The buzzards were circling.
After Ronnie Franklin’s calamitous ride at the Florida Derby journalists were widely condemning Franklin and Buddy Delp for their racist language and out-of-control behavior. It was all extreme and bizarre and yet, in its total, delicious theater.
A handful of the nation’s greatest jockeys followed the drama closely. They were waiting by their phones, eager to get a call from Buddy Delp. They hoped to find out that the suddenly vulnerable Franklin was deposed and that one of them would ascend to Spectacular Bid’s mount on the largest stage in racing, the Triple Crown races.
While they all hoped to be chosen, most said nothing and did nothing. They kept a respectful distance from the decision makers and the process. But there was one man under consideration who showed no fear of making his presence felt. That was Jacinto Vasquez. He came to Delp’s barn as he always did, brimming with confidence and vigor. But he didn’t come to romance the trainer or to cuckold the mount from Franklin or to get a leg up on the other hopefuls. He arrived at the barn for the oddest reason of all. He was simply concerned about the young and fragile Franklin, and he came to console him and offer a little veteran advice.
Jacinto, of course, was known for his ferocious sense of competition and his success in gaining and maintaining the mounts he wanted. Riding Spectacular Bid would have meant a huge financial windfall for him, not to mention another boost to his already formidable reputation and legacy. Yet he sat down next to Franklin, put an arm around him, and talked him through the difficult situation he had just encountered in the Florida Derby. “When you get boxed in,” Jacinto told Ronnie, “there’s nothing you can do anyway, so stay in there. There’s a next time.”
It was an unusually generous moment, especially considering that Jacinto was also a “spic,” the ugly ethnic slur that Ronnie and Buddy had used only recently against Angel Cordero and Georgie Velasquez. Jacinto was a proud man, but he had a high tolerance for certain insults and a pragmatist’s capacity for forgiveness. Jacinto was also as greedy for victory and recognition and a nice payday as any of the other successful jockeys, but he was able to put it all aside and help the kid. Vasquez simply had a talent for being brotherly and magnanimous.
But Jacinto took no such credit for being a nice guy. He chalked up his warm behavior toward Ronnie, when so many others were against him, to a kinship of the saddle. “That kid was just like us,” Jacinto said. “He was just trying to make a living.”
Jacinto wasn’t the only one who let Ronnie off the hook. Harry Meyerhoff, believing that his colt and the boy had a special bond, retained the young rider. Yet the public wouldn’t know of that decision until almost a full week after the Florida Derby.
Even though there wasn’t any real news to announce, Delp called a press conference and milked the opportunity to spend more time in front of the TV cameras. Standing where he was most comfortable—at the front of the room with all eyes on him—Buddy discussed Franklin and rolled through a gauntlet of emotions.
First, he was maudlin, choking up and almost breaking down into tears. Then he made a fast transition into hard-ass, falsely claiming that he had been violent with his protégé. “I’ve knocked him across the room,” Buddy said, “but I couldn’t knock him off the horse.” And then, with tears in his eyes, Buddy proclaimed for the world: “Everyone in the Delp organization loves Ronnie Franklin.”
It was a gushy and gross performance, all to announce something that needed no announcement—that the current rider would continue to ride the horse. But Buddy had what he wanted, and that was the attention of the press.
Many racing insiders watched with disbelief. They were fascinated by the decision. How could Delp and the Meyerhoffs possibly retain Ronnie Franklin, young and inexperienced as he was, after that spectacularly poor performance in the Florida Derby?
Almost all of them felt that with “a more competent rider” the horse was a sure thing to win the Triple Crown. Those who adhered to this school of thought also minimized the importance of chemistry between colt and rider. It meant nothing to them that Ronnie and the Bid had been together since Middleburg; that they had been taught by the same brilliant trainers; or that they had amassed an impressive stakes-race winning streak with record-smashing times that bespoke dominance. They chose not to notice that when Franklin was removed from the Bid’s saddle for two races, the horse simply did not perform as well for Georgie Velasquez, though Velasquez was widely acclaimed as one of the best riders in the nation.
The fact was that Ronnie had demonstrated superior riding skills. He won on the Bid. And he was also a winner on a slew of other horses.
The bottom line for Buddy and the Meyerhoffs was that Franklin achieved their goals and made money for them. He was a young man without the long resume or battlefield savvy they would have preferred, but he demonstrated that he was more than capable of snatching purses for all of them. Every time he took the irons, their wealth and prestige increased, and their dreams came closer.
