Right out of the starter’s gate Spectacular Bid clanged into the side of the unforgiving steel opening; he did it with so much abusive force that Ronnie Franklin was almost jarred clean off his wide, strong back. The young rider might have fallen under the pounding hooves, but with his great physical strength and fortitude he managed to stay in the saddle, and after only a few strides the horse and rider had recovered and were in top form.
That hard crash was only the beginning of an extremely trying race and day.
As Ronnie and the Bid ventured further into the loam of Gulfstream Park and the prestigious Florida Derby, a key stakes race and an indicator for the Kentucky Derby, the path would only become more treacherous.
It was a small field, but among the group of riders was Georgie Velasquez. When last Ronnie and the Bid had seen him, Georgie had been their friend and teammate, wearing Hawksworth Farm’s familiar black-and-blue silks and riding the Bid to victory in two pivotal races.
When Buddy Delp removed Velasquez from the mount, the rider seemed to walk away professionally and without rancor. But as Ronnie was the first to find out, the veteran rider wasn’t at all happy about losing his place on the Bid. In fact, he was still livid. Much of his rage stemmed from the humiliation of losing the special horse to the young and inexperienced Franklin, a rider he did not respect.
The depth of Velasquez’s wrath and his capacity for revenge were both about to be revealed. He and his friend Angel Cordero Jr. were intent on torturing Franklin in front of the entire racing world, thwarting the mighty Bid, and paying back Buddy Delp.
Ronnie was oblivious to all of that. After the Laurel Futurity, where he had bested Secretariat’s time and defeated Stevie Cauthen, the hottest name in riding, he was calm and confident. In the Futurity, it had all been so simple.
Here at the Florida Derby Franklin tried to employ the same tactics, but things played out far differently. Just as he had done at Laurel, he let Spectacular Bid languish far behind the leaders without a worry in the world. But when it was time to make his move, he ran into a different style of racing than he had ever encountered before.
He whipped the Bid and gave the horse his marching orders. “Let’s go Big Daddy!” he shouted in the Bid’s ear. With that, the steel gray accelerated and gobbled up the ground between himself and the others. The first rider he encountered on his trek to the front was Angel Cordero Jr.
Angel, who liked to have his name pronounced Spanish-style, Ahn-hel, was a jockey unlike any other Ronnie had seen before. By 1979, Angel was already firmly established as one of the finest riders in the country, and perhaps one of the greatest across the centuries. Both Black and Puerto Rican, Cordero grew up poor on the island, in a little wooden house that sat behind the stable area of the track. Despite his family’s lack of wealth, he had a happy upbringing. His father, Angel Cordero Sr., was a highly respected man who had emerged from a huge family of horse people.
Angel Sr. was just one of forty-nine Corderos listed as jockeys in Puerto Rico. He distinguished himself from the crowd of his own family and, for that matter, all of the other Puerto Rican horse professionals to emerge as one of the most distinguished jockeys and trainers in the history of the island.
In Cordero Sr.’s era of racing the men were so tough and fearless, so desperate for opportunity, that they often raced without helmets. Angel Cordero Sr. was among the greatest of these natural horsemen, an adept rider who scored more than a hundred victories on one horse alone. After his riding career was over, he became even more well known as a winning trainer.
Angel Jr. regarded his papi as a kind and loving man who taught him almost everything he would ever know about riding. Angel’s mother, Mercedes Hernandez, also came from horse people. Her father, too, was a jockey and a trainer, as were all of her brothers.
Living at the track from birth and with so many family members in the profession, Angel Jr. found that horses and riding came naturally to him. He was familiar with the huge animals before he could say “cat.” Years later his mother still had albums full of photos of Angel on the caballos, in the saddle, grinning, when he was still barely old enough to walk.
It is interesting that even with his pedigree and God-given horse-riding ability, Cordero harbored another dream. He loved baseball as much as racing and fantasized about playing in the World Series every bit as much as he did riding in the Kentucky Derby. From his home on the island he followed the pennant races in the American and National Leagues and worshipped the stars who fought all summer for the October glory.
