Buddy Delp’s influence as a father and a father figure was never more evident than in the spring of 1982, when Ronnie Franklin and Gerald Delp were living in a motel room in Kentucky. The boys were out on their own and utilizing the skills that Buddy had provided them to make a living. Despite his past problems, Ronnie was riding well. He’d just won seventy races at the winter meeting at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans.
Twenty-year-old Gerald was Ronnie’s agent. In addition to representing the former Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, he had also had the prescience to recognize the talent in a young female rider named Julie Krone. With those two fine jockeys under his auspice he was already gaining wealth and respectability.
It was thanks to Buddy’s interest and intervention in their lives that both boys were enjoying self-sufficiency and material success. Unfortunately, Buddy had another legacy, and it was about to bring them down.
The boys wanted to get high, but they had no trusted connections in Kentucky from whom to acquire a bag. So Gerald dialed up a contact in Louisiana and got that pusher to send them some cocaine via Federal Express. Everything would have been fine—that is to say they would have received their drugs without any trouble—except they were so needy for a taste that they couldn’t control themselves and picked up the phone. One or the other of them called the couriers, over and over.
“Hey, have you seen our package yet?”
“Is our package there?”
“Do you know when our package is going to be here?”
Federal Express managers had seen and heard it before. They recognized that kind of impatience as the prototypical signs of jumpy addicts yearning for something illicit to arrive. When the package finally turned up at the distribution center, men with badges were there waiting for it. They opened it up and found the coke.
After Ronnie and Gerald received the package they had so eagerly awaited, they were immediately arrested.
Once again Buddy distanced himself from the issue by persuading gullible reporters that he was shocked and angry. He assured everyone that he was attending to the problem like an old-school, hard-ass disciplinarian. He had left the boys to rot in jail overnight, he said, without any bail money from him. It was a punitive measure for their stupidity.
Buddy never mentioned if his ire was provoked by the fact that the boys were using coke or merely because they had been stupid enough to get caught. But it was no joke; Ronnie and Gerald were facing felony charges in Kentucky. Ultimately, through the magic of celebrity and adept legal assistance, they bargained their way down to a misdemeanor. Most of their sentence was suspended, but they were nevertheless assigned sixty days of incarceration.
So they arrived in a place that could only be described as the exact opposite of the winner’s circle: the Fayette County House of Detention. The boys, who had been roommates for so many years, were now cellmates.
Meanwhile, the man who had given them their first taste of cocaine and who had snorted it right alongside of them on many occasions was far away, insulated from their issues. No police detective, FBI agent, or curious reporter questioned Buddy Delp about his own connection to cocaine. No one asked him if he had ever bought it or used it himself. No one bothered to ask if he had ever seen it around his house or workplace.
These questions never came up, though Ronnie was now spiraling into a pattern of incidents, and Gerald, Buddy’s own young son, was incarcerated too. The boys were in deep trouble, legally and emotionally, yet no one drew the thin, white, powdery line between Buddy and the coke. To the media of the day it was all merely a matter of “boys will be boys,” like Babe Ruth’s much lionized drinking and womanizing.
At the detention facility it didn’t take long for the other inmates to notice them. Gerald was immature but more than 6 feet tall and by appearances formidable. Ronnie, small and boyish, had an admirer.
One day, early in their sentences, the jockey sat in the common room and watched television when he was approached by another inmate. The thug turned off the TV set and then loomed over Franklin in his chair. “I want you to get in that shower,” the convict told him, pointing in the direction of the spigots. Ronnie looked up at the larger man and didn’t say a word. Instead, he stood up and calmly walked over to the television, and he turned it back on. Then he walked back and stood directly in front of the other convict, face to face. Ronnie clenched his fists and said, “I ain’t going anywhere.”
They were about to square off when an old, raspy voice came from the side of the room. An aged man sitting at a table had watched the incident unfold. “You leave them two boys alone,” he snapped.
The assailant looked at the old man and then did as he was told and immediately backed off. He walked away and never bothered Ronnie or Gerald again in the two months of their incarceration. “We assumed the old man was some sort of gangster,” Gerald said. “We didn’t know, but if he told someone to do something, they did it.”
After their sentences ended, Ronnie and Gerald reemerged from jail, supposedly chastened. Franklin spoke to reporters with a contrite tone. He said, “[Jail is a place] I never want to go back to. I don’t think I’ll be getting into any more trouble. It’s not worth it.”
He also revealed that he’d found God in jail. “Jesus came and got me when I was in the gutter,” Ronnie said.
Whatever deal Ronnie made with the almighty, it worked. Though he seemed to be in big trouble with racing officials, he was back on the track, riding competitively again, far more quickly than expected. He had one problem, however, that was even bigger than getting busted for the coke.
While Ronnie was in jail, his weight had ballooned up to nearly 130 pounds—far beyond any acceptable limit for a jockey. He was filling out and maturing, at least physically. In order to ride again he needed to bring himself back to 112 pounds. He ultimately did it, but he could no longer take natural perfection for granted. From that point on, he would feel the pressure of weight management.
Ronnie went back to riding for Buddy, but their relationship waxed and waned, creating stressful career issues. That was especially true when Ronnie met Tyann, an attractive young mother from New Orleans.
Franklin fell in love quickly. When he told Buddy that he wanted to marry Tyann, his father figure didn’t approve. Buddy was afraid that she and her two children would be too much of a distraction and that Ronnie wouldn’t put the same focus and effort into his work. Buddy insisted that Ronnie move on from Tyann, so of course Ronnie proposed to her.
At that moment both his friendship and business relationship with Delp fractured badly, and that created a severe financial hardship for Ronnie at the very same moment he was in his greatest financial need.
Franklin was free, of course, to ride for other trainers. He was, after all, a celebrity rider with an outstanding winning percentage and victories at the highest levels of the sport. But he was hampered by the negative publicity associated with his drug arrests. The truth was that without Buddy’s patronage he couldn’t earn nearly as much as he could with it.
Financial hardship and the vagabond lifestyle of a professional athlete did not agree with Tyann. After only a year and half the marriage was intolerable to her, and it was all coming to a swift and volatile end.
Needless to say, Ronnie was low on cash and desperate to hear from Buddy again.
Finally, after a long absence, the Delps reentered his life. Buddy’s brother Dick, now in charge of his own stable, called with a riding job. And Buddy left word with Dick for Ronnie to call him too because he had an excellent horse, Aspro, who needed a rider for a lucrative race at Keeneland.
But Ronnie never made it to Dick’s barn, so he never got the message to call Buddy. Instead, he was waylaid on his way into work by police. They detained him for questioning, though in this case Franklin hadn’t done anything wrong.
The cops were at the track to investigate a different jockey who they believed was in possession of drugs. They rifled through his car looking for the contraband, but they were frustrated when none turned up. In hopes that the day wouldn’t be a total loss, they grabbed Ronnie, a known drug user with a rap sheet, and grilled him with a long list of questions. Mostly they wanted him to give up the names of horse people who sold or used.
While Ronnie was detained, he missed his opportunity with both Delp brothers. Dick got a different rider for that day, and Buddy found someone for the weekend. The lost opportunity with Buddy was especially painful. Aspro won his race and pulled in 10 percent of the winner’s share of $34,000 for the jockey. Franklin lost that hefty payday and a chance to mend important fences for no other reason than that he had a bad reputation with law enforcement.
The turmoil in Ronnie’s career echoed his tumultuous personal life. His marriage to Tayann ended acrimoniously, just as Buddy had feared it would. Ronnie was too young and immature for the responsibility of an instant family and too strapped financially to make it work. Tyann was Mrs. Ronald Franklin for eighteen months, and for that she walked away with most of what he had, including his mobile home, his car, and some land holdings.
Ronnie wasn’t left with much, but at least he got his freedom back.
Gerald’s problems with drugs were less well known to the public than Ronnie’s, but in a sense they were much worse. While Ronnie could abstain and find extended periods of sobriety, Gerald suffered from a near constant addiction. At one point, living in Louisiana all by himself, Gerald did nothing but get stoned. Eventually Delp employees in New Orleans called Buddy to say that no one had seen or heard from Gerald in a long time; they didn’t know what had happened to him.
Buddy tried calling but couldn’t get Gerald on the phone either. So he dropped everything and immediately caught a flight to New Orleans to find his son. When he arrived at Gerald’s apartment, he opened the door to the sight of his boy unconscious on the sofa, lying in a quagmire of his own vomit, urine, and feces. Buddy was relieved Gerald was still breathing. He wrapped up his poor son in a blanket, lifted him up, and gently carried him out of the apartment like a swaddling baby.
After that near-death incident Buddy sent Gerald to Kentucky, ostensibly to lead his operation there. The real reason, however, was to get his son away from the drug dealers and users back home who had fueled his addiction.
While out in bluegrass country, Gerald did little more than attend a drug rehab program and work. Buddy provided an additional layer of protection by seeing to it that his son was under the watchful eye of Dr. Harthill. Buddy’s friend and veterinarian made sure Gerald didn’t fall off the wagon or get into any other trouble.
