Cauthen: A Born Winner

By BJ. Phillips

There had been 102 runnings of the Preakness Stakes before last Saturday, and many a great duel between horses and their riders. But the 103rd Preakness was as thrilling and cannily run a race as any in the history of this Triple Crown classic. Harbor View Farm's Affirmed, a splendid chestnut colt that can win from the front or the field, was masterfully paced by Steve Cauthen, who showed once again that, at 18, he already has the incandescence of greatness.

After a clean break, Cauthen dropped Affirmed into second place, waiting for Believe It, third in the Kentucky Derby, to lead the way. When Believe It hung back, Cauthen moved to the front. With stopwatch precision, he then cut the pace, lulling the field into marching to his drumbeat. Affirmed ran the first half-mile in a plater-slow 47 3/5 sec., Cauthen actually managing to rate, or husband, his horse while loping on the lead. Thus, when Jorge Velasquez pushed Calumet Farm's Alydar into his stretch surge, Affirmed was rested and ready to run. Said Cauthen simply: "He came up and set his horse down in the lane and I set mine down. Mine won." Affirmed flashed across the finish in 1 min. 54 2/5sec.--just 2/5 sec. short of the track record despite the slow early running--and won, going away, by a neck. Steve Cauthen and Affirmed outwitted and outran their challengers for the $136,200 winner's share of the Preakness purse. It was a lesson in the jockey's art.

From the day he first dons silks, walks to the paddock and gets a leg up on a Thoroughbred race horse, the public knows him as a jockey. But around the track, he is called a boy. It is an odd inversion of status for these masterful men, a class cognomen left over from the days when jockeys were servants of the sporting aristocracy. Age does not matter. The rankest apprentice is a boy; Willie Shoemaker--at age 46, the winner of more horse races than any man in the sport's history--is a boy.

There is another track term for a jockey: race rider. The title is used sparingly so that, in a generation of boys, only a handful, the very best, will earn the honor. Arcaro, Atkinson, Longden were race riders. And Shoemaker, Hartack, Cordero, Pincay, Baeza, Turcotte, Velasquez. Now there is Steve Cauthen, only 18 and a race rider. A prodigy at 16, a fearless boy returning from an ugly spill at 17, and less than a month past his 18th birthday, winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the first two classics of the Triple Crown.

Saturday's Preakness victory on Affirmed is further proof, as much as any single race can be, of Cauthen's claim to be on the select list. At 1 3/16miles, the Preakness provides an honest test of the three-year-old Thoroughbred and an intense examination of the rider. The shorter course (1/16 of a mile less than the Derby and 5/16 of a mile less than the Belmont Stakes) demands the hot speed that is the first hallmark of the breed. A topflight field hurtling around Pimlico's tight turns leaves no margin for error by a jockey: fail to find position by a few feet, miscalculate the pace by a tick of the clock, and the winner streaks to the wire before ground can be made up.

A fine ride, such as Cauthen's Preakness win, is composed of many parts, most of them beyond quantification. Horsemen sputter and maunder when asked to specify reasons for the success of the few truly great riders. Seat and balance, a clocklike sense of pace, strength, intelligence, courage, they say, and, most important, most mysterious of all, "the hands"--instinctive, intricately articulate, the medium of communication between horse and rider. Sometime, somehow, someone gets it all and then they say: "He's a natural."

Jockeys are born into all kinds of backgrounds--Arcaro to the tough streets of ethnic Cincinnati, Jorge Velasquez to the barrios of Panama--but a handicapper of naturals would take odds on the Walton, Ky., home of Tex arid Myra Cauthen. Walton is small (pop. 2,200) and Bluegrass (60 miles north of Lexington). Horse country is one place where a kid could grow up small and not develop an inferiority complex. He could imagine himself a jockey. And when his father is a blacksmith and his mother a second-generation owner and a trainer, when he looks forward to celebrating his Derby Week birthday every year at Churchill Downs, the dream doesn't seem so farfetched. If, in addition, he has been sitting on horses since his toddler's legs were long enough to splay across a saddle, he would have a natural head start.