Angel’s baseball ambitions were fueled by the kids he ran with. He counted Roberto Clemente and Orlando Cepeda among his childhood friends. Like Angel, they were Black and Puerto Rican and intensely driven with a hot fire for success. But while Clemente and Cepeda went to the United States and became All-Stars and Hall of Famers, Angel learned the hard lessons of sport. Though clearly a superb athlete, he didn’t really have much to offer the scouts. He was good enough to play some semipro ball on the island, but physically he was never going to cut it. At age twelve he was so small that many people believed that he was a midget. At eighteen, he was but 5 feet tall and weighed seventy-eight pounds. No one had to tell him that there was no future for him in baseball. “I was just too small to do anything but ride,” Cordero said.
But the path wasn’t as clear as it might have seemed for him to be a great rider. For one thing, his mother was dead set against it. In fact, despite her own background and immersion in racing, Mercedes Hernandez Cordero wanted her little son to be anything else but a rider. In her eyes he was tiny and vulnerable. She lived in fear that her Angel would get hurt or killed on the track. Her anxieties were only heightened when her husband finally, inevitably, came to her and asked the question that she had long dreaded: “May I take Angel to work with me?”
Before she gave her consent for him to even go, she made her husband promise to keep her boy off the horses. He agreed, and more than that, he obeyed. He personally saw to it that Angel Jr. never got a leg up. And he made it clear to all of his workers that his son was not to ride the horses when he was away.
But Angel Jr. was already a determined kid and a rule breaker. When the old man left the premises, he hopped aboard any old horse that appealed to him and rode without regard to parental rules. So Angel Sr. soon learned the same lesson that countless others in the horse world would find out the hard way: Angel Cordero Jr. did what he wanted.
Unable to stop the boy from riding, Angel Sr. used his son’s dogged determination for his own simple needs. “Buy me a beer,” he told his son, “and I will put you on a horse.” So young Angel saved his money and delivered cold bottles to wash the hot dust of hard work out of his old dad’s dry mouth. And of course he got his race-riding lessons.
Later, the clever father demanded one more thing. He used riding as an inducement to get his kid to school. He wanted Angel Jr. to have enough education that he wouldn’t be forced to the irons to make a living. “If you finish school, I might think about letting you ride,” he told his son. “But we’ll have to convince your mami.”
Angel finished school, or at least more school than most of the men who worked at the barn or the track ever had. He got his high school diploma and went on to a semester of community college to boot.
Mercedes was delighted that Angel was getting an education, although she never knew about his backroom deals with her husband. They never told her that Angel Jr. was also training to race ride.
Mercedes only found out that her son was a jockey on the day before his first race. By then, she was forced to accept the fact that he was a rider and there wasn’t much she could do to prevent it. But while she accepted it as a fact, she never quite reconciled herself to it. That was true even after he became a star on the mainland.
Because riding was second nature to Cordero, he drove his horses with an urgency, ferocity, and daring that few others could rationally attempt. His riding style and combative nature both kept him in constant conflict with track officials, and he came to the mainland only because he faced a long suspension in Puerto Rico. Had he stayed there, he would have been out of work for months. So he made a deal with the stewards. They agreed to lift their punishment if Cordero agreed to leave the island.
He complied and moved on to the United States.
Angel had no idea what to expect on the mainland. Clemente and Cepeda told him about the terrible prejudice aimed at Blacks and Latinos in the states. They recounted how they had to take different buses than their white teammates and stay in different hotels.
At first, Angel thought their stories were exaggerations. But when he landed in the United States for the first time in 1962, the civil rights movement had not yet reached its zenith, and he actually found life on the mainland worse than his friends had described it.
“They treat me like shit here,” he confided to his parents, and there was plenty of reason to think so. At the track, white riders who were punished for some infraction typically received a five-day suspension. But Angel noticed that if he (or another Latino) was involved in a similar violation—and he was always involved in something—his suspension would generally last ten to fifteen days.
