Buddy Delp had a hard decision to make.
Spectacular Bid’s scintillating performances had changed every possible expectation and equation. Ronnie Franklin had ridden the horse to near perfection, winning races, beating great riders, and breaking records. But Buddy Delp had decided to look for another jockey anyway. In fact, the better his horse ran under Franklin, the more he was convinced that a different rider was necessary.
Members of the racing world weren’t surprised. Despite Franklin’s successes, both on the Bid and on Delp’s many other horses, there were plenty of negative whispers about the boy from Dundalk who was getting so much attention. He was too young for a horse like Bid, they said, too inexperienced. Others dissected his riding skills and found fault in just about every move he made. And then of course there were those who gave all the credit for Franklin’s accomplishments to the talented stable for which he rode.
Buddy often spoke publicly and wistfully of engaging Willie Shoemaker, the sensational and legendary rider then entering the autumnal years of a highly significant career. By the late 1970s, Shoemaker had already won ten Triple Crown races and thousands of others. “If Bill Shoemaker were six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds he could beat anybody in any sport,” the most well-respected sports writer in the United States, Red Smith, once wrote. The fact that Shoe was only 4 feet 10 inches tall and ninety-one pounds didn’t bother Smith. “Pound for pound, he’s got to be the greatest living athlete,” Red said.
In short, Shoemaker was the polar opposite of Franklin. Ronnie was still a teenager; Shoemaker was bearing down on fifty. Ronnie was still an apprentice who’d come out of nowhere; Shoemaker was as famous, experienced, and successful as any rider in the country. He already had more than six thousand trips to the winner’s circle in his career.
Once, when Delp was asked if the California-based Shoemaker would want to come east just to ride his horse, Buddy answered with the flippant arrogance for which he was fast becoming known. “Is a blue bird blue?” he asked.
Despite that confidence there was already one prominent rider who had turned down an opportunity to ride the Bid. Stevie Cauthen was among the first riders Buddy reached out to as a possible successor to Franklin. Like Ronnie, Cauthen was only a teenager, but his circumstances were already vastly different. For one thing, Cauthen had just won the Triple Crown, masterfully riding Affirmed to three whisker-close victories over Alydar (ridden by Jorge Velasquez) in one of the most intense duels in the history of racing.
Cauthen’s precociousness and all-American good looks had made him more than just a jockey. He had quickly become an ambassador for his sport and an American icon. By the late 1970s the Hispanic riders already dominated American racing, but Cauthen, born and raised on a farm in Kentucky, briefly restored a sense of Caucasian dominance and middle-class values.
The tracks and training facilities were filled with high school dropouts and poor people. Cauthen’s winning smile yielded more than a white gleam; good grammar came peeking out from behind those teeth. He presented a sense of social class that was well within the understanding of America’s job holders and bill payers. Suddenly, with Cauthen on the throne, horse racing was pasteurized and homogenized, shrink wrapped, and packaged. It was, in short, a lot less spicy than it had been for twenty years, but that suited American tastes.
Thanks to Cauthen’s many virtues, he enjoyed opportunities that few people in racing had ever known. He leapt from the starter’s gate to the covers of major American magazines and starred in commercials for blue chip brands. “Do you know me?” he asked hundreds of millions of Americans. “I won the Triple Crown, but people still think of me as a kid. With the [American Express] card,” the diminutive boy said as he mounted a horse, “people look up to me, and not just when I’m up here.”
But a peculiar prejudice cost the brilliant young rider a second-straight chance at a Triple Crown. When Delp put in the request to speak to Cauthen, his agent, the usually prescient Lenny Goodman, told Stevie not to bother.
“What do you know about Spectacular Bid?” Stevie asked him.
“Not much,” Lenny responded. “I think he’s some New Jersey horse.”
Cauthen and Goodman said thanks but no thanks, and they passed.
If Delp couldn’t have Cauthen, he turned to the next best option, the man Stevie had barely defeated in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. That rider was Jorge Velasquez, who also went by the Anglicized moniker “Georgie.”