Much has been made of the fact that Cauthen was preparing for the jockey's craft at the age of twelve. His zeal was tireless: flailing bales of hay to practice his whip technique, huddling with his father over race films to decipher the art of moving a horse up in traffic or setting him down for the stretch run, crouching along the rail at the starting gate to learn how to navigate those first chaotic moments of a race. At 13, he was practicing yoga to develop his concentration--yoga at 13!--because he knew he would need it. "All I thought about was riding. In school, I thought about riding. On weekends, I thought about riding. I thought about riding all the time."

But perhaps even more crucial training for Cauthen began years before. He was reared, his mother says, "to be polite to everyone and to have good table manners." Put it another way: to be a gentleman, to be a gentle person. Human beings may or may not detect this quality, but a Thoroughbred race horse --willful and fragile, high-strung and intuitive--certainly does.

Young, very young, Cauthen also accompanied his father on his smithing rounds at nearby race tracks. He began to help calm animals unnerved by shoeing or perturbed by a stranger's presence. He started to use his hands, and in his hands, horses relaxed. Whether coming from God, genes or good manners, this is the priceless gift for a jockey, the difference between wrestling a horse around a track, only to blunt his spirit for the run, and rating him kindly, handily, through the pace, while conserving enough of his energy for the stretch drive. Steve had the gift even before he had the jockey's dream. Says Tex Cauthen: "He had horses bred in him as a small child and was a good horseman from a very young age. He could make them do whatever he wanted."

Cauthen tries to explain: "It's in the hands. Your hands are how you communicate with the horse. When you're setting down on the final drive, that's how you keep in touch with him. Some jocks can communicate with horses better than others. The horses sense it through the hands." He pauses and then shrugs: "Who knows how they sense it?" Cauthen admits that horses seem to remember him not by sight but when they feel him in the saddle and the touch of his man-size hands on the reins. Paddock punters watch with amazement as colts, skittish during saddling and fractious in the walking ring, suddenly relax when Cauthen goes up in the irons.

Cauthen broke in when he was 16 at nearby little tracks like Kentucky's Latonia, where the horseflesh was less than prime and the riding more than a little rough. He handled that trial by guile and nerve and then moved on to New York's Aqueduct race track, the Big Apple. He was riding "bugboy light," a 5-lb.. weight allowance granted apprentice jockeys. But on the home turf of Angel Cordero Jr., Ron Turcotte 'and Jorge Velasquez, that was the only allowance he got.

His 1977 racing year was like none the horse world had ever known. His mounts won more than $6 million in purses, a record. He won 487 races. In one incredible week, he won 23 of 54 races, and people began betting not on the horses but on their rider. Cauthen was clearly something to tug at a horseman's heart, a manifestation of genius, present palpable and future prodigious, that occurs only rarely in any human endeavor. He was a born winner.

Cauthen left such flights to others; he has settled into a life that he clearly loves, reports TIME Correspondent Peter Stoler. He is addicted to the track and to track people. Cauthen often leaves his bachelor's apartment in Floral Park, Long Island, before dawn and drives his 1977 Mercury Cougar to the track, whether or not he is scheduled to work a horse. He breakfasts in the track kitchen, then kills the hours between daylight and early afternoon post time in the jockeys' quarters. He changes into white breeches, boots and T shirt and studies the Daily Racing Form to dope out the day's competition. Cauthen also spends a good deal of time with his agent, Lenny Goodman, a shrewd, showy horseman up from the streets of Brooklyn. (Cauthen's earnings, about $750,000 in two years so far, go home to his father, who has a New York financier investing the money in conservative stocks and bonds.)

When it is race time, the jockeys stride out of the locker room, most flicking their whips with bravado. Cauthen goes calmly. Decked out in the splashing silks of his trade, he seems terribly young, frail, unknowing--until you look at his eyes, when those eyes are examining a horse he is about to ride. Then there is an eerie, almost existential quality to his face, an absorption so total that his life becomes encompassed by it. For the twelve minutes required to mount, parade to the post and, finally, run the race, the ride is Steve Cauthen.

Cauthen must get his mount to the starting gate loosened up and ready to run without wasting the animal's energy. Once in the gate, he must hold his horse square and up on his toes, hoping to have him perfectly balanced for the sudden clang of the bell and the frantic first steps. The horse explodes from the gate, his hindquarters coiling to unleash his stride. These are the most dangerous moments as, tightly bunched and digging for a purchase on the track, the field sweeps away, each little man controlling 1,000 lbs. of animal rushing at nearly 40 m.p.h.