He was also ordered to speak English in the jockeys’ room. The Latinos were generally forbidden from speaking Spanish. Worst of all, he had to take the pain of being called “nigger” and “spic.” He heard those words applied to him both at the track and outside the gates. On occasion, in an attempt at self-deprecating humor, he even referred to himself as “the little nigger.” Certainly that’s how he was seen and treated. Away from the track he was second-class. He was turned away from “white” restaurants and bathrooms. These things didn’t happen only in the South; he experienced similar treatment in New York.
Later on, riding in California and enjoying financial success for the first time, Angel hoped to live the American dream and purchase his own home. On two different occasions he picked out a house only to be told he couldn’t buy in a “whites-only neighborhood.” “Spanish guys was very mistreated in this country in the sixties; womens, too,” Angel remembered with some bitterness. “America in the sixties was meant for white mens only.”
Going hand-in-hand with the racial and ethnic abuse was class warfare. The monied interests were always working to suppress Angel’s upward mobility. Riders were required to have agents for their own protection, but Angel wasn’t allowed to speak to his in private. It was required that someone official always be present to listen into their conversations.
These slights and insults only enraged Cordero and fueled the aggression and ambition that came so naturally to him. He wasn’t in the least bit ashamed of who he was. On the contrary, he had a rock-solid sense of self, and he sure as hell hadn’t come all the way to the mainland to be a pin cushion for demeaning epithets. And no matter how unwelcome he was made to feel, he had no intention of going back home to live in some race track shanty like his father did, with the smell of horseshit and poverty in his nose night and day.
He had come to New York for good, and he had come to win.
Angel wanted the money, and he wanted adulation. He was in the game for groceries but also to show the world his talent. If you didn’t give him your respect, he would take it from you against your will. He could beat you and break your heart with his whip because he was willing to take his horses to places you were too afraid to take yours. But, if by chance, you were feeling a little courageous and willing to ride in the dangerous places too, he would make you pay for that.
Fear, and potentially pain, were merely implements in Angel Cordero Jr.’s toolbox. No matter who you were, he could almost certainly outride you. But if that didn’t work, he was more than willing to out-crazy you. Even Angel’s most ardent admirers knew that.
Angel was the type of guy who would go to the wall for a friend, help him in private, and even aid and abet him out on the track. But should your self-interest collide with his, all bets were off. “He had a motto for himself,” Angel’s close friend and fellow jockey Ruben Hernandez said. “‘Number one, Angel. Number two, Angel. Number three, Angel. Number four, Angel.’”
Hernandez admired Cordero and considered him greater than any other jockey in the business. But encountering him in a race was no picnic. “He was the type of rider if you come in the inside, well you picked the wrong place to be. He won’t let you in there. But if you come outside he push you out.”
Cordero reminded Hernandez, a Panamanian, of another strong athlete he knew back home. “Angel was like Roberto Duran in a saddle,” Hernandez said, referring to the wild man of the boxing ring who had once unnerved and defeated Sugar Ray Leonard. Duran was as much about pre-fight psychological torture as he was about his whipping, whizzing hands of stone.
Ruben idolized Cordero but knew that he was wild and brutal too. “Most of the time Angel do it the right way,” he said, “but a lot of time he overdo it a little bit. He not only ride his horse, he ride your horse, too.” By that, Ruben meant that Cordero could make an opponent’s horse follow his instructions instead of his own jockey’s. Angel also had no compunction about using his crop to whip another rider’s horse.
But Ruben also saw Angel’s cerebral side. He knew that his friend’s greatest strength lay in his understanding of every crevice and nuance of his game. “Angel always examined the other horses,” Hernandez said. “When he rides he always looking to his surroundings. He looking to the left, he looking to the right. He cover every angle, when he was riding a horse.”
Intelligence and intensity carried Angel to victory many times even when he wasn’t on the best mount. “Angel take the maximum ride of the horse,” Ruben said. “That’s one of the best achievements of him. It doesn’t matter if he ride a favorite or a 10–1 shot, you would see him riding with the same enthusiasm.” Ruben continued, “Angel was very patient. He wasn’t the type of guy who move after the 3/8th pole. He can wait and can wait and then check you around, look where you are especially when you ride the favorite. If he’s not riding the favorite and somebody else ride the favorite, he look for you because he want to beat you.”
