In his pink silks and with a face still boyish and bare, Ronnie Franklin looked like a baby swaddled in the wrong blanket. But the world was about to find out that if child he was, he was no ordinary boy.
Less than two years after he had first arrived at Pimlico as a teenage French fries server and an aspiring hot walker, Franklin was at Bowie Race Track in the dead of winter for his first-ever race as an American professional athlete, a jockey. It was an astonishing ascendance.
For his protégé’s first ride, Buddy Delp had picked out Pioneer Patty, a filly with talent but a complex psychology. She could be so violent at night, kicking and climbing the walls, that Buddy had a soft rubber material installed in her stall to protect her from herself. She wasn’t easy on the track either. Most of the jockeys and exercise riders Delp put aboard Patty had difficulty handling her. But Ronnie was different. She was calm underneath him, and for reasons that everybody noticed but no one understood, he brought her an elevated sense of focus.
Gerald Delp believed that Pioneer Patty’s improved behavior and performance under Franklin was no accident. “Ronnie was naturally blessed with the ability to get along with horses,” Gerald said.
Race day was excruciatingly cold. Temperatures struggled to reach 30 degrees, and the threat of snow loomed. The warm breath of men and horses billowed out of their mouths and nostrils into the frosty air, creating small apparitions that hung momentarily motionless and then floated away. Most people didn’t believe Ronnie had much of a chance. It was highly unusual for a rider to win his debut and, in Franklin’s case, even less likely since he was aboard Patty, a long shot. Nevertheless, as a show of support, all of the Delps put down small bets on their horse and rider. And Franklin, highly confident, laid down $50 on himself.
Bowie was just the right starting spot for Ronnie. It was a mecca for beginning riders, who came there from all over the country. It lacked the historical gravity of Pimlico or the stakes race austerity of Laurel. It was an unpretentious and working-class track, ideal for a young rider learning the craft before moving on to bigger and better things. Chris McCarron had started at Bowie only a few years earlier, and now he was about to pack up and leave Maryland with the hope of striking gold in the Hollywood hills.
Bowie was not only a showcase for young riders, but it was also a platform for some of horse racing’s worst behaviors and addictions. Built in the shadow of Oden Bowie’s old southern plantation and constructed mostly of the scrub pine that grew wild right on the site, Bowie Race Track had opened in 1914, the same year that Babe Ruth made his professional baseball debut in a Baltimore bandbox.
Because it was a winter track, Bowie catered to a clientele of highly motivated bettors, and weird things happened there. In the early 1950s, a fully armed U.S. fighter jet exploded in midair right over the track. The wreckage landed in the nearby woods. On another occasion a Cabin Cruiser was found floating in the middle of the infield lake; how it got there no one knew.
One racing day in the late 1950s, with twenty thousand fans packed into the stands, a long and persistent snowfall began. While everyone focused on the action, the snow piled up in the parking lots until the cars were more or less locked in. The large crowd was stranded, and after the ninth race the fans had no choice but to hunker down in the clubhouse for a sleepover.
The place buzzed with boozy chatter as petty thieves worked the crowd and “found” wallets in other peoples’ pants pockets. The gamblers, at least, were content. They organized impromptu games of craps, cards, and quarter toss and had a great time winning and losing petty cash.
And then a public health crisis ensued. There were diabetics in the crowd, some without their medicine, who had seizures right on the spot. Others suffered heart attacks. Both groups were in serious trouble since there were no qualified medical professionals on the premises to help them. Incredibly that wasn’t even the worst medical disaster in Bowie history. On a 15-degree day in 1961, a train packed with Philadelphians derailed about a mile from the race track. Six people died in the accident, and more than two hundred were injured. The survivors, undeterred, demonstrated the hypnotic power of their addictions. Panicked that they might miss laying down their bets, they trudged through the icy mud, many with blood still streaking down their faces, just to get to the windows. Almost all of them refused medical attention until they could see the results of the Daily Double.