But while everyone pondered whether or not Ronnie was good enough for Spectacular Bid, very few stopped to ask whether the Bid was good for the boy. It was a fair question too, considering that the kid had grown up in what basically amounted to a small village, raised by unpretentious parents who did their best to shelter him from the uglier sides of life.
Did Ronnie have the maturity and mental stability to handle the national spotlight and a pushy press corps that celebrated and then heckled anyone with the talent to stand apart? Given that his life was just beginning, did he have the emotional steel for an inherently dangerous and terrifying job that could kill or paralyze him at any moment?
Ronnie also had an additional pressure that that few others did. And that was Buddy Delp. Living with and working for a man so volatile and intimidating, owing him so much, was Franklin’s most difficult challenge.
But no matter how excruciating the pressure was, Delp had a talent for making it even far worse. There were the insults he aimed at the competition, the constant bragging, and the predictions of victory. And of course there were the racist taunts that made national news.
No doubt Buddy saw himself as a latter-day Joe Namath or Muhammad Ali, predicting victory and backing it up. Only he forgot that it wasn’t he out on the track pulling it all off. That fell to the horse and the rider.
Buddy did most of the talking, but it was Ronnie who had to dodge the dangerous and sometimes coordinated moves of rivals who were enraged by Delp. Franklin would be the one to stare them down in the jockeys’ room. And if necessary, Franklin would be the one to exchange hard fists with them.
Within racing circles Buddy’s worst traits stuck to Franklin with a stubborn persistence. Buddy was a braggart, loud and abrasive, so the other riders and the trainers saw Franklin that way, only in silks and a saddle.
It made perfect sense that Ronnie would pay the price for Buddy’s bad behavior. The riders were in the habit of getting along with and pleasing the trainers. That’s how they made their meat and potatoes. No one wanted to feud with a powerful man like Delp, who controlled a huge stable of talented, well-trained horses that won purse money. Jockeys who wanted to win and get rich spent their days kissing ass to guys like Buddy, not alienating them. So Ronnie became the proxy, the man to aim for when they didn’t want to take on the man himself.
But even without these complicating factors it was clear to anyone paying attention that Ronnie was an unsophisticated kid and wholly out of place in the adult world. Cathy Rosenberger knew it. She spent a great deal of time alone with Ronnie, transporting him to the stables and working with him. On afternoons when Ronnie was racing, Cathy “ponied” him, calmly leading his horse on the long trek from the paddock to the gate.
In all of these activities there was a great deal of opportunity for companionship or at least a little banter between the two colleagues. Even more so since Cathy was in her late twenties, loquacious, attractive, physically fit, and passionate about horses. She had already been married to a blacksmith and trained a racing stable of her own. In short, Ronnie and Cathy had everything in common but very little to say to each other. “In all the time I spent with Ronnie I can’t remember ever having had a single interesting conversation with him,” she recalled years later.
The silence that stood like a wall between them was more than just a lack of personal chemistry; it was a sign of how out of place the teenager was in the adult world. Ronnie was only just then emerging from boyhood. Had he stayed home with his parents, he might’ve eased into a grown-up’s life with community college classes or a low-level job where the money, stress, and expectations were all more manageable and commensurate with his ability to handle them. But instead of being under the watchful eyes of his mother and father, Ronnie was housed and harbored by other adults who had a stake in his talent. What was it that bound Ronnie to these grown up companions?
The thrill of celebrity. The allure of money. And ultimately the seduction of cocaine.
So instead of cleaning his room or taking out the garbage, Ronnie was sparring with the national media, coping with Triple Crown pressures, and hiding from Buddy Delp’s explosive temper. Thanks to Buddy, Franklin also had a contingent of grown men gunning for him, especially Angel Cordero and some of the other Latin riders who were outraged by the racial slurs that Franklin and Delp dropped so easily and publicly. Everyone knew—press, public, and horse professionals alike—that there was every possibility that fists and full-speed horses both might soon be aimed at Ronnie.
As he contemplated the growing dangers of his situation, Ronnie also had a baby son to think about and that he’d yet to see. The boy’s mother was reaching out to him, but he barely knew her, and anyway he blamed her for the predicament that they were all in. He might’ve taken some solace in the vast sums of money he was honestly earning, but it was all slipping from his grasp like a fistful of water. But all of these problems paled in comparison to just one other, and that was the coke.
For Ronnie, cocaine was new and decadent, but it was a drug that had been around to amuse the bored and lonely for a long time. A century before Franklin discovered its pleasures, Arthur Conan Doyle described it in his debut Sherlock Holmes detective story, “A Study in Scarlet.” Doyle used cocaine, per se, in a way that would surprise modern audiences. In his world, his London, cocaine wasn’t the inventory of a loathsome criminal bent on distributing it or the habit of a depraved junkie. It was the hobby of his hero, Holmes himself, the brightest and most moral man in Doyle’s universe. Holmes was characterized by his bravery and broody brilliance, but when he wanted to unwind, he rolled up his shirt sleeve and injected cocaine into his muscular arm.