Even Angel’s friends could suffer at his hands. At times, it seemed he punished other riders for simply doing what they were paid to do and trying to win.
Jacinto Vasquez had a colorful name for it. He called it “barbecuing.” If you got pushed or shoved into a rail, a fence, the parking lot, or a hedge; if something endangered you and made you feel like you would be thrown, kicked, maimed, or killed, that was getting “barbecued.”
Angel might as well have worn a “Kiss the Cook” apron instead of silks. He did more barbecuing than anyone in racing. Even so, most of the other Latin riders liked and revered him, and they tolerated his cunning tricks. “We didn’t call [Cordero’s style] dirty,” Hernandez said. “We called it horse riding.”
For many of the old Anglo-style Americans in racing Angel epitomized everything they believed about Hispanic jockeys. One story about an old trainer trying to make a jockey out of a young Irish boy summed it all up. When asked about the Irish kid’s prospects, he was pessimistic. “Ah, he’s such a nice, good little Irish lad,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Little son of a bitch will never make a goddamned nickel. In this business you gotta be nasty. You have to be some common little spic to make a living.”
It was a despicable story, but it explained how the white riders and trainers saw it. In their eyes the Latins were more daring or, perhaps, more desperate. They were liable to do anything out there. Cordero understood that and played off their fears and insecurities about what he was willing to do. Ronnie Franklin was simply too young and inexperienced to know just how complex, dangerous, and difficult Cordero was.
The two jockeys rendezvoused at the first turn. Angel was a length or two ahead of Ronnie and straying to the outside. Right away that presented Franklin with a choice. Cordero showed him a yawning gap between his horse and the rail. Franklin could go around Cordero, but that was taking the long way. When Ronnie peered into that hole, he saw exactly what he had hoped to see: the pure Florida sunlight shining on the other end.
So far as Ronnie could tell, it was a short, inviting tunnel to a sure victory. But as soon as he charged into the gap, he realized he’d fallen into something. What he had perceived as a path was in fact the jaws of a vicious predator. He and the Bid were the prey.
So he tiptoed into the opening like a baby into a disaster. Meanwhile, Cordero was a stoic hunter. He waited for Franklin to venture far enough into the hole to the point that there was no easy escape route, and then he clamped down with the teeth.
Cordero, on Sir Ivor Again, swiftly pointed his horse’s nose to the left and shut the aperture. Ronnie knew that he had been duped; he was trapped with nowhere to go. He didn’t just see it; he could feel it. With every step Sir Ivor Again galloped, Cordero shoved Ronnie and the Bid closer to the terrifying rail, where everything was tight, claustrophobic, and dangerous.
Ronnie still had viable options. He might’ve taken his chances and bolted through the flickering sliver of light, but that was a huge risk that could have spooked or even damaged the Bid had Cordero continued to squeeze him. Or he might have elected to bide his time, maintain his ground, and wait until the varying speed of the horses caused a natural reopening of the gap. The latter required a certain cunning and patience, a belief that the horse could still win despite the long impediment.
But Franklin was still too inexperienced to know which was the better path.
Fearing both the rail and Buddy’s rage if he lost the race or damaged the horse, Ronnie made an extraordinary and dangerous decision that no experienced rider would have attempted. He pulled the Bid’s reins, slowing the mighty horse in mid-gallop. He so desperately sought to maneuver outside that he panicked and cut across the heels of Sir Ivor Again and Cordero.
Ronnie treated the Bid as if he were equipped with a break, a clutch, and an accelerator. He was variously stomping on all the pedals in a frantic attempt to explode his way out of Cordero’s iron grip.
To his credit, he escaped Cordero, but in doing so, he came incredibly close to clipping hooves with Sir Ivor Again. Had that happened, Franklin, Cordero, and several tons of babied horseflesh would have all tumbled to the unforgiving dirt. The horses would have most likely shattered their femurs, and the riders might have been kicked in their skulls or crushed under the weight of tons of tumbling horse. And with two horses still behind Franklin and Cordero, the calamity would have been significant.
