Steve's Slump

Cauthen loses 110 in a row

The fourth race at Santa Anita was for four-year-old horses that have never won, otherwise known as "maidens." The purse was $13,000, the crowd sparse and the Southern California weather mucky. The winner by a neck: a 5-to-2 shot named Father Duffy.

Not exactly the Triple Crown. But for the winning jockey it meant deliverance. When he climbed aboard Father Duffy last Thursday, Boy Wonder Steve Cauthen, 18, winner of the Triple Crown and just under $5 million last year, had not won a race since New Year's Day. His losing streak of 110 straight races, one of the worst ever for a major jockey, was a stupefying slump for The Kid who once won 23 of 54 races in a single week.

Rumors blamed Cauthen's woes on the distractions of fame and California women. But Cauthen's ex-agent Lenny Goodman dismissed the gossip and accused California trainers of sticking Stevie with slow horses: "I could not give him the horses I wanted him to ride. They gave me leftovers." The bettors agree: Cauthen rode only ten favorites during his winless streak. Explained Trainer Joseph Trovato: "Trainers have their own commitments. It's hard to break into that if you're an outsider." Frustrated, Goodman packed up and left for New York two weeks ago; Cauthen, who began his association with Goodman 2 1/2 years ago, is now on his third agent.

Last week came the biggest blow: Trainer Laz Barrera pulled Cauthen off Affirmed, the horse he rode to the Triple Crown last year. Horsemen do not show slumping jockeys quite the paternal support that Leo Durocher, manager of the old New York Giants, gave a weeping rookie named Willie Mays after he had gone 1 for 26 in his major league debut ("Tomorrow's another day, kid, and you're going to be playing centerfield tomorrow"). Barrera said the decision not to let Cauthen ride Affirmed in the $200,000 Strub Stakes was "one of my hardest." But he earlier confessed, "You know what race-track people do fastest? Bury others." Still, it was Barrera who put Cauthen on Father Duffy, and gave The Kid the chance to break his losing streak.

A poised hero during his glory days, Cauthen was clearly shaken. "No matter if you have the greatest team in the world," he said, "you [play] out of town sometimes, and you get beat by the local yokels. I've just got to dig in and get tough." Cauthen has been a determined rider ever since he began practicing yoga at 13 to heighten his concentration; a year earlier he was flailing at hay bales to improve his whip technique. But simple cures are often hard to find for slumping athletes. Cauthen, however, does not appear to have picked up any bad technical habits. "He's not doing anything different," growls Barrera. Nor is growth the problem; Cauthen is less than an inch taller than he was when he won the Triple Crown, and he weighs only 104. Some have suggested that after Goodman had a heart attack in July, he stopped hustling for good mounts; and that after Cauthen injured his knee in an August spill, he stopped trying so hard to spur them on. Now Laffit Pincay Jr., the rider who replaced Cauthen on Affirmed for the Strub Stakes, wonders if The Kid is not "trying too hard."

To get hot again, Cauthen may need to regain his almost mystical touch, the energy he seemed to communicate to horses through his skilled oversize hands. Then again, ex-Agent Goodman may have the best prescription: "Fast horses."

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