In Kentucky, Gerald lived a simple, low-stress life. He rented an affordable apartment across the street from the race track so that he could walk to work. His primary job responsibility was to oversee only eight horses. All of these elements allowed Gerald to earn enough money to stay alive without applying the type of pressure that might have driven him back to the drugs.
When Gerald felt better, he joined his father’s operation in a more meaningful capacity. He worked his way up to become Buddy’s assistant trainer, the same second-in-command position that Dick Delp had once held.
But working for Buddy wasn’t easy. There was a lot of tension between father and son. Gerald found Buddy abrupt, rude, and especially negative. If Buddy exasperated him too much, Gerald might tell him to “fuck off” and then hop in his car and speed away for a few hours. Even worse than Buddy’s constant criticism was his complete indifference to good work. “Thank you” apparently wasn’t in his vocabulary.
“You know,” a frustrated Gerald finally told his father, “you just always say fucking bad things.”
“I pay you to do a good job,” Buddy shot back. “You are supposed to do a good job.”
“Okay, mutherfucker,” Gerald muttered under his breath.
Whatever problems they had, they were still father and son. Gerald loved and respected Buddy and chose to emphasize the old man’s decency and especially his fatherly care for him. It was Buddy’s paternal tenderness, not his negative traits, that Gerald saw in his dad.
But there was no denying the other side of Buddy’s care: the utter indifference to education, the overemphasis of money, and especially the introduction of early-age alcohol and drug consumption that had led to Gerald’s life-threatening addictions.
All told, it was a clinic in atrocious parenting.
Gerald sublimated all that, pushed it so far back that he actually believed that he owed his dad his back-breaking labor, his unstinting loyalty, and amends for “everything I’d put him through.”
When Gerald tried to tell his father how sorry he was for all the trouble his addictions had caused, Buddy waved him off. “Stop right there,” Buddy said. “You just keep doing what you’re doing and that’s all the amends I need.”
Gerald accepted that as yet another generous gift from his father, a sign of his deathless love. But Gerald never even considered the possibility that the equation was all wrong. Perhaps it was Buddy who should have begged Gerald for forgiveness. After all, it was the father who had engineered the son’s metamorphosis from child to addict.
In light of so many complex and conflicting emotions and corruptions, their partnership soured. Whatever Buddy’s inner turmoil or deep-seated unhappiness, it surfaced in the form of heavy drinking. And not surprising, he was a mean drunk. It got to the point where Gerald, who arrived for work at 5:00 a.m. every day, dreaded his father’s stumbling appearance at eight or nine because the old man was already reeking of booze and paranoia.
“You’re trying to steal my owners!” Buddy shouted at his own son.
“You’re bat-shit crazy, Dad,” was all Gerald could say in return, shaking his head in amazement that his father could make such outrageous accusations against him. Gerald tried not to be offended; he knew it was the liquor talking.
It was only when necessity stepped in that their partnership finally came crumbling apart. Gerald’s wife, Annette, was pregnant with the couple’s first child. Feeling, as most men would, a sense of responsibility to his burgeoning young family, Gerald summoned the courage to discuss his changing financial situation with his father. He strode into Buddy’s office, shut the door behind him, and laid it on the line.
“Listen, Dad,” he said. “Annette’s pregnant and she won’t be going back to work. I need to make a little more money.”
“I see,” Buddy said.
“And If I can’t make more with you, I’m going to have to go out there and try it on my own.”
Buddy leaned back in his chair and clapped his hands; he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.
“Welp,” Buddy said, “when are you leaving?”
The callousness of the response was reminiscent of Buddy’s stepfather, Raymond Archer, who had said more or less the same thing to Buddy many years ago. Like Buddy, Gerald had no choice but to blaze his own path. He accepted his father’s decision, but he was deeply hurt and more than a little resentful. “I busted my dick for him,” Gerald said. “I didn’t want to leave, and I was surprised by how cold he was. I had wanted him to prepare me to take over the business. I knew what I was doing. I had good relationships with all the owners. And I wanted to help him.”
Gerald’s good intentions, dreams, and disappointments meant nothing to Buddy. They parted amicably, though Gerald left with but two horses with which to start. If there was a silver lining in his banishment, it was only this: at least he wouldn’t have to watch his father slowly drink himself to death anymore.
But in the end, Gerald was just like all of the other promising young men who’d come to Buddy for their opportunity in racing. The initial excitement of the experience wore off and was quickly replaced by frustration. Getting a leg up with Buddy was unfulfilling—if not debilitating.