And yet Franklin got away with it all. Not only did he avoid the heels, but the Bid actually responded to his crazy demands. After his forced slowdown, the great horse accelerated, regained his momentum, and took aim at the leaders, who were still a ways off in the distance.
Almost any horse in the Bid’s shoes, having had the reins pulled, would have lost the race—and lost it badly. But the Bid had a peculiar engine. Apparently, he was more Ferrari than thoroughbred. He seemingly went from 0 to 60 in no time. And Ronnie, despite the mistakes of a lifetime, somehow had his horse gaining ground with every stride. Cordero and Sir Ivor Again, who had been so menacing just seconds ago, were now mere specs in the distance and relics of the past.
Set free and out into the open, the Bid made up fourteen lengths against some of the best horses of his generation. Improbably, he found himself neck and neck with the three leaders.
Ronnie approached those front runners near the second turn. But instead of staying to the outside, where he’d just found so much success, he inexplicably ducked back into the hole on the inside. And that’s where he and Georgie Velasquez, riding Fantasy ’n Reality, became reacquainted.
Velasquez was galloping side by side with the other two leading colts to form an impenetrable wall. He met Franklin’s move inside in much the same way Cordero had. He showed the boy the opening and then squeezed him tight when he took it. And Franklin responded in the same exact way. Unbelievably, he tugged on the Bid’s reins yet again, but this time he cut across the heels of not one but three horses!
Miraculously, Ronnie avoided all of them, and once more he found the wide-open outside. At this point the Bid had traveled an incredibly long distance on his four spindly legs, not only going forward but also zigzagging back and forth across the track. And yet somehow he still had the wind for victory. With the encouragement of Franklin’s frantic whip and verbal pleadings the horse rocketed past the field.
Ronnie and the Bid somehow won the Florida Derby by five lengths, going away. But they did it only after one of the most manic and erratic rides in the annals of professional racing. For the horse, it was a magical journey. After the first turn, Spectacular Bid made up nineteen lengths and did it after his reins were pulled and he was steered erratically.
It was a stunning race in its danger, its speed, and, of course, its sheer malevolence.
While the crowd roared its approval at Ronnie’s theatrical display of riding—something more reminiscent of a rodeo than a race—Buddy Delp stood and watched it all with his jaw open and his blood pressure popping. He was seething and horrified by Ronnie’s recklessness. And with newsmen all around him he kicked his composure and opened a window into his true nature. “I’m going to put a size 10½ shoe up his ass so far it’ll take a dozen doctors to get it out,” Delp bellowed.
Then, rushing down to the track, Buddy confronted Ronnie, who was still trotting to the winner’s circle. His “son” had not only just won one of the most prestigious races in the country, against the most well-bred competition, but he had also beaten some of the best jockeys in the world.
Yet Buddy Delp pelted him with mean abuse. His succinct message to his boy was as direct as it was crude. And it was all highly public. “You fucking, idiot!” Buddy raged at his victorious rider. “You fucking, idiot, I ought to put my foot in your ass!” The trainer’s unbridled rage and loss of control escaped from his mouth right in front of the Meyerhoffs, Franklin’s fellow riders, his parents, and members of the press corps, who were delighted by the horrifying spectacle and printed every humiliating word (at least the ones that were printable).
Though Harry Meyerhoff actually owned the valuable horse, he was more gentlemanly and composed in his reaction. Calm and collected in his sport coat and tie, with his beautiful young wife and strapping son by his side, Harry responded to the inquiries of the writers in the manner of a CEO reporting sunny results to nervous shareholders. He cited the bottom line: “[Franklin] won the race, didn’t he?” Harry asked with a confident smile.
Meanwhile, Ronnie complained to both Delp and the press that he had been the victim of collusion. He appeared paranoid, claiming that every single other rider in the race was in the same conspiracy to get him. “They teamed up on me,” he said. “What can you do? Six riders against one.” Ronnie said their motive was his horse or, more precisely, the mount. They all wanted to ride Spectacular Bid so badly that they made him look bad in the hopes that he would be fired.
