THE KID WAS a natural-born horseman.
Bred as well as any foal dropped in the Bluegrass, Stephen Mark Cauthen was born there on May 1, 1960—coincidentally during Kentucky Derby week—to a mother who trained racehorses and a father who shod them. If his robust birth weight of seven pounds twelve ounces hardly hinted that he could grow up small enough to someday be a jockey, it soon became clear that young Steve Cauthen was indeed a natural in the saddle.
He was still in diapers at the tender age of one when his father first hoisted him onto a horse to get him out of the way of some cattle. He was just two years old when he began to ride ponies, without a trace of fear. He was barely three when he attended his first Kentucky Derby at the same age the horses do, romping on the grass along the Churchill Downs backstretch and watching in wide-eyed wonder as rising star Braulio Baeza rode Chateaugay to a rousing upset.
By the time he turned five, Steve Cauthen had already shown an affinity for horses and had become an accomplished rider in his own right. That was the year Tex and Myra Cauthen had finally settled the family down once and for all in Bluegrass Country, affording their precocious son forty acres of farmland to gallop across. To get to their new farm in the northern Kentucky hamlet of Walton just twenty miles south of Steve’s birthplace, the Cauthens had traveled a circuitous five-year route through whatever Southern racetracks provided work for a family of self-described “racetrackers.” Tex, who still went by Ronald Cauthen when he got his start as a thirteen-year-old cowboy breaking wild horses, had ridden out of Texas at fifteen to become a nomadic racetracker—first as an exercise boy and stable hand, then as a hard-luck trainer, and finally as a blacksmith. It was at a track that he met Myra Bischoff. The petite blonde, who had grown up in a racing family on a Thoroughbred farm near Walton, was holding a horse Tex was shoeing for her father. The connection was as deep as it was instantaneous. The couple soon married, forging a life together while bouncing around Southern and Northeastern tracks where Tex would shoe horses for up to eighteen dollars a pop and Myra would train off and on.
The arrival of their firstborn a year later didn’t change that itinerant lifestyle, so Steve was practically weaned on backstretches throughout the South and Midwest. It wasn’t until he reached school age and a kid brother was born that his parents decided it was time to put down roots in the Bluegrass. There, centrally located sixty miles north of Lexington and twenty miles south of Cincinnati, Tex could count on regular farrier work on the Kentucky-Ohio racing circuit while Steve could hone his riding skills, galloping pell-mell across the pastures of their modest farm.
Not long after the Cauthens settled into their plain wooden farmhouse, word started filtering to Latonia, the small Kentucky track where Tex was building a reputation as a skilled shoer, about “something unbelievable” happening down the road in the tiny town of Walton. One skeptical racing official was curious enough to drive the seven miles from Latonia to check it out. “I saw this tiny kid handling a Thoroughbred in full gallop, sitting over him like a regular exercise rider,” he marveled. “I never forgot the name Steve Cauthen after that. You don’t forget a kid five years old who looks like that on a horse.”
That was also the age at which the youngster’s weight began to level off. As a six-year-old, he tipped the scales at forty pounds, only ten more than he had weighed when he was eight months old. Even though he was smaller than the other first graders, any notion of growing up to become a jockey couldn’t yet compete with every boy’s dream of being a major-league ballplayer or an NFL quarterback. Riding was just something he did for fun.
When he wasn’t galloping the family’s handful of cheap Thoroughbreds around the farm, young Steve was tagging along with his father at the racetrack. On school days, he would wake up hours before class so he could accompany Dad to Latonia for the farrier’s daily 5 A.M. rounds. One morning while Tex was shoeing a horse elsewhere on the backside, Steve was hanging around the stall of an old stakes winner named Slade, a stallion so high-spirited and ill-tempered that all the stable hands feared going near him.
“Hey, Steve,” the horse’s trainer, Lonnie Abshire, called out with a grin, “you got your riding boots on?”
“Yup,” replied the kid, already a horseman of few words.
“You want to ride this dude?”
“Yup.”
“OK, put the tack on him, boys! You sure you can do it, Steve?”
“Yup.”
When Abshire abruptly called an end to the escapade, explaining that he couldn’t rightly put a seven-year-old on the meanest stallion at Latonia, Steve excitedly begged the trainer to, please, let him ride Slade. Finally, Abshire relented and reluctantly lifted the boy into the saddle. As the young rider walked the horse around the barn, Slade was tossing his head, snorting defiantly, baring his teeth. Fearing for the rider’s safety, the trainer glanced up at Steve and couldn’t believe his own eyes: the kid was actually laughing at the horse. Dismounting as nonchalantly as most children hop off a school bus, the second grader simply shrugged. “I understand how kids might be scared of some things in their lives,” he would later explain, “but it never did occur to me to be scared of a horse.”
Fearless and unflappable, he was already demonstrating an uncanny connection with the beