse in August 1996, Jerry sensed Cigar's despair. Jerry blamed himself for allowing the other horses to force the pace.

"If there was ever a time I wanted to keep riding and not come back, that was it," Jerry said.