By the 1970s cocaine was considered illicit, but it was growing in popularity anyway. The mania for it was a sign that American demographics, perceptions, and attitudes had all rapidly changed. Previously illegal drug use had been viewed as a fringe behavior, scandalous and embarrassing. Like everything else in America, it also took on a taint of racism as the white-bread middle class convinced itself that hard-drug addiction was a ghetto behavior confined to inner-city Black populations.
But in the 1960s marijuana and LSD weren’t the special province of outliers; they were popular with middle-class suburban Boomers who were less willing to be controlled than their neck-tied and Brylcreemed fathers. The new generation created a counterculture in which sex, music, and recreational drugs were all expressions of a peculiar rage aimed at a society that was supposedly free and prosperous yet self-suffocating in the thick air of its own conformity.
The same young people who wanted to change society were thwarted from total freedom by their parents’ values, which demanded love of God and fealty to country. Militarism was part of the deal, the price one paid to be an American. There was a sense of purpose and duty in service, even though it was compulsory, and a moral awakening in war.
But when the war ended in disgrace and the unpopular draft had stopped, the nation’s youth turned to decadence. Young people, without the obligation of service or the fear of premature death on a battlefield, could suddenly do as they pleased. And freedom was no longer something to protect; it was something to be enjoyed. And theirs was a life of pleasure.
One of the most popular movies of the era, Saturday Night Fever, brilliantly depicted this change. The main character, Tony Monero, was played by an envelope-thin and elastic John Travolta. Monero had a lot in common with Ronnie. He lived in Brooklyn, New York, then a blue-collar town much like Dundalk. By day, he was a clerk in a hardware store who seemed destined to a lifetime of hard work and low pay.
A couple of decades earlier the same life Tony Monero rejected was precisely the kind of life Tony Franklin had embraced. After completing his military duty, he had come home and fulfilled commitments as a husband, a father, and a bill-paying consumer. He didn’t run from hard work; he added to its burdens with night jobs and weekend enterprises.
Ronnie Franklin had a lot more in common with Travolta’s character than Tony Franklin did. Ronnie also wanted to run away from drudgery and give his life purpose and recognition.
In the era of Saturday Night Fever, popular music was no longer raw or anthem-like or political, as it had been in the 1960s. The new sound was sanitized and uncomplicated. It required nothing from the listener intellectually or morally. This new music was all about the beat; if there was any message at all, it wasn’t about politics; it was about pleasure. The songs, by and large, were about dancing or having sex after dancing.
For Travolta’s character the dance floor was his saddle, and for Ronnie the saddle was his stage, the place where he could show the world he had talent and purpose.
The fictional movie character and the all-too-real boy both yearned to be someone. But on the authentic dance floors and race tracks of the era cocaine was a sign of arrival.
The capital of the disco world was located on Fifty-Fourth Street in Manhattan in an old CBS television studio. The building was a throwback to the early days of TV. For many years it had hosted the Captain Kangaroo show. When the building was abandoned by CBS, two entrepreneurs snapped it up and created the most exclusive club in the country, a place they called Studio 54.
At Studio 54 the mediocre were banished behind an inviolable velvet rope while the beautiful people and the rich and powerful businessmen all glided through the front doors.
The interior of Studio 54 was so full of coke users that the powder hung in the air like a poisonous fog. Even when the place was empty, the walls were skim-coated with a thin but perceptible layer.
But the drug user’s experience wasn’t only for the people who glittered. A variety of drugs was being used by ordinary Americans all over the country. One of them was Judith Grisel, who, much like Ronnie, spent her own formative years as an addict. With her long, lustrous brown hair and bright eyes, Grisel started life with the fresh and wholesome look of a 4-H beauty queen. But she also had a secret life in which she harbored a craving for the illicit. Much later she managed to overcome the disease of addiction and became an expert in its neuroscience. She wrote a best-selling book on the subject called Never Enough.
Grisel enjoyed her first taste of intoxication when she was only thirteen, guzzling half a gallon of wine in her girlfriend’s basement. Soon after that she was drinking before, during, and after school.
Alcohol was only Judith’s gateway drug. After a short while, she was regularly using marijuana, cocaine, and meth. She was high at her high school graduation and, in her own words, “wasted” at one of her grandparents’ funerals. Eventually she was kicked out of college and estranged from her parents, who withdrew their financial and emotional support from her. They felt hopeless to help their daughter and feared that any money they gave her would be used to fuel her drug habits.