Buddy might’ve fallen back on his many years of experience in racing to calm his rider and defuse the explosive situation. Instead, he dumped gallons of gasoline on it and then casually lit the match. Right in front of a reporter, Delp placated Mrs. Meyerhoff by explaining to her how unintelligent his own hand-picked rider was. “Ronnie is smart enough to know that he’s not that smart,” Buddy said.
Another reporter, who hadn’t heard Buddy’s profane rant firsthand, asked him what he had said to Franklin. “In essence it was something like this,” Buddy said. “I told him he was a dummy and rode a stupid race on a horse who could’ve won by twenty lengths.”
After berating Ronnie some more, Buddy urged his protégé into the jockeys’ room. He wanted him to confront Cordero and Velasquez with his fists. Physical altercations were not uncommon in the manly sanctuary of the jockeys’ room. That’s where the men who strove against each other on the track for victories and in the barn for decent mounts, and who intimidated and endangered each other in competition, settled their scores. They didn’t always even need a provocation to fight. Sometimes they merely hauled off and cracked each other just to establish psychological dominance.
Ronnie, though a successful fist fighter back in the nooks and crannies of his old high school hallways and on the streets and alleyways of Dundalk, didn’t punch anybody. Instead he did something really dangerous. He slurred Cordero and Velasquez. Shouting at the top of his lungs in rage, he called them both “spics.”
Velasquez knew Ronnie personally. He looked past those ugly words, perhaps understanding the frustrations that led to their utterance, and without admitting anything, he said that Ronnie was probably right in his wild accusations “Everyone’s always after the best horse in the race,” Georgie said. “Everyone takes his shot at him. [Spectacular Bid] is the best horse around—everyone wants him.”
After the tumult was over and Ronnie and Buddy had humiliated and embarrassed themselves, they went their separate ways. Buddy moved on to an after-race party and then came back to the barn to check on the health of his horse.
The old man was intoxicated, of course, after almost drowning in a half-dozen vodkas, and he made the unfortunate decision to drink and talk with a reporter by his side. He would’ve been safer behind the wheel and speeding down the highway.
Soaked in booze, he suddenly turned from ass-kicker to gooey sentimentalist. Buddy regaled the reporter about his feelings for Ronnie. “He’s my man,” Delp said. “He’ll always be my man. Give him a hug and tell him I love him.”
It was the revolting and mawkish blabbering of a drinker whose every word was fermented in a vat. So the worst luck Buddy had on this evil day was maintaining his consciousness. He hadn’t even had the good fortune to pass out before he’d opened his big mouth.
And now something really telling was about to slip out.
“I’m going back to the house now and see Ron,” Buddy said. “I may be going to party with him.”
“Going to party” was an odd expression for a man nearly fifty to use in connection with a teenage boy. “Party,” used as a verb, was Baltimore high school slang for getting high. When Gerald and Ronnie said that they were “going to party,” they meant that they were going to inhale cocaine or, as they said it, “snort some blow.”
Buddy had used their nomenclature to tell the journalist that he hoped to go back to his rented Florida house, find the teenagers, and use illicit drugs with them.
That didn’t happen. When Buddy got home, Ronnie wasn’t even there. In fact, nobody knew for sure where he was. Franklin, near tears, had been so humiliated when he left the track that he simply disappeared. By the time Buddy returned home, Franklin had been gone for hours and had yet to resurface.
Without his “man,” Buddy quickly passed out in bed. Meanwhile, with no one paying attention to him, seventeen-year-old Gerald Delp sat in the living room and did lines of coke all by himself. His enjoyment was disturbed only when he suddenly heard a loud crack out on the porch.
Gerald opened the front door to see what had caused the racket. It was Ronnie. Intoxicated, he’d tried to lie down on the porch’s hanging glider and had fallen off. Once on the ground, he decided to use the hard floor as a makeshift bed and go to sleep.