Ronnie knew it to be so, but like Gerald and the others, whatever negative feelings he felt for Buddy were not for public consumption. Years into the future, even with close friends with whom he might have confided his disappointments, Franklin referred to Buddy respectfully as “Mr. Delp.” He never uttered a word to anyone in the press about the coke, the poker and other gambling losses, or even the poor riding advice in the Belmont.
Ronnie confessed these things out loud only to his young nephew, Tony Cullum. The two had become brother-close as Ronnie’s beloved father lay dying, wasting away in an east Baltimore hospital from colon cancer.
Ronnie was Tony’s hero. The young, athletic boy idolized his uncle and hoped to follow in his footsteps as a jockey. And Ronnie felt a kindred spirit in Tony. He saw in his nephew someone who understood exactly where he had come from. On their trips to the hospital, he opened up and told Tony Cullum things he didn’t confess to anyone else: the truth about where his life was going, his career, the terrible things that had been done to him, and some of his own sins.
Ronnie, like Gerald, was deeply conflicted about Buddy. He loved “Mr. Delp” for the opportunities the old man had provided him and the apparent kindness he had shown. But Ronnie swung back and forth between blaming himself or Buddy for one thing or another, especially for the disastrous ride in the Belmont Stakes. Ronnie told Tony about the horse’s injury and the clandestine appearance of Dr. Harthill. He told Tony that it was Buddy who had instructed him to get the Bid out in front as quickly as possible and “take ’em away.”
And yet Ronnie never got over his own performance in the Belmont. He replayed it in his mind again and again, for years, chastising and blaming himself for having chased the long shot and “spending” the horse too soon. He condemned himself in his own harsh thoughts even though, intellectually, he knew he had merely followed Buddy’s instructions and run the race precisely as the trainer had told him to do it.
But the truth was that the Belmont instructions were the least of Buddy’s sins. In Ronnie he had possession of an eager boy with a great deal of talent. With that clay, the trainer might have molded a new Shoemaker. Ronnie had everything needed: the native ability and early start, a perfect build, and Barbara Graham’s impeccable training. Under the right circumstances he could have racked up the big victories and raked in the wealth for decades to come.
There was no doubt that Buddy had done great things for Ronnie, but he was also the one who had taught him to use coke. And the horses and cocaine, in one form or another, were a part of Ronnie for the rest of his life. He was preoccupied with both and subordinated everything else in his life to those two things.
In 1986, after years of problems with drugs, authorities, the IRS, and others, a small act of kindness by Ronnie for a young woman led to the single greatest possibility for salvation that he would ever be given. Going to the post one cold, rainy day at Laurel, he was led to the gates by Jane Rettaliata. Jane was a trainer and sometimes exercise rider or fill-in pony girl. Ronnie noticed her discomfort in the wet and chilly weather and sent his valet back to the jockeys’ room to fetch his personal rain jacket for her. She was touched by his small act of kindness and attracted to his boyish face. She, of course, knew who he was and knew all about his troubled past, but when he asked her out, she readily agreed.
Both outwardly and beneath the surface Jane and Ronnie were an interesting study in contrasts. Jane was tall and striking, and at 5 feet 9 inches, she towered well above him by 7 inches. She had a hearty Italian look, with long brown hair and angular features, and she exuded a long-limbed vibrancy.
Jane was as buttoned up as Ronnie was tattered. Horse racing was her childhood dream too, but after galloping horses, training them, breaking them, and convalescing them, all she could envision was a bleak future of long hours, exhausting work, and low pay. She decided she needed a better plan and went to nursing school.
Although there were many differences between Ronnie and Jane, the most important one was sobriety, something that was apparent on their first date. She was swept away by Ronnie that night, captivated by his good looks and charm. But at the end of the evening things took a surprising turn. While they were still in the car, Ronnie took out a little baggie of white powder.
“Do you want some?” he casually asked her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t do that.”
Undeterred, Ronnie emptied the baggie on a surface, cut a few lines, and snorted them right there in front of her. It was the last time he ever got high in her presence.
Although Jane never personally saw it again, she knew he continued to use. When he asked her to marry him, she demanded sobriety as a condition of her agreement to be his wife. He reluctantly complied. But the week of their wedding Ronnie disappeared. He simply was gone for several days. Jane had no idea where he was but knew that the stress of the moment had been too much for him and that he was off on a cocaine bender somewhere. He came back in time for the wedding, and everything went off without a hitch, but it was a sign of what she was in for: a husband who was capable of giving her great love and excitement, but also a fragile man who might lose his bearings at any moment.
