He’ll Try to Beat Odds Again at the Derby

When the jockey, Chris McCarron, burst onto the horse scene 10 years ago, the racing establishment took one look and said “OK, kid, what did you do with your dog Sandy?”

First of all, there were those ringlets of red hair, those bright blue eyes, that piping voice. Little Orphan McCarron.

Still others figured that you looked at Chris McCarron and you knew what a leprechaun looked like. You looked to see if the toes curled.

You got jockeys out of dusty little border towns in Texas or the Caribbean, not Dorchester, Mass. The last horse in that area was Paul Revere’s.

When he said he wanted to ride horses, they directed him to Disneyland. It never occurred to them that he meant real ones. They figured he had seen too many John Wayne matinees, that, as soon as he got thrown a few times, he would go back to the Hub and get a job in the post office.

No one knows what makes one rider a winner on a horse’s back and another just a passenger. That’s because nobody has ever been able to ask the horse. Some old-time trainers tell you that it’s the hands, others that it’s the seat. Cynics say that it’s just the stock he’s on, that Man O’ War would win with Lady Godiva in the irons.

Other riders just bully their horses. They win races the way Hitler won battles. With sheer terror.

But no one ever crashed into the winners’ circle as devastatingly as Chris McCarron. He never got onto a horse’s back till he was 16, and he got thrown. He never got in a race till he was 18, and he finished last.

But, from then on, the horses ran for McCarron--20-1 shots ran like odds-on favorites, plating horses ran like stakes winners, quitters turned into world beaters. The world riding record was 515 wins in a year, held by Sandy Hawley. McCarron broke that as an apprentice jockey in his first year with an astonishing 546 wins in 1974.

His style wasn’t flashy. He didn’t bring horses back in filets. He didn’t steal races on the front end the way Longden did. He didn’t win a contest of wills with the horse as Arcaro did. Horses just seemed to run for him. He romanced them across the finish line.

He won 1,014 races the first two years. And those were not on the elite of American livery. They were not storybook horses, they were bandaged old studs, rank 2-year-olds, bleeders, shadow-jumpers, biters, kickers, some of the great outlaws of the starting gates trained by some of the gypsies of shed row. In some of those races, you weren’t always sure all the horses in the field were who the program said they were.

Still, when Chris McCarron came west to ride the California tracks in 1978, his pals were horrified. “That’s Shoemaker Downs out there,” they warned. “Pincay Park. They’ll be riding Affirmed and John Henry. You’ll be on a camel.”

Those were the tracks that turned Steve Cauthen into an English rider, he was reminded. “You’ll be jumping over hedges at Aintree after a year out there,” they predicted.

McCarron responded by winning not only the riding title with 405 wins in 1980, but the money title with $7,666,100 as well. Anybody could win with fit horses.

McCarron now has won nine consecutive riding titles at Hollywood Park. He rode a winner opening day, then rode three winners Thursday. He once rode seven straight winners at the track. He became the first rider in history to rack up $12 million in purses in a single season.

You would think they would be writing poems about him, measuring him for a paddock statue. But, although McCarron has won honors--the George Woolf and Eclipse awards--he has come up short in another category.

You see, every rider hankers for a Triple Crown winner. Every rider wants to win a Kentucky Derby.

For a California rider, that is already a long price. There have been 110 Kentucky Derbies. Only six of them have been won by Santa Anita Derby winners. The winner comes out of Eastern racing. And so usually does the rider.

Chris McCarron has never won a Triple Crown race, even though he’s won more than 4,000 others. Still, it took Pincay 18 years to win his first Kentucky Derby, 16 to win his first Belmont and he has yet to win his first Preakness.

The problem is only partly geographical. The problem also has to do with the Eastern trainers having a deep-seated distrust of California racing. They think that neither the riders, nor the horses, can handle a deep track, largely because they never have to.

One result is, they often get culls to ride. It isn’t so much that Chris McCarron doesn’t get to do well in the Kentucky Derby, it’s that he doesn’t get to do anything. He’s only ridden in three. He was on a 50-1 shot called Esop’s Foibles in his first try. He rode Desert Wine home second in 1983 and, last year, was next to last on a false favorite, the filly Althea.

He gets the call on another no-chance colt called Fast Account at Kentucky this week. There are those who think the colt’s first name should be Noah and that he will be one of those chasing the winner to the wire Saturday provided he shows form in the Derby Trial.

It’ll be one more year that Chris will lose his chance to make the second-most famous ride in Massachusetts history.

It’s too bad. With Chris in it, you wouldn’t know whether the winner’s circle scene at Louisville was the end of horse race, the finale of “Finian’s Rainbow” or a curtain call from “Annie.”