But Gerald walked out and roused his best friend. Ronnie sat up, his head spinning, and told Gerald that after fleeing the track, he had scored some coke of his own and gotten stoned. That was how he dealt with the incredible stress of his horrific day.
“But, what’re you doing out here?” Gerald asked him.
“I was afraid to come home,” Ronnie said. “Buddy was so mad.”
“Don’t worry about him,” Gerald said. “Anyway, he’s asleep. Come on inside.”
Ronnie entered the house, and he and Gerald sat down on the sofa and enjoyed the remainder of the cocaine together. They also drank their hard liquor and popped their pills. Those activities occupied the boys the rest of the night until Ronnie’s pain was sufficiently numbed, and they went to bed.
But a good night’s sleep didn’t solve much. In the morning, matters were as complicated as ever. Despite Buddy’s drunken pronouncements the day before about Ronnie being “his man,” the trainer informed the media that the Bid’s mount was under review. Delp told the press that he had given the Meyerhoffs a list of several riders for consideration, and asked them, as the owners, to make the definitive decision. Buddy’s register of appropriate riders included Willie Shoemaker, Darrel McHargue, Jacinto Vasquez, and Chris McCarron. He said that Ronnie was also still in the mix and, in fact, Delp himself had recommended Ronnie as his choice to remain.
And then, as if he could simply not stop his mouth, Delp lit off the mother of all firecrackers. He said that there were two riders who were definitely not on his list: Georgie Velasquez and Angel Cordero. “I wouldn’t use [them] on a Billy goat,” Buddy said, in another one of his clever zingers. He told the reporters that he agreed that Cordero and Velasquez “were out to intimidate Franklin and our horse. Georgie is hot about me taking him off Spectacular Bid.” As for Angel Cordero, “I wouldn’t know him if I saw him climbing out of a banana tree.”
It was the lowest and ugliest blow yet, far worse than the use of the word “spic.” “He basically called Angel a chimpanzee,” Ruben Hernandez said. The comment did nothing to hurt Cordero, who had already absorbed and endured much worse during his time on the mainland.
And yet Buddy’s slur was so incredibly vicious and public that it couldn’t help but elevate the feud among the riders to a far more personal level. Buddy spoke up in a misguided attempt to protect his horse and to deflect criticism from his rider. Instead he birthed a terrible animosity right there and at that moment. It had the net effect of putting a target on both the horse and the jockey. Thanks to Buddy, they were assured of getting extra attention from the most intense and ruthless rider in the country.
And Cordero was a man who relished target practice.
Buddy did the talking, but it was Ronnie who had to stare down the barrel of the furious men in the jockeys’ room. It was Ronnie who would have to go out on the track and ride in close quarters with Cordero and the other Hispanics. Now pretty much all of them would have a grudge, and of course they would all be on the backs of animals that weighed in excess of half a ton—animals that could be aimed at another man and fired like a canon.
But even without Buddy’s explosive comments Ronnie still had a lot to endure. The next day one of Washington’s major newspapers published a cartoon of him on the Bid, in mid race. The jockey whipped his horse while Buddy sat right behind him and whipped Ronnie with a crop that was the size of a golf club.
Even more troubling, in a segment for ABC’s Wide World of Sports program, Ronnie faced the music for his strange ride. His professional credibility and competence were questioned for the world to see by two eminently reasonable and expert men. Host Jim McKay and his racing sidekick, legendary jockey Eddie Arcaro, broke down the film of Franklin’s disastrous day.
Arcaro, likable and articulate and one of the biggest winners in racing history, gave his ostensibly unbiased third-person assessment of the race. He basically exonerated Cordero and Velasquez. Arcaro never explicitly mentioned collusion and didn’t address it, though it was clear as day that it had occurred. Instead, he blamed Ronnie alone for all the trouble.
Going through the race film frame by frame, Arcaro dispassionately analyzed the controversies. First, taking note of Ronnie’s rendezvous with Cordero, he said nothing of Angel squeezing the boy and the Bid against the rail. Instead, he implied it was an empty worry. “It looks like you could move a small Toyota in there,” Arcaro said, speaking of the gap.