Jane came to know Ronnie so well that she could tell in only a glance whether he was under the influence. When Ronnie was high, his upper lip stuck out in an unusual way, and his skin took on a distinct pallor. When Ronnie was sober, Jane considered him an excellent man and a fine husband. She invested large amounts of her own time assisting him to repair his life. She cheered him on when he went to community college to get his GED. She stood by him while he pursued his racing license after he had been ruled off for a failed drug test. And she helped him work on becoming current with the IRS. Most important, she encouraged him to make time for his son, Chris.
Jane’s supply of compassion and understanding seemed endless. For years she carried the belief that Ronnie would beat his addictions, but it never quite happened. She had a great deal of hope when he checked into two different high-end rehabilitation facilities, but she was horrified when she believed they had used him for his celebrity without really helping him. “They wanted him because he was famous,” she said, “so they took him on for free. Sounds nice, but he wasn’t treated like everyone else. And because he never felt the sting of paying the high price for the treatment, he didn’t take it seriously.”
Their marriage finally came crashing down when she noticed a strange odor in her house. Cleaning the first-floor powder room, she realized that there was the faint whiff of something that she couldn’t quite identify. Eventually it dawned on her that the reek she detected was the residue of crack cocaine, which Ronnie had been smoking in there.
At last she understood that their marriage would never work. Something irreparable had set in. Crack was inexpensive, obtainable for even a broke guy like Ronnie, and more addictive than the coke. In her heart, Jane finally had to admit that she was licked. Even with all of her love and help, he would never successfully quit the drugs.
And that was the moment that she gave up.
The most important thing that Jane helped Ronnie accomplish was to assume his role as father. First, she allowed him to play stepfather to her daughter from a previous relationship. He was pleasant and caring to that young girl. But Jane also facilitated the reconciliation of Ronnie with his own son.
With Jane’s encouragement, Ronnie had his best moments as a father. He showed his son real love and attention. He picked Chris up for visits in his new home, and the boy spent nights and sometimes weekends with Ronnie and Jane, and for the first time they were like a real family. Ronnie and Jane took Chris out to dinner, and Ronnie took Chris to Dundalk to visit with the boy’s grandmother.
In those moments, Ronnie was both friendly and fatherly. When Chris demonstrated that he didn’t know how to use a knife and fork properly, Ronnie gently showed him how. These simple and ordinary moments, which most children would take for granted between themselves and their fathers, were cherished by Chris. They stuck with him for many decades, cutting through the shadows of childhood memory and lasting deeply into his middle age, because those simple actions were the biggest moments Chris Campbell would ever share with his father.
When Ronnie’s marriage to Jane ended, so did his relationship with Chris. Ronnie disappeared from his son’s life, just as suddenly as he had come back into it. As far as Chris could see, Ronnie galloped off into oblivion like a ghost on a horse. Franklin rationalized what he did. He told himself that vanishing was for Chris’s own good and that it allowed the kid’s stepfather to have the last word in raising the child. But Ronnie never considered the bewilderment and emptiness, the blame, that his son would feel for decades to come.
When Ronnie would finally reappear in Chris’s life, the boy was seventeen years old. Ronnie was a down-and-outer by then, ruled off the track and hawking gasoline cards door to door.
This time it was Chris’s sister, Jamie, who arranged for Franklin’s reunion visit with Chris. She loved her brother and hoped that it would spark a renewed relationship between the father and son. Ronnie and Chris spent the day together as door-to-door salesmen. It was a happy memory for Chris, but the last one with his father; he never saw Ronnie again.
From the time he was a baby, Chris was raised by his mother’s husband, Joe Jacobs, a kind and loving man who was, as far as Chris was concerned, indistinguishable from a biological father. Joe modeled many of the right things for Chris. He demonstrated a sterling work ethic and a flair for good parenting. He was a carpenter by trade who labored out on the job site all day. Sometimes he took Chris along with him to work, making the little boy clean up the work area and teaching him how to be a responsible laborer.
After work Jacobs usually took Chris to a small farm where they attended to a handful of thoroughbreds. Owning and training horses was Jacobs’s hobby. It was Joe, not Ronnie the Kentucky Derby winner, who taught young Chris how to ride a pony.
Most of all, Jacobs taught Chris joy. He designated every Sunday “Funday” in his family, and he set aside time in his busy schedule to take the kids to some amusement park or on some new adventure.
Despite Joe Jacobs’s sincere efforts at being a true father, Chris’s mother and sister worried about Chris and feared that his childhood was painful and that he was growing up with a certain fragility due to his lack of a relationship with his real father.