Stevie, Georgie, and their horses had just engaged in a duel so intense that there were few precedents for it in racing—or anywhere else. Affirmed versus Alydar was only vaguely reminiscent of Seabiscuit and War Admiral. It was no one-act play; it unfurled in ten brutal installments. In the intensity and drawn-out ferocity of their confrontation, they had more in common with exhausted and bleeding pugilists than anything on four legs. They were two fighters so skilled and fearsome that nobody else could or would challenge them, so they kept going at each other.
The horses and their riders and especially their rivalry unlocked the potential of their sport. They captivated the nation with high-speed daring and contrasting styles. Affirmed inevitably set the pace, while Alydar chose to save something until the end.
In the 1977 Champagne Stakes at Belmont, a race for two-year-olds and a key early indicator for the Kentucky Derby, Alydar and Velasquez came charging from the outside and swooped past Cauthen and Affirmed to win. It was less a sign of things to come and more of a wake-up call for Cauthen.
In the next season’s Triple Crown races, Stevie used Velasquez’s and Alydar’s tendencies against them. Victory in the Champagne Stakes had taught Velasquez that the best way to beat Affirmed was to hang back and then kick it into high gear. With enough gas left in Alydar’s tank, he believed, he could outgun Affirmed to the finish line. But it was Cauthen who had unlocked the secret to victory. If he could get to the inside and save enough ground, he believed, he could stave off his magnificent competitor long enough to win. He put that strategy to work in the Triple Crown, where he outmaneuvered the more experienced rider. In all three races, Cauthen found the rail and saved just enough millimeters around the oval to defeat Alydar’s frantic and fearsome late charges.
Those second-place finishes notwithstanding, Velasquez was about as formidable and sensible a choice for Spectacular Bid’s mount as any race rider in the country. Like Jacinto Vasquez, Georgie was a Panamanian who had made a big name for himself in the United States in the 1960s. In 1967 he won more races than any other jockey in the country. In 1969 he was the nation’s top money winner.
So Georgie Velasquez was Buddy’s man, the experienced and battle-tested rider chosen to take the Bid’s reins like a baton from Ronnie Franklin. Georgie was supposedly getting the mount of a lifetime, one better than Alydar or, for that matter, Affirmed. Spectacular Bid was a horse, it seemed, that would bring him even greater fame and financial fortune than any he had ever known before.
But who would really want to be in Velasquez’s boots?
While the Bid was unquestionably great, the situation was not. In replacing Ronnie, Velasquez was taking over for a rider who had already performed admirably on the same horse and for the same trainer. Franklin was not only under contract to Delp, but he also lived with him, supposedly as a son. In Franklin’s last race on the Bid, the World’s Playground Stakes in Atlantic City, he had galloped to an incredible fifteen-length victory.
For the new rider, following in the footsteps of a success and one who was apparently dear to the boss was virtually guaranteed to be a poor situation. And yet, given how extraordinary the Bid was, how could Velasquez or anyone else turn down the mount?
In his first race on Spectacular Bid, Georgie took the reins for the 1978 Champagne Stakes, the race he’d won on Alydar only the year before. Delp’s advice to him was oddly more about appearances than substance. “Don’t let [Spectacular Bid] loaf,” Buddy told Velasquez. “Show them in New York who’s the champ from the quarter pole home.”
The Bid indeed finished fast. He was just two-fifths of a second off the stakes record recently set by Seattle Slew. Nevertheless, the Bid barely beat the field, finishing less than three lengths ahead of the second-place horse. It was a striking contrast to Ronnie’s recent fifteen-length victory.
After the race, Velasquez might have also provoked Delp a little when he very lightly criticized Spectacular Bid’s ride. “He didn’t break too sharp,” Georgie said about the horse’s emergence from the second turn.
It was a mild statement and typical of a jockey’s observation, but Delp was cultivating an image of perfection for his horse and didn’t like his jockey speaking out of school. Velasquez’s wife didn’t help either. She got on Buddy’s nerves too when she exuberantly pushed her way into the winner’s circle photo. Nevertheless Velasquez was back in the saddle a little less than two weeks later when the whole crew went to New Jersey’s Meadowlands for the Young America Stakes.