The problems now come by milliseconds. Gather the horse in and rate him, or take the lead? Who is inside, outside, and where to position? Where is a hole going to open or a gap going to close? The variations are infinite. Finally, the move through the stretch, whipping when needed, but always, always moving as one with the horse. Feet, legs, body, shoulders and arms surging with the animal, the hands speaking to the horse--run, run your heart out, run.

Steve Cauthen repeats these remarkable minutes as often as eight or nine times a day, perhaps 2,000 times a year. It is a grueling day. Jockeys heatedly insist that they are fine athletes, not passengers going along for the ride. The physical strain is enormous. Says Cauthen: "The first race you ever ride, it's unbelievable. If you're ever going to quit, that's the time. You can be the fittest person around, but not fit enough to be a jockey. Until you actually ride a race, you can't tell how hard it is, how exhausted you get. You feel like you're going to have a heart attack. After you ride 1,000 horses a year, you get fit."

The day is also dangerous. A jockey was killed and two others injured at Pimlico two weeks before the Preakness. Huge horses running at high speed cannot be kept on their feet if a bone gives way or a mount falls in front. Says Jockey Jacinto Vasquez: "We're in the kind of sport where you have to be scared. Jockeys always have one foot in the hospital and one in the cemetery. But we can't think about what will happen if a horse stumbles. If an athlete has fear, he can't work."

Throughout Cauthen's apprenticeship, the prospect of a fall --and the recovery of his psyche from it--was the single reservation that racing people had about his future. Hot bugboys (though never as hot as Cauthen) had come along before, only to turn all too cold when a spill thudded home the risks of the trade. Fear is part of racing. So is courage.

Cauthen took the kind of spill that tests courage a few days before his apprenticeship was to expire. His right wrist was broken; kicked by the flying hoofs of trailing horses, his forehead and right hand were cut, and he suffered a concussion and cracked ribs. He was out for a month. When he came back, he answered all the questions. Rounding the turn for home in his first return race, he drove a colt named Little Miracle--Affirmed's half brother--through a narrow opening between front runners and booted him home the winner by 1 1/4 lengths. He used horse balm to soothe his tight, sore right hand and its ugly crisscrossed scar and went about the business of riding. Says Trainer Tommy Kelly: "I don't think the kid has any fear. He just put some of our liniment on his hand and went out there and rode. No hesitation, no fear."

For Cauthen, the comeback had been a foregone conclusion: "I've been falling off horses since I was two. I wanted to ride so bad it didn't take much to come back. I came back faster than I thought I could."

The boy was becoming a man. All the gifts, the marvelous, balanced seat, the head filled with horse sense and a ticking clock, the wonderful, knowing hands of the bugboy had been fused with the courage of the race rider. In short order, the stakes horses started to come his way: Johnny D., last year's turf champion, and Affirmed, the best two-year-old colt and his Triple Crown mount this year.

It was while riding Johnny D. that Cauthen first convinced the experts that he was developing as a shrewd competitor. In the Laurel International, one of the major grass races of the year, Cauthen took an early lead and then throttled back to lull his rivals--setting a "false pace," track people say. In the stretch, Cauthen suddenly drove Johnny D. on, catching the field off guard, and came home a winner.

There seems to be no limit to the potential of this slight young Kentuckian who so loves to ride. "Gettin' the best you can from a horse, that's the whole thing," he says. "That's the real pleasure." He has been, so far, charmingly oblivious to the fame he has earned so quickly and the pressure that has come with it. "Reason I don't feel any pressure is because I don't want to," he says simply. "You have to perform, have to do your job."

Cauthen may still lack a bit, perhaps, of the ruthless will to win that marks the enduring greats of race riding. He remains Myra and Tex Cauthen's well-brought-up boy, a kid who spent the night before the Kentucky Derby in a sleeping bag on the floor of a hotel suite crowded with relatives because, as Brother Doug, 15, quite logically explains: "It was his turn."

At California tracks this winter, Cauthen's remarkable winning record fell off slightly, and the going in New York will be more testing in his sophomore year. No longer merely a phenomenon, he is a craftsman now, settling in for the long haul. But like vintage port, he can only get better with age. Real race riders always do. Steve Cauthen is a real one.

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