But Chris was attached to Joe, and he felt whole in that.
Chris did experience real pain and loss, in high school, when his mother and Jacobs separated and divorced. After the papers were signed and the arrangements finalized, Joe Jacobs disappeared just like Ronnie had. Chris rarely ever saw his stepdad again. With Jacobs gone, Chris’s mother fell into addiction, and she was largely absent from the house too. Shirley spent her afternoons and evenings providing for the family by working as a bartender. Without her, the house became chaotic and filled with teenagers every day after school. The Campbell house became a perpetual party venue for the underaged, who were free to do anything they wanted.
Many of the same temptations that had been so alluring to Ronnie many years earlier—pot, booze, and other drugs—were all there for Chris too.
Chris flirted with that lifestyle but ultimately rejected it. Instead he found fulfillment in exactly the way Joe Jacobs had taught him: Chris buried himself in hard work. After high school, he took a job at a local grocery store stocking shelves. It was intended to be only a first job, but he was diligent and hard working, and he quickly climbed the ladder. Eventually Chris was promoted to manager, leaving him in charge of a store with about ninety employees and about $20 million in annual sales.
It is interesting that when Chris became a father, he was something more than just a good one. He was present emotionally and financially for all of the children, including one who wasn’t even technically his. That child, a daughter, was conceived in an extramarital affair by his wife. Yet for the first five years of her life the little girl was raised entirely by Chris while her mother was long gone. Chris not only raised the child as his own, but he also did it by himself while working a highly demanding job.
In short, Chris grew up to lead the life Ronnie might have had if he’d never met Buddy Delp. Chris’s work ethic and talent, his expansive care for his family, offered a glimpse of who Ronnie might’ve been had Tony Franklin remained his primary influence instead of Buddy. There was a lot of Tony Franklin in Chris Campbell, though they never really knew each other.
When Chris Campbell was born, Ronnie Franklin was barely nineteen, and he was wriggling under the thumb of a man who terrified and controlled him. By then, Ronnie had already been using highly addictive drugs for at least a year, and Chris’s mother was a stranger to him. What chance did Ronnie have to be an adequate father? He was already well down the road to addiction, financial ruin, and public ridicule when his son was still in diapers.
Unfortunately, most of those things were still true almost four decades later. Ronnie’s years after racing were marred by his battles with drugs and his struggles to find himself. He went to community college and studied business. He worked a variety of blue-collar jobs. And he turned, at times, to religion. Despite it all, Ronnie’s stubborn drug issues persisted, and he was derailed at every turn. After he had been ruled off enough and he was no longer a viable rider, he and Buddy Delp drifted apart. He didn’t see much of Gerald either since they were both told to avoid old drug associations.
As Ronnie aged, the rakish good looks that were the hallmarks of his youth were replaced by a more distinguished appearance. His body had expanded so that he was thick around the chest and torso. Thanks to Mother Nature and a razor, his head no longer featured the waving, caramel-colored hair he had enjoyed in his youth.
Ronnie eventually found love again. Many years after his marriage to Jane had ended, he came into contact with Cia Carter, a racing fan who had followed his career from the very beginning. Cia first saw him ride in his earliest races at Laurel, Bowie, and Pimlico. She was only a young girl then, a fan who came to the track with her camera. After a while she realized that she had stopped showing up for the horses and was coming out just to see Franklin. She took many priceless snapshots of his early career, capturing him when he was a glorious and happy young pup as yet untouched by worry and care.
In the many years after that, Cia never stopped thinking of Ronnie. She followed his rise to the top and was still following him well into his endless descent. Long after his career had crashed and burned, she sent him long, deeply expressive fan letters. “You seem to want to do everything on your own,” she wrote to him, “but I am here if you need me. You have never let me down. I won’t let you down, either.”
Cia cared so much for Ronnie, and he was so hard to pin down, that she went to the expense of having a letter delivered to him by hand courier all the way at the track in New Orleans. Ronnie was so touched by it that he showed it to one of his friends around the barn who told him, “Marry that girl!”
He picked up the phone and called Cia to officially reconnect with her, and thereafter she became the most important female presence in his life. She had a radiant smile that had retained its luster into maturity and a kind of genius for kindness and empathy. She was an intelligent and educated woman with complex thoughts and an artistic flair. Her voice was soft and soothing. There was a luxurious comfort to her presence.