Gambling wasn’t only a fan addiction; it could infect the riders too. On Valentine’s Day 1975, just about three years before Ronnie Franklin’s maiden ride at Bowie, a group of seven jockeys sitting around a poker table hatched a plot to throw Bowie’s ninth race. Unfortunately, the caper went awry. Authorities could easily see the plot. All the jockeys’ bets were placed by one person, who took them all to the same window. One of the jockey’s efforts to deliberately slow his horse were so graceless and obvious he literally stood up in the irons and pulled on the reins right out of the gate.
As their web unraveled, the jockeys quickly lawyered up. One of them hired Peter Angelos, a lawyer with a growing reputation as a wizard and the future owner of the Baltimore Orioles, to represent him. But nothing helped. Four of the seven conspiratorial jockeys went to jail. Even worse, Eric Walsh, the most successful rider among them, was so humiliated by his part in the foolish plot, and by his fears of jail, that he committed suicide. He was only thirty-six.
Bowie also had a long tradition of substance abuse—and not only by the lower social classes.
In 1952 a former baseball executive named Larry MacPhail made a substantial investment in Bowie. MacPhail had a reputation as an eccentric genius, brilliant but crazy, depending on whether he was sober or liquored up. He graduated law school at age twenty. By twenty-five he was practicing law and running two thriving businesses, a tool company and a department store.
MacPhail’s service in World War I began his reputation as an unmanageable genius. He joined the service and went overseas. Typical of his style, he had organized his own regiment and rose through the ranks, quickly moving from private to captain. To him, war was an adventure. He cheated death twice and survived both a battle wound and a poison gas attack.
MacPhail also got involved in a weird crusade when he and a handful of men drove from Paris to the Netherlands to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm in an unauthorized maneuver. They came awfully close to succeeding anyway, making it all the way to Wilhelm’s living room in a Dutch castle, where he was squatting. They could even hear the Kaiser in the next room. They were dissuaded from snatching him, however, by Dutch troops in the house and instead absconded with the Kaiser’s ashtray. It made a hell of a story, but MacPhail’s superior officers weren’t amused and he ended up in front of a military court.
When he got back home, MacPhail briefly settled in Columbus, Ohio, and turned his attentions from war to baseball. He purchased the Minor League Columbus Senators for $100,000 and then quickly flipped that team, for a nice profit, to Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals organization. Rickey recognized MacPhail as a talented executive and retained him to lead the Columbus operation, a decision Rickey would soon find to be both brilliant and regrettable.
MacPhail not only set about a series of bold moves to make the Columbus franchise a winner, but he also quickly transformed, modernized, and improved baseball itself. He started with a colossal failure. He built a beautiful new stadium to attract fans, but it didn’t work. Considering the problem, he correctly reasoned that his prospective fans simply weren’t available to watch baseball during the sunshine hours; they were too busy manning their jobs. So MacPhail devised a bold plan to fix the problem. He had lights installed at his gleaming new park and started playing games at night. Just as he suspected, the fans came out in droves.
From that experience MacPhail learned to open up new and overlooked sources of revenue and succeeded in targeting groups most others had ignored. He created a ladies’ group with reduced seat prices for women. He introduced children’s clubs and filled up more ballpark seats with kids.
Under MacPhail’s direction the Columbus turnstiles literally clicked day and night. Rickey should have been thrilled with MacPhail’s performance, but the truth was he couldn’t stand him. MacPhail was almost as innovative about irritating his boss as he was in improving his club. He became territorial about his players, refusing to send them to St. Louis to help the parent club. And he upstaged Rickey. The Minor League Senators outdrew the Cardinals by more than thirty thousand fans for the season. Rickey was technically the winner in this arrangement; after all he had bought a victorious club that produced good players and prospered at the gate, yet his dealings with MacPhail exhausted and embittered him.