At the point in the race when Ronnie complained about Velasquez, Arcaro again stopped the film and appeared to peer into the same small space Ronnie saw. “There was room in there, Jim,” Arcaro said to McKay. “There was absolutely room in there.”
Like the excellent reporters that they were, McKay and Arcaro sought comment from the principals: Cordero, Franklin, and Delp. And all three of them said revealing things.
First, Franklin, more in the glare than anyone else, was surprisingly calm and poised on camera. Looking younger than his nineteen years, he spoke from high atop Spectacular Bid with a rider’s protective helmet on his head.
With his smooth baby’s face and fractured grammar, Franklin radiated a childlike vulnerability. Despite his position and talent and all of the success and attention he had amassed so far, it was easy to see that he still had the fragile psychology of a boy. “Around the first turn, when Angel Cordero shut me off, he was intimidating me,” Ronnie said. “I was taking care of my horse. I didn’t want [Cordero] to bang [Spectacular Bid] up against the fence and everything, which he would’ve did.”
As Ronnie spoke, his shoulder jerked and twitched in involuntary spasms—a sign, perhaps, of the pressure that he was under or maybe of the high quantity of illicit drugs that were coursing through his system.
Buddy also spoke to the crew from ABC and offered his own theory as to what might be making the young jockey so nervous. “I want the monkey off of Ronnie’s back,” Delp said, utilizing an old euphemism for drug addiction. But then he clarified and said, “The monkey being Bud Delp.” Speaking of himself in the third person, Buddy said, “I think Bud Delp has intimidated Ronnie Franklin to a degree; he wants to please Bud Delp.”
Finally, Angel Cordero had his say, but he provided it on paper instead of in person. Feigning an innocence that belied his uncanny mastery of the track, Angel wrote, “I was never close to [Spectacular Bid], and I found no problem with the race. I was two or three horses away. Franklin wanted to go around me. I couldn’t see what was going on behind me. You could look at the film and see there was no problem. There was plenty of room between Franklin and me.”
Finally, Arcaro spoke up again and reported the conversation he’d had with Florida’s chief state steward, Walter Blum. He informed the audience that Blum was “a former rider and a good one.” Arcaro said that Blum also felt that Cordero and Velasquez were “never near” Ronnie and the Bid.
It all seemed so comprehensive, and it was a professional take on the events from highly credible men, and yet it utterly ignored the fact that Cordero was a known badass. Every jockey in the business knew he had done exactly what Ronnie accused him of doing. In a sense it was poor journalism since it never even bothered to address the key question: Were Cordero and Velasquez in fact targeting Ronnie Franklin?
Jacinto Vasquez didn’t need a reporter to tell him what was what. He was friends with Cordero and Velasquez, and he had battled both of them many times. He admitted that Angel had deliberately “crowded Franklin.” Jacinto knew that Hispanic riders regularly ganged up on the English-speaking jockeys, coordinating their efforts to defeat them. “We did it many times,” Jacinto said.
More than that, Jacinto also knew that Cordero and Velasquez would collude against any other rider, regardless of ethnicity, if that rider had succeeded in ousting one of them from the mount of a coveted horse. “They even did it to me,” Jacinto said.
According to Vasquez, Angel was the ringleader of the shenanigans. “Velasquez was the nicest guy to ride,” Jacinto said, “and Cordero used to abuse him all the time. Then Angel would come back [to the jockeys’ room] and say, ‘I’m sorry, papa. My brother.’”
“My brother?” Jacinto roared. “You asshole!”
“Cordero was a nasty little prick when he was riding,” he said.
Jacinto easily knew from hard experience what McKay and Arcaro didn’t know and hadn’t bothered to learn. Angel and Velasquez had deliberately tortured Ronnie out there as payback for Buddy Delp’s decisions and choices.
Jacinto also knew how inappropriate aiming angry, coordinated, and complex retribution at such a young rider was. “Leave that freakin’ kid alone,” he had advised Cordero and Velasquez.
Jacinto said it, but no one was listening.