Cia also happened to be African American. Ronnie had grown up in an era and in a neighborhood where interracial dating was taboo. But his affection for her underscored that his rough journey through life had changed and softened him. He was once well known, even infamous, for the mean-spirited racial slurs he had slung at Angel Cordero. But Ronnie’s relationship with Cia, in its many redemptions, showed that he had moved on from that kind of thinking.
In return for all that Cia gave him, Ronnie gave her a little dignity. She had put on weight as the years had passed, and before she agreed to meet him in person, she wondered aloud if he might have some discomfort with her appearance.
“I want to lose some weight first, before I see you,” she told him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t care about that.”
“He was the first man in my life,” Cia remembered, “who liked me just the way I was.”
Ronnie showed Cia a side of himself that few others knew or recognized. He was kind and gentle with her, soothing in his words and generous in his actions. He showered her with all the few modest gifts he had left to give. Ronnie presented Cia with the winner’s circle photographs from his career, one of the few trophies he had not sold for drugs, and a diamond heart pendant that he’d scratched the money together to buy for her.
Occasionally in his later years, Ronnie was invited to racing events, such as a dinner for Kentucky Derby winners, or autograph shows. These nostalgic gatherings offered him the opportunity to relive his days as one of the most improbable kings of the sporting universe. At one event Joe Namath recognized him, and the two smiled and chatted such as two colleagues might.
Mostly, though, Ronnie worked hard to subsist. He performed lower-profile work, the type he had done when he had first broken into racing as a fifteen-year-old. He mucked stalls and walked and rubbed horses. The people who hired him for these jobs liked his personality and appreciated his work ethic.
But drugs always intervened to scuttle any progress his good works might’ve created.
One of Ronnie’s old friends, a trainer named John Bosley, had hired him to ride. The two became so close during this business arrangement that Ronnie actually briefly lived with Bosley’s mother.
Bosley not only employed Ronnie, but he also often drove him to work. It was during one of those morning rides that both the long-standing friendship and the partnership hit a rough spot. Ronnie asked the trainer to pull over at a house along the path. He asked the trainer to wait in the car while he ducked into the place for a brief visit. This started to become a regular feature of their morning drive.
Each time, Ronnie exited the car, disappeared into the front door, and then reemerged a short time later. After that they proceeded to work. Curiosity finally got the best of Bosley.
“What do you do in there?” he asked Franklin.
“There’s a bookie in there,” Ronnie said. “I lay down football bets.”
Bosley found out in the most painful way possible that Ronnie had been lying to him. That became apparent in the middle of a race. Riding one of Bosley’s horses, Ronnie behaved erratically out on the track, standing up in the irons and sitting back down again for no apparent reason. That was usually a sign that a jockey was no longer riding hard. Ronnie did it several times.
Bosley was enraged. He was so mad that he didn’t want to speak to Franklin after the race, though he had the responsibility of driving him back home. As soon as they got into the car, Bosley couldn’t contain his anger and he confronted Franklin. “What in the hell were you doing out there!” he shouted. “That was one of the most pathetic things I ever saw.’”
Ronnie didn’t even attempt an answer, and they drove home in bitter silence. But the next day, when Bosley picked up Ronnie at 5 a.m. for work, the jockey was finally contrite and ready to explain himself. “John, I’m going to come clean with you,” Ronnie said. “You know when I was telling you I was betting on the football games? I was really going in and picking up [cocaine].”
Bosley believed that Ronnie had been high on the track, but Franklin insisted that it wasn’t true. Ronnie admitted to using the drugs but said that it was the night before, when he had gotten high long into the evening, like he used to do with Gerald. He hadn’t gotten high before the race, he said; he was merely exhausted and out of shape, and that was why he stood up.
That episode ended Ronnie and Bosley’s relationship but only for a while. The two track veterans were good friends and shared a mutual respect. Bosley could talk to Ronnie about anything horse-racing related and get feedback from a man who had lived it all at the highest levels.
Eventually Bosley and his client, horse owner Don Pistorio, gave Ronnie another chance. Ronnie worked around Pistorio’s stalls and even lived in his barn for a while, sleeping on a blow up mattress. But again, the allure of the drugs was just too much and the effects too obvious. “He was moody,” Pistorio said. “Some days he would sleep half the day.”
Pistorio was a kindly sort of man, and although he worried about the danger of having a guy like Ronnie around his horses and property, he was more worried about the kid. “Ron, you really need to get some help,” Pistorio told him.
Instead Ronnie shoved off from Pistorio’s job.
Franklin landed on his feet. He eventually ended up at the Fair Hill Training Center, a heavenly slice of the Eastern Shore of Maryland in Cecil County. It was a racing-training complex reminiscent of Middleburg, only bigger and more vibrant.