When MacPhail left Columbus, he moved on to a string of jobs with big league teams. Everywhere he went, he dramatically improved his own club and the business of baseball. But he also usually imploded, unable to control his drinking.
His first stop was with the Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s oldest team, yet failing on the field and in bankruptcy. Very quickly, MacPhail installed lights at Crosley Field and oversaw the first night game in big league history. His team traveled by air while his competitors were still in choo-choos. And he enthusiastically embraced broadcasting while his archaic colleagues feared that radio would ruin their gate.
MacPhail recognized the vast promotional benefits of broadcasting and hired young Red Barber, a master storyteller, to describe his games. Instead of harming business interests, baseball translated beautifully through the airwaves and whetted fans’ appetites for the ballpark.
MacPhail left the Reds in 1937, but the machine he had built soon went to two straight World Series and won it all in 1940. He moved on to Brooklyn, where the Dodgers were suffering many of the same maladies as the Reds. They were in deep financial distress, and they hadn’t won the National League pennant in more than twenty years.
The great executive’s innovations transformed that second-class borough and harkened in the “Boys of Summer” era, when the Dodgers were one of the most rabidly followed, beloved, and gloriously profitable teams in the game. It was MacPhail who had created the franchise that would be rhapsodized and then lamented for decades to come.
After another stint in the service for World War II, MacPhail divested himself of his Dodgers holdings, opening the door for Rickey to take over. Meanwhile, MacPhail headed a syndicate that bought the New York Yankees. In his wizard-like way he wrested control of the marquee franchise in professional sports with only $200,000 of his own money. It wasn’t much more than he’d paid for the Minor League Columbus franchise just a few years earlier, and now he was president and general manager of the legendary pinstripes.
MacPhail was no easier to work with in the Bronx than he had been anywhere else. In only his first season at the helm he fired two different managers. Yet he was as brilliant as ever.
In year two under MacPhail, the Yankees won the American League pennant and, most satisfying of all, defeated Rickey’s Dodgers in a thrilling seven-game World Series. It should have been a moment of triumph, but MacPhail’s joy led to a day of ballpark drinking. After the final out he made the grave mistake of stumbling his way over to greet Rickey and console him. In a sloppy show of inebriated sportsmanship, he draped his arms around the Dodgers’ leader, who didn’t take it well. Rickey was both puritanical and a sore loser; disgusted by MacPhail’s condition, he berated him right on the spot. Enraged by Rickey and still highly intoxicated, MacPhail went berserk in the Yankees’ clubhouse. He sprayed invective in every direction, and he fired respected employees right there in the winning clubhouse. He even hauled off and clocked a man.
That night, as he sobered up, MacPhail realized that he had embarrassed himself so thoroughly in front of news professionals from all over the country that he had no choice but to resign. He’d just won the World Series, making everyone in his orbit a little richer and a lot happier, and yet his abdication was enthusiastically accepted. And it was all for the want of a few drinks.
Despite it all, MacPhail left the Yankees with his head held high. His fellow owners paid him $2 million for the same shares in the team that he’d purchased for a mere $200,000 a couple of years before.
But something much more valuable than money had been lost. MacPhail was done in baseball. Nevertheless, he was flush with cash, still relatively young and energetic, and overflowing with creative energy. All of that brought him to horse racing. First, he bought a farm for thoroughbreds in Harford County, Maryland, and then he purchased Bowie Race Track. It was quintessential MacPhail at his messianic best. Bowie was failing, and he would save it.
Like almost all of the endeavors in which MacPhail became involved, Bowie Race Track was a tarnished brand when he found it. His vision was to make it a first-class facility that surpassed its competitors. His first step was implementing a $2 million renovation package to improve the physical plant.
But opening day was just another bad day with the bottle for MacPhail. He literally drank in the moment, and as the day wore on, he became highly intoxicated and brutally abusive. He loudly and profanely berated members of the Horsemen’s Benevolent Association who were seated near him, incensing them, of course. But the worst was yet to come.