Delp’s team arrived just as the New York Yankees were returning to the tri-state area from Los Angeles with the 1978 World Series trophy. The Bronx Bombers won their title memorably, but only after firing their popular but erratic manager, Billy Martin, and falling fourteen games behind the Boston Red Sox in July.
Spectacular Bid entered the starter’s gate in New Jersey soon after the Yanks had been feted with a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan. Like the Bronx Bombers, the Bid endured some struggles before crossing the finish line. When the gate opened, a horse called Port Ebony took a hard-right turn that threw off several riders including Velasquez, who was forced to stand up in the irons. He recovered masterfully and continued on, but as he ventured through the race, he encountered more trouble as he ran into traffic. For a few desperate moments he was locked inside, and ahead of him was Strike Your Colors, a colt that had beaten the Bid at Delaware Park only two months earlier.
Velasquez, a calm and expert rider, patiently waited out the traffic jam until a hole appeared. Exploiting the sliver, the Bid bolted into daylight and emerged from the tight quarters cinema-style, in the nick of time. In the end, the Bid won, but barely. He had prevailed by a neck.
Buddy wasn’t pleased with the small margin of victory, but that was less disconcerting to him than the jockey’s contention that the animal was hard to control. Buddy had always seen the horse as a “natural” that needed little correction or coercion.
Yet Velasquez was emphatic. He told Buddy that the Bid required two radical pieces of equipment to perform properly. He insisted on an extended blinker, for focus, and a burr bit, to keep the horse from lugging in. Delp couldn’t disagree more with both suggestions. But the notion of a burr bit particularly irked him.
A burr bit is an uncomfortable piece of equipment with pronounced bristling brushes that go on the side of the horse’s face. It was considered a severe solution that was usually utilized only for incorrigible horses. It is painful by design, but it gives the rider maximum control of the animal.
Buddy saw this as a typical suggestion by a Hispanic rider. He believed that as a rule they sought more forceful control over their animals and had no qualms about handling the animals more roughly.
Buddy believed that Spectacular Bid was a more talented horse than any other he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a million of them. In his mind there was no need for extreme or cruel measures. In fact, on a horse like the Bid, the less equipment, the better. Delp believed the jockey’s number one job on the Bid was to sit back and enjoy the ride. Up to that point Spectacular Bid had never been outfitted with anything more elaborate than a “D bit” and a simple leather bridle, the most basic equipment in the game. It was a minimalist approach and, as far as Delp was concerned, the right one.
Delp thought about the difference of opinion between himself and Velasquez on the car ride back to Baltimore. He knew, however, before he even reached the Delaware Memorial Bridge that he was going to make a change. “Georgie’s fighting the horse out there,” Buddy told his sons as they zoomed past the endless exits of the New Jersey Turnpike. “He’s not the right fit.”
Back in Baltimore, Delp aggressively did what he had to do to move on. He called Velasquez’s agent and delivered the bad news in a terse, dispassionate conversation. That’s all it took to do the deed and sever the tie. There were no scenes, no arguments, and no baseball bats.
Velasquez’s bad news was good news for Ronnie Franklin. Delp returned the boy from Dundalk to the mount, allowing him to reprise his role as the luckiest man on earth, at least in the eyes of the Hispanic jockeys. Whether he truly was unprepared and undeserving, as they said, it was nevertheless undeniable that no one knew Spectacular Bid better than Ronnie Franklin did. The horse and the boy had been together from the beginning.
It wouldn’t be until a few weeks later that the wisdom of returning him to such a rare and coveted mount would be tested. That’s when the two-year-old horse and the eighteen-year-old jockey were reunited for the Laurel Futurity.
Great horses like Honest Pleasure, Affirmed, and Secretariat were all recent winners of the Laurel Futurity. It was a highly prestigious race for two-year-olds, and it would be a stiff test for both horse and rider since they would be pitted against a small but promising field of four of the nation’s best up-and-coming thoroughbreds. The real showdown, however, would be with just one horse. General Assembly, Secretariat’s well-regarded son, was also in the race, and Stevie Cauthen would be in his irons.