Without her mother and dad around and without their help, Judith was often jobless and homeless. She found herself scoring in dangerous places such as public housing projects, where she’d go to an apartment and get high in a bedroom with a man while his wife and children were on the other side of the wall watching television. Her addiction was so intense that she ripped off stores and stole credit cards to get the money she needed to get high.
By age twenty-three Judith was already many years removed from a completely sober day. Feeling suicidal, she finally committed to going to a rehabilitation center. She expected it to be a spa-like experience. It wasn’t that. She spent a month in that facility and then three months in an old convent converted into a halfway house. Treatment made her miserable, but she learned how to control her addictions. She recovered so well that she ultimately went back to college and earned a PhD in neuroscience. Her passion was not only to understand the relationship between addiction and the brain but also to explain it to others in plain language. In her book Never Enough, she chronicled her own redemptive journey and clarified for ordinary readers the neuroscience behind the problem.
And Judith understood why cocaine was so well liked in the horse racing world. It was the perfect drug for a jockey because it provided a jolt of energy without any corresponding hunger. But more than that, Judith said, “Cocaine is like sex, with everything but the orgasm.”
When Ronnie and Gerald snorted their coke, they experienced feelings of intense pleasure. But for them the drug was particularly harmful. At their young ages, their brains were still in a state of development. “Between puberty and age twenty-five, peaking at about fifteen years old,” Judith said, “there is a proliferation of changes in the brain as new pathways and circuits are being made. The drug organizes how the brain develops and can permanently change things such as mood or cognition.” So Ronnie’s and Gerald’s essential natures were changed with every snort, affecting their ability to think and learn and especially experience pleasure for the rest of their lives.
A more mature cocaine user might experience only temporary changes. Someone beyond twenty-six has a brain that is already developed and solidified. But for young guys like Ronnie and Gerald, chronic and heavy cocaine users as teenagers, the drug had far-reaching effects. The huge pleasure of coke made them less sensitive to ordinary pleasure. They kept using because they hoped to recapture the happiness they experienced at first use. They didn’t understand why, but they came to know that goal was impossible to achieve.
As Mackenzie Phillips, a famously addicted actress of their era, eloquently put it, “[Cocaine is] an endless cycle of give and take. [It is an] instant thrill and surge of ecstasy that . . . promised, delivered, and revoked all in the course of half an hour.” After that, she said, “The race to recapture that unimaginably good feeling would begin, again and again, until the supply ran out and the thrill turned to a dark, hollow absence, a bleakness so opposite and dreadful that more cocaine wasn’t just desirable, it was necessary.”
That is the essence of addiction: going back to cocaine, hoping to recapture pleasure, knowing full well that one could not. For addicts like Ronnie and Gerald there was simply no pleasure to be found.
And without pleasure where was happiness?
Ronnie was achieving things few other riders ever could. He was entrusted with the finest horse in the country, maybe the greatest horse who had ever lived. He was a national celebrity, stacking up the stakes race victories. He was setting new records on a daily basis. He was earning bushels of money. And he was winning prestigious awards. Everything he did was news.
For just about any man these public achievements would have been proof positive of his worth to the world. But for Ronnie, a kid reminded again and again that he’d been a dropout from a working-class neighborhood, who was labeled dumb, who was bullied and beat up because he was small, it should have been luscious vindication.
And yet he was quite literally unable to fully enjoy his substantial achievements. It was the coke that had robbed him of that. Where the joy should have been, there was a great emptiness instead.
If there was any excuse at all for Ronnie’s addiction, it might have been that drug use was so pervasive in his world. Experienced horse professionals described the backside as “a candy store to an addict.” The jockeys’ room was a virtual bazaar, with vendors doing everything they could to lighten the jockeys’ pockets. They came with anything and everything, including customized saddles, gold watches, jewelry, furs, and drugs. Pills, coke, and everything else were widely available right there in the inner sanctum of the track for the jockeys to buy.
The riders used the drugs in great quantities and for more reasons than just one. They wanted recreation, yes, a diversion, but they also used laxatives and amphetamines to suppress the appetite and maintain or reduce weight, they took pills for energy and alertness, and they smoked marijuana or swallowed other drugs to reduce pain from a variety of injuries. Drugs were an essential accessory to celebration in moments of triumph, and they were self-medication for chronic pain and depression.