Later in the day, as patrons filed out of the track and took to the roads, MacPhail encountered a state trooper directing traffic. In his stupor MacPhail perceived the officer as slow and incompetent, and he quickly lost his composure. He became physical with the policeman and was arrested. Within the week, MacPhail was officially banned from entering his own race track. All it took, all it ever took to destroy him and undo all the massive good he had accomplished, was a few drinks.
But as bad as things were for MacPhail, the real damage was done to Bowie. The man was embarrassed and hurt, but he could salve his wounds on his rolling horse farm as he merely returned to his life of wealth and privilege. But for that struggling race track, permanently deprived of the guidance and services of perhaps the ablest and most visionary sports executive in the country, potential was squandered and hope was lost. Instead of enjoying a renaissance under MacPhail, Bowie regressed and never became the great venue that only he could have envisioned and produced.
MacPhail died in 1975, but in an interesting example of the past and present intersecting, the former Bowie chief executive was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame the same week that Ronnie Franklin rode his first race at Bowie. As Ronnie stepped into the irons, many were still recounting MacPhail’s brilliance and how it had been squandered by addiction.
In front of a large, cold crowd on February 4, 1978, Delp gave Ronnie a leg up on Pioneer Patty for the fourth race. No one knew what to expect from Franklin. Despite his nearly two years of training with Barbara Graham and his perfect jockey’s build, he seemed to many unsuitable, a city kid with limited knowledge and experience with horses. The great jockeys, they reasoned, grew up in the irons.
Certainly no one could have predicted what did happen. Before the race, he brimmed with so much confidence he didn’t even bother taking instruction from Delp. Instead he told the trainer exactly how he planned to ride the horse.
Pioneer Patty was slow out of the gate and content to lag behind for two-thirds of the race. She was still three lengths back near the top of the home stretch when the patient Franklin kicked her into gear. Coming from the outside, he rushed the front runners, hesitating only briefly to press in on and crowd the horse Despedida. But Franklin didn’t waste any more time. He moved back to the clear and took the lead.
The crowd beheld the smooth maneuvers of the eighteen-year-old and roared its approval. And it was to the chorus of those cheers and in the warmth of that adulation that Franklin and Pioneer Patty crossed the wire, the other horses and riders behind them.
Ronnie finished first in his next race too, and the superlatives started to flow in. “He is further along than any rider I’ve ever brought around,” Buddy said. “I wouldn’t hesitate now to put him on anything in the barn.”
The Baltimore Sun compared Ronnie to Chris McCarron and anointed him the successor to the still young and successful future Hall of Famer who was about to depart for California. And McCarron, himself endorsed Franklin too. “He’s got a good head and obviously a lot of natural ability,” Chris said. “He’s going to win a lot of races.”
As the days passed, every kind word uttered about Franklin only seemed to be an understatement. He progressed at a torrid pace, and by the third week of April 1978, he was the hottest apprentice jockey in the nation. After just three months in the saddle he had already taken the reins of 142 mounts and finished in the money an astonishing ninety-one times. On thirty-four different occasions he posed in the winner’s circle. His 27 percent winning percentage was the best of any rider at Pimlico.
Franklin’s agent, Chickie Lang, revved up the hype machine. “He is the hottest Franklin since Ben,” Chickie said.
It is interesting that Ronnie’s early successes were all achieved without virtue of the best horse in Delp’s stable. While Franklin made a name for himself at the track, Spectacular Bid was still in the stall, untried and unknown to both press and public. The Bid had come to Baltimore from Barbara Graham’s farm even less heralded than Ronnie had been. In Buddy’s operation of top horse professionals only Gerald, still in his early teens, had a sneaking suspicion about just how special Spectacular Bid was.
“Dad, watch that gray,” Gerald said. “I’m telling you he’s gonna be a good one.”
But Buddy was unconvinced. “I’ve got Tired Castle in the barn,” he told Gerald. “I’ve got stakes winners here; why’re you talking about this young horse?”