As everyone anticipated, the two horses and their young jockeys were neck and neck for much of the race. They were still that way as they went around the second turn.
Because the race was an important one, with the eyes of the horse community following the action, Buddy was eager for everyone to see what his special horse was capable of doing. In his pre-race instructions, he told Ronnie, “When you straighten him out into the stretch, ride him out, keep on driving.”
The jockey followed Delp’s directives to the letter. Ronnie pressed the Bid and whipped him on the haunch ten times down the stretch. And the great beast responded. Having been asked for more, Bid provided it, accelerating past his rival as though General Assembly was a claimer and not the son of Secretariat.
The Bid-Ronnie rocket ship finished the race in a minute forty-three and three-fifths seconds. From the second turn to the wire, Bid opened up eight and a half lengths between himself and General Assembly, and more than twenty on Clever Trick, the third-place finisher.
Spectacular Bid had not only beaten General Assembly, but he had eclipsed that colt’s illustrious father too. Ronnie and the Bid clocked the fastest time yet recorded in the long and storied history of Laurel, more than a second faster than Secretariat had run the Futurity just a few short years before.
Even the hardened trackmen who’d made long careers in and around racing could barely believe what they had just seen. Buddy and his crew, however, had no problem fathoming it. The Bid’s implausible speed catapulted all of them into a state of euphoria.
Delp was so happy that the cranky old man actually became giddy and planted a kiss on his talented young jockey in front of everyone. And Ronnie wasn’t the only one to get a little unexpected affection. Posing right next to Buddy for the last picture of the day was none other than Raymond Archer, Delp’s stepfather, the man who had so kindly taught him everything there was to know about racing and then had so cruelly cast him aside.
In the exhilaration of the moment they had all lost themselves.
The horse was doing the hard lifting and generating the happiness. The Meyerhoffs, Buddy, and Ronnie were all raking in big money and developing huge reputations because the stars were in alignment for them. They had crossed paths with the golden horse like Pharaoh’s daughter had lifted Moses from the Nile. They hadn’t created the horse, but they had found him. And with his special qualities he was changing everything.
But lost in the huge victory and the incredible display of equine speed was the relative ease of the race. Although the field consisted of excellent two-year-olds, true contenders, there were only four of them. That meant that Ronnie and the Bid had a mostly clear path to show off the horse’s genetic superiority. Beating the great and famous Stevie Cauthen was certainly a point of pride, especially for Franklin, who had come under so much scrutiny. But as fine a rider as Cauthen was, he might have been one with whom Ronnie could cope.
Cauthen wasn’t bellicose or intimidating. As his public image suggested, he was straightforward, a clean competitor. Like Ronnie, Stevie was a teenager who’d been allowed to pilot the very best talent and to compete in the most prestigious races. He’d already won the Triple Crown, and he was the current hottest commodity in the business. Stevie might’ve been the only rider in America who had no axe to grind with Ronnie, and of course, he felt no jealousy for him.
But now that everyone could see the greatness of Spectacular Bid, now that the superlatives were stacking up and Bid was the clear frontrunner among the two-year-olds, all that he had really earned was a big fat target on his back—for himself and Ronnie.
Buddy finished out 1978 by taking the Bid to one last lucrative race. At the Heritage Stakes in Pennsylvania Spectacular Bid, with Ronnie aboard, won by a gaping six-and-a-half-length margin. When the year finally ended, the highest recognition came pouring in. The Bid won the Eclipse Award as the “Two-Year Old Male Horse of the Year.” And Ronnie was named the “Outstanding Apprentice Jockey of the Year.”
But Franklin could barely enjoy the professional validation. His personal life suddenly became far more complicated when he got a call he never expected. It was from Shirley Campbell, the young woman with whom he’d had a single, quick sexual encounter earlier in the year.
Shirley was nervous and uncertain. She made small take with Ronnie for a moment, and then she blurted out the real reason for her call. “You’re going to be a father,” she bluntly said.
Ronnie didn’t reply.