Virtually all had their stories. Cathy Rosenberger remembered leading one horse to the gate with a rider so stoned that he fell off the mount and landed in the mud before the race could even begin. That hapless jockey was dragged to a first-aid station while a new rider was quickly called in to replace him.
In 1979 Jacinto Vasquez spent the winter in New York, where rampant drug use by others regularly interfered with his ability to make a living. “There were some guys taking that shit,” Jacinto said. “It was a bunch of bad boys, hopheads. They couldn’t function without the shit. They got stoned every day before they [went] out. The sons of bitches. I report[ed] ’em to the stewards one time. And I told ’em, ‘All of these guys are on some kind of frikken dope.’”
What bothered Jacinto the most was how the riders’ drug habits affected the day of racing. “The [stoned riders] refused to ride,” he said. “They used to take off because they said it was too cold. The stewards was canceling races every day. I said, ‘Hey, I stay here in the winter not because I am waiting for good weather. I don’t give a shit about the weather! I came here to ride. If I wanted good weather, I’d go to Miami. I don’t like to ride with these guys. They don’t know what the hell to do. They all messed up.’”
Sick of seeing his paydays canceled, Jacinto rounded up the “bad boys” one day and marched them all into the stewards’ office. “These guys on some sort of shit because they don’t act normal,” Jacinto said.
One of the stewards asked, “What do you mean, they’re drunk?”
Jacinto didn’t know exactly what they were on, but he knew it wasn’t booze. “Why don’t you take them all over there and give them a test?” he responded.
It didn’t do much good. Jacinto’s belief was that the drugs were so universal that even the powerful white guys, the supposed watchdogs who ran everything, were on them too. “A lot of the commissioners used to go out to the meetings and tell us, ‘Say no to drugs,’” Jacinto recalled, “and the next day they was taking those drugs themselves.”
Ronnie was embedded in a world of rampant drug use. Not only could he see it at the track, where the more experienced riders were users; not only was his mentor, Buddy, a user and an abettor, but he could even look to the wealthy and successful Meyerhoffs and see that the so-called respectable people, the better people, the wealthy people, enjoyed drugs too.
Ronnie was well aware that Harry Meyerhoff always had a drink in his hand, and it was a source of amusement for the Delps and Ronnie that the “old man” liked to smoke his pot. Teresa Meyerhoff was, for a time, a casual cocaine user.
But for Ronnie and Gerald cocaine and pills, marijuana and booze, all clearly had a different meaning than they did for most of the drug-using adults who were around them. When Buddy Delp introduced Ronnie and Gerald to cocaine, he put the two teens on the fast track to a serious and lifelong problem. “Eighty percent of all addictions begin before the age of eighteen,” Judith Grisel said.
Gerald not only became a habitual user, but he also manned the supply chain. He could easily acquire any kind of drug the boys wanted. Because of that, Ronnie took to calling him “Doc,” an old-timers’ nickname for a pharmacist.
In the end, whatever issues Ronnie had as a rider or as a young man, Harry Meyerhoff chose to return him to Spectacular Bid’s mount. Like most of Harry’s business decisions, it appeared to be a golden one.
Ronnie was back in the saddle for the Flamingo Stakes in late March at Hialeah, and the crowd jeered him. Clearly understanding now that he had the best horse by a long shot, he made no pretense about fighting with the other jockeys for position on the inside. In fact, he was quite content to take the scenic route.
Ronnie was four wide at the clubhouse, meaning that he was going a very long distance to get to the wire. But it didn’t matter. By the time he reached the far turn, he was in front of the other leaders. He widened the gap with every stride and crossed the finish line twelve lengths in front. It was an impressive victory, but in the eyes of the press and many in racing, the glory all belonged to the horse. Franklin’s ride from the outside told them nothing about his ability.
The Bluegrass Stakes at Keeneland in Kentucky was Bid’s last great tune-up before the Derby itself. It went much the same as the Flamingo. Ronnie stayed to the outside. The difference was that Bid was in last place of the four-horse field for a while, though Ronnie was whipping and goading him all along. Finally, nearing the turn at the top of the homestretch, he moved into first place by two lengths.
But for the longest time the horse appeared complacent, as though he wasn’t even challenged. With Franklin whacking his haunches the whole way, the lethargic horse finally picked up the pace and sprinted to a seven-length victory.
In the final two races before the Kentucky Derby, with Ronnie aboard, the Bid won by a combined nineteen lengths. The ease with which Spectacular Bid beat the other horses, the huge distances he put between himself and the others, made it almost appear as if he was a completely different animal than they were. He fought through his own yawning indifference to slaughter them all.
The people around Spectacular Bid may have started to show just how fragile they were, but the horse’s only addiction was for victory.