Indeed Buddy showed no recognition of what Gerald saw. The trainer chose a mediocre team to look after the Bid, a sign that the horse wasn’t viewed as anything special. Instead of assigning the steel gray to his top groom, Mo Hall, Buddy picked out an old hand named Tots. Experienced but elderly, Tots was known primarily for his vices. He liked to drink and smoke, even around the barns, and he was known to snooze on the job, staking out some hidden corner to close his eyes and let it all float away.
These habits were combustible when combined, and they had almost tragic consequences for Spectacular Bid. One day Tots was tipsy and tired when he reclined into an impromptu bed of straw on the other side of the wall from the Bid’s stall. Tots lit up a smoke and then nodded off to sleep. Soon, his cigarette gently fell from his lips, and while he quietly snored, the straw beneath him smoldered. And then a trickle of smoke arose from the bed to the air in a winding upward path. As an unimaginable tragedy was about to unfold, another worker smelled the smoke, ran over, and roused Tots. The flame was extinguished while it was still in its baby stages.
Ronnie was chosen to ride the Bid, and this was another sign that Buddy and his team had no idea what they had in the horse. Although Ronnie and the Bid had known each other since Middleburg, Ronnie was still just a beginner—eighteen years old and extraordinarily unlikely to ride anyone’s Triple Crown contender.
All of this was not to say that Buddy’s team could not see Spectacular Bid’s obvious talent and raw speed. It was evident during exercise sessions. But nobody knew how that would translate to race conditions. Many a horse was a morning hero, a stud at the exercise track, racing against just one opponent and in the privacy of an empty grandstand. But in the afternoon, when a roaring crowd was present and there were seven or eight horses in the race, no one knew what an even evidently fast horse might do.
On June 30, 1978, they found out.
Spectacular Bid left his home stall at Pimlico to race for the very first time on Old Hilltop’s track. Although it was the Bid’s first start, it was no throwaway. The Bid was far from the favorite. There were some good choices in the field, including Strike Your Colors, a fine horse that finished in the money in eight out of nine races in 1978, including three first-place finishes.
Strike Your Colors was an eventual stakes winner but not the favorite that day. That distinction went to the well-regarded filly Instant Love.
Scheduled for the third race, Spectacular Bid walked out in front of the Pimlico crowd for the first time as though he was ready for battle. His steel gray coat glistened in the early summer sunshine like armor. Ronnie was up, in his black-and-blue silks, young and perfect and perched high atop the Bid like a knight.
It wasn’t an easy race, though the result was never in doubt. Approaching the homestretch, the Bid was in the lead, though Strike Your Colors was in hot pursuit. And then, right there in his first race, Spectacular Bid revealed something about himself, about his character, that he would demonstrate again and again throughout the rest of his career. At the quarter pole, he became a different horse. When the race was on the line, he became a killer. He hit his stride, quickened his pace, and blew away the field.
The Bid and his young rider won, but what’s more, they came within two-fifths of a second of breaking the track record. Ronnie was an even bigger story than his horse. He rode three winners at Pimlico that day, bringing his total at that venerable track up to an even one hundred. He too engaged in behavior that revealed character and that would become a pattern. He was disqualified from one of the races for interference and almost came to blows with the other horse’s jockey.
By the third week of July Ronnie was the leading rider at Pimlico with almost forty more victories than his closest competitor. On July 22 he rode the Bid again at Pimlico. Franklin could sense something special happening. In the home stretch he whipped the Bid hard, over and over with his left hand. This time the two of them tied the track record. The success of both the baby-faced jockey and especially the two-year-old horse with the eye-popping speed had everyone in the industry talking about Buddy Delp and his magic touch. The story took on another dimension, however, when the press and public learned that Ronnie not only raced for Delp but that he was also living in the trainer’s home.