He expressed no happiness and showed no anger. He didn’t deny anything or urge her to put the child up for adoption. He didn’t demand that she have an abortion. He simply said nothing.
Shirley could sense his fear. She was scared too. Awkward and unsure of herself, she attempted to fill the petrified moment with the same soothing question a young wife might ask her husband in the same situation.
“What would you rather have, a boy or a girl?” she asked Ronnie.
“A boy,” he said.
And that was it; they said nothing more to each other, and they hung up the phone.
Shirley never heard from Ronnie again throughout the months of her pregnancy. And he wasn’t present in December either, when she gave birth to the boy he said he wanted.
Without Ronnie there, Shirley was free to name the child whatever she liked. She called him Chris, and gave him her last name, Campbell. It was a way to honor the father whom she loved so much, her father.
Chris was the only son Ronnie would ever have, and he was a dead ringer for his dad, but he was a Campbell and would never be a Franklin.
The appearance of a son would only apply financial pressure to Franklin, and by all appearances he now had plenty of money to cope with that. But the truth was that even as he was under contract to Buddy Delp, riding excellent horses on a daily basis, dominating area race tracks, and winning and making national headlines, he had very few assets. Since he had first tried cocaine with Buddy and Gerald in the “playroom,” he had developed a real taste for it. He regularly got high with them and others at Buddy’s house.
Although living with Buddy was portrayed as wholesome and protective in the media, it was actually draining. Ronnie paid the bill for the coke consumption of the whole house. And the white powder was so pervasive at Buddy’s that one housekeeper accidentally used her vacuum tube to suck up a mound of it on a table, believing it was talcum spillage.
In that house, they smoked pot and swallowed a variety of pills and drank booze by the bottle. And Ronnie, the young guy with the big paydays, shelled out for most of it. There were also other costly vices. Ronnie lost piles of money at the poker table, and Buddy was known to be a great poker player.
Although the track was supposed to be the place where Ronnie made his money, he lost a significant amount of it there too. Hank Tiburzi, Tony Franklin’s best friend, the man who had brought Ronnie to Pimlico that first time, continued to watch over the boy and do odd jobs for him. From a distance, he once observed Buddy solicit $2,000 from Ronnie for a horse bet. Tiburzi decided to shadow Delp as the trainer made his rounds through the track and see what he did with the money.
Buddy never went to the windows with it and never placed a bet. In fact, the money remained in his cavernous pants pocket, where it never saw the light of day again. But when Buddy got back to Ronnie, Tiburzi heard him deliver some sad news. “Your horse lost,” Buddy told Ronnie. And just like that, two grand of the kid’s money had evaporated.
“This was an old trick,” Cathy Rosenberger said, “usually perpetrated by an unscrupulous agent on his client-rider. They’d take the money from the jockey, supposedly to lay down ‘the bet’ for them, but instead they’d keep it. If the horse won, the agent would tell the jockey that he got shut out of the window, didn’t get the bet down in time, and would simply give the money back. But if the horse lost, the agent kept the entire stake for himself.”
Ronnie was young and vulnerable, but even he knew that he was being duped. But what could he do about it? For that matter, what could his parents, do? They weren’t going to confront Buddy, so they merely chose to see it as the cost of doing business with him. The Franklins were all too painfully aware what they owed Buddy Delp. Without him, Ronnie would still be at the fast food fryer or God knows where.
For better or worse, Buddy was Ronnie’s font of opportunity, his future, and his identity. Everything Ronnie had—the roof over his head, his friends, his career as a jockey, and his celebrity—were all owed to Buddy. And Buddy could end it all in a moment’s notice, at his whim. That was the power dynamic.
Ronnie had the ability to walk away from any of these unfair situations, but it would have cost him everything to do it. And for what? A little coke money or some stupid bet on a horse? It was all just part of some unfair dues he had to pay to get to the top. He had to see the big picture; there were years of good times and easy paydays ahead. Anyway, as long as Buddy was getting a regular taste out of Ronnie’s till, there was every incentive for the trainer to keep feeding the young rider good mounts and especially to keep him on Spectacular Bid.