At Fair Hill, Ronnie got the best break he’d had in many years. A novice horse owner whom Ronnie had met at a card show made it known that he needed a trainer for his talented young colt. Star-struck by Ronnie’s celebrity, the owner rashly hired Franklin to handle his horse. The only thing was, Ronnie had never been a trainer before, and he didn’t even have a license to do it. Given his past history with drugs and his having been ruled off so many times, it was unclear if he could even obtain one. “Everyone told us, warned us off him,” the owner said. “But we really liked him.”
The owner committed to Ronnie and then went all in. He ferried Franklin around to convene with more experienced trainers and get their advice. More than that, he signed a lease for an apartment for Ronnie and directly paid the rent. He also provided Franklin with a car and bought and paid for his groceries.
Despite these advantages and kindnesses, despite the opportunity to start over with a new career, Ronnie’s addiction issues still loomed. “I tried to be careful and pay his bills directly instead of handing him money,” the owner said. “But he found a way around that.”
Ronnie would go to the feed store to purchase needed tools and supplies. Afterward he would show the owner his receipts to confirm that he’d spent the money for its intended purposes. But then he’d turn around and sell the same implements he’d just bought to get the cash back and use it for drugs.
After a while, Ronnie asked his patron for a loan. He offered his Preakness trophy as collateral. “I knew he’d sold it a long time ago,” the horse owner said.
On another occasion Ronnie went into the tack room of another trainer to offer her a “business opportunity.” “Would you like to buy a bottle of clenbuterol?” Ronnie asked her.
Clenbuterol is a bronchial dilator that is used to help horses that are considered “bleeders.” Veterinarians typically distribute it by prescription only and only in acute episodes. Prolonged use can make the animal resistant to it. It is also a drug used for cheating since it is believed to have a steroidal effect.
“Where did you get that bottle?” she asked him.
“Somebody was supposed to pay me to ride, but they gave me the bottle instead,” Ronnie said.
The trainer knew about Franklin’s reputation with drug abuse. Taking that into consideration, she decided that the bottle was likely stolen and the money he’d make by selling it would be used to get high. She didn’t want any piece of it or him. “No thank you,” she said, “but thanks for coming by.”
More than forty years after Ronnie started using drugs with Buddy Delp, he was still an addict, reduced to grifting and hustling. Sensing he had to do something to save his own life, Ronnie quit his training job and moved to Southern California, where he checked himself into a Salvation Army rehabilitation clinic. One of his old friends correctly called it “a Betty Ford clinic for the indigent.”
For a full year, Ronnie was an inpatient living on the campus. He was learning to control his desire to get high and also picking up menial job skills. He received a certificate of achievement for completing a class in janitorial work. He communicated with Cia from California and told her his goal was to finally kick the drug habit and leave racing behind forever. He wanted to start over with a new career.
Racing was a part of his uncomfortable past, and despite his talent and accomplishments, there were too many negative memories associated with that life. His new ambition was to be a drug counselor and help others beat the addiction issues that had swallowed his life and career.
As Ronnie prepared to finish his program and leave the Salvation Army, however, he picked up a little cold. After a while it worsened to flu-like symptoms, and he was fatigued and slept longer than usual. It didn’t appear to be anything serious. But his symptoms were stubborn and refused to go away, so the Salvation Army personnel sent him to see a doctor. After a round of testing the medical staff knew for sure that he didn’t have a cold or a flu. He was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.
After everything he had been through, after all that he had suffered and overcome, he was now living under a death sentence.
Franklin returned to Maryland and moved in with his sister in her suburban Baltimore townhouse. He was a hit with her friends, winning them over with his sense of humor and colorful personality. But with each passing month he was reminded of the seriousness of his condition. He got weaker and weaker.
As he approached the end, the pain was excruciating. He didn’t want to take the highly addictive pills prescribed for him by his doctor; they made him nauseous and provided him no relief. So he returned to what he knew. Though his addictions had been under control for about a year, he found cocaine again, and for once, without regret, remorse, or fear, he used it to ease his torturous suffering.
Ronnie died in Baltimore with his family around him, still a few years removed from his sixtieth birthday. At his request, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered on his father’s grave, reuniting their molecules and restoring the paternal line that had been severed so long ago when he had been far too young to leave.
There was no chance to fix anything anymore; there was not time left to make anything right. Ronnie had crossed the wire.
It was hard to believe that a boy who had once been so vividly alive, who had captivated an entire nation with his talent and audacity, was now merely buoyant dust floating on the wind and not riding it.