When Ronnie returned from Middleburg at the tail end of 1977, the decision of where he should live was not an easy one. His last two residences, his parents’ house in Dundalk and the small, bare room above the stable at Pimlico, were out of the question. Both were too far from Buddy’s home base in Laurel.
Ronnie might have taken up residence on the Laurel backstretch, like George Cusimano once had, but Gerald Delp wouldn’t hear of it. He and Ronnie had become the best of friends, and they wanted to spend more time together hanging out. Gerald went to his father and asked him if the young jockey could simply live at their house. To everyone’s astonishment, Buddy said yes.
Delp’s house in suburban Laurel couldn’t have been more different from Tony Franklin’s little breadbox row house back in Dundalk. With nothing but men living in it, it felt more like a clubhouse than a family home. Ronnie slept on a rollaway in Gerald’s room, and sharing that space, the two boys became more like brothers than buddies. They’d become inseparable, hanging out together all day at the track and all night at the house. For them, Buddy’s home was a sanctuary where they enjoyed their off hours and blew off steam in Buddy’s subterranean game room, fully outfitted with a pool table and a color television.
To the public the arrangement looked like a wholesome one. It was charming: the wise old trainer and the eager young protégé under the same roof had the feel of the wizard Merlin teaching metaphysics to the future king, Arthur, in some out-of-the-way castle.
But the truth was almost opposite to how the press presented it to the gullible public. The scribes painted portraits of Buddy as a Vince Lombardi for four-legged athletes—a brash, bold, and tough miracle worker. To them he was both a winner and a wit. He was articulate and funny in a world where those things were in short supply. Buddy’s charming qualities led reporters to misrepresent his relationship with Ronnie. Instead of referring to Delp as Franklin’s employer, they started to call him a “father figure,” and Franklin was sometimes described as Delp’s “surrogate son.”
In fact, it wasn’t easy spending so much time with Buddy. At work he could be foul-mouthed and abusive if Ronnie did something out on the track that he didn’t like. He communicated in a highly intimidating way, looming over the jockey and leaning his imposing body into his protégé to make a point. At times, he would even threaten to kick the boy out of his house.
In fact, many young men in racing felt intimidated by Buddy, and they didn’t have to live with him. One aspiring trainer, Scott Regan, found that out the hard way. Regan was building his own stable in precisely the same way as Delp had once done it—by claiming horses. Regan particularly admired Buddy’s operation and, for a while, claimed a string of Delp’s racers.
Buddy wasn’t flattered. He took notice of Regan’s pattern of claims and was soon highly annoyed by it. After yet another race at Delaware Park, where Regan hoped to take home one more Delp horse, Buddy exploded. He followed the young trainer into the secretary’s office where claims were filed and came face to face with Regan. He wasn’t there to exchange pleasantries. Buddy stuck his thick finger within inches of the young man’s nose and eyes and then sputtered at him: “If you claim one more of my horses,” Delp said, “I will shut your whole God-damn stable down.”
Put a little more plainly, Buddy had just threatened to claim every single one of Regan’s horses. That would have effectively ended the kid’s emerging business. Regan, knowing that Buddy had both the money and vindictive nature to follow through on the threat, took Buddy at his word. Needless to say, the message was delivered. No more Delp horses were claimed by Scott Regan.
Another young trainer, Ronnie Alfano, a clean-cut kid and Vietnam war veteran, had an almost identical experience. He too claimed a few Delp horses, only to find himself personally confronted. Buddy had just deposited $300,000 into his own account for claiming purposes. In a moment of rage and retaliation Delp told Alfano: “I ought to just give [the entire $300,000] to you. Because I’m going to take every fucking horse you run.”
“Buddy is brutal,” Alfano confided to his friend, Mark Reid. “He’s scary.”
But Reid had no fear of him. One summer at Delaware Park, he also claimed a bunch of Delp horses but had a pretty good feeling that Buddy wouldn’t say a word to him. Reid, who was then only about twenty-nine, was nicknamed “Heavy.” It was an allusion to his athletic 6-foot-2-inch, 240-pound frame. Reid had been a college wrestling champion just a few years before. “Delp was a bully,” Reid said. “But he wouldn’t have said ‘boo’ to me. He would’ve gotten hurt.”
Anyway, Reid understood Buddy, and the code that he and all the old guys lived by. Reid’s first boss, Richard Dutrow, had made it all clear to him early on. “Don’t make friends at the track,” Dutrow had warned. “Every time another trainer wins, that’s the food being taken from your kids’ mouths. Give no quarter and expect no quarter to be given. This isn’t a game for sissies.”
That was Buddy’s credo too.
If Buddy was someone for a young man to fear at work, he was downright scary when he attempted to be a father. One night, after dinner at a nice restaurant near Pimlico, Ronnie and Buddy’s sons all piled into the old man’s Lincoln Continental for the ride home. In those close and happy quarters, Buddy took the opportunity, as a lot of father’s might, to lecture his three teenage passengers about drug use. “I know you all smoke a little weed,” Buddy told them. “I read what you kids are doing today. But there’s a lot of bad shit out there, and you don’t know what you’re getting.”
With that he departed from conventional norms and reached into his sport coat and pulled out a large marijuana joint. He lit it up, unleashing the pungent odor, and took a drag from it right there. The boys were flabbergasted. Gerald, then only about sixteen, couldn’t believe his eyes. “What the fuck?” he muttered to himself.
“If you are gonna smoke,” Buddy continued, “I like to know that you’re getting the good stuff. I like to know that it’s not laced with anything bad.” So, apparently in the best interests of the kids’ well-being, Buddy passed around the pot, and he and the kids took turns in the cloudy car all the way home.
It was the first time any of them had ever seen Buddy use drugs.
Cathy Rosenberger didn’t know what Buddy and the boys did in their spare time, but she could see that the boss wasn’t running a tight ship. As an organized and utterly reliable member of his organization, she was tasked with getting Ronnie to work in the morning. She was supposed to pick him up at Buddy’s house twice a week at 5:00 a.m. and take him to the barns at Laurel. But on many days when she arrived, it was hard to get anyone to answer the door. She would ring and pound for a while before Buddy himself would finally appear in the doorway, disheveled and attired in nothing more than boxer shorts and a “wife-beater” undershirt. Still groggy, Delp would tell her, “I can’t get Ronnie up.” Then he would make her wait in the kitchen while he roused the young rider out of bed and pushed him outside.
It wasn’t Rosenberger’s place to question why Ronnie wasn’t ready in the mornings. But the truth was that Buddy’s place was the setting for occasional parties in the evenings. The boys and their friends, usually other race track people, got together to play pool and poker, to drink, and to listen to music or watch TV. Sometimes Buddy’s girlfriend slept over.
Much of the fun was harmless, a way of passing time and blowing off steam. But some of it was very much at odds with a family-like atmosphere. That was especially apparent one evening when Buddy and the boys were all shooting pool in the playroom with a few of their friends from the track.
In between shots, Buddy asked Ronnie to run upstairs and get him a beer out of the refrigerator. Ronnie did as he was told, but when he came back downstairs, the scene had changed. No one was playing pool anymore. Instead the table had become a makeshift green felt surface for small sheets of glass. Everyone in the room was bent over the table and inhaling lines of white powder through rolled-up dollar bills. Even Buddy. Ronnie was stunned, but he slowly continued down the steps.
He looked at Buddy, the man who had saved him from the streets and taught him a profession, the man who was his employer and his landlord. As everyone good-naturedly exhorted Ronnie to join the fun, he accepted a rolled-up bill, leaned over the table, and did the same as everyone else—right beside the man the newspapers called his father figure.
It all began for Ronnie at Bowie that winter. He won his first-ever race there, and just a few weeks later he purchased his first bag of cocaine from another jockey there. He’d been hailed as the next great rider, but the seeds of his painful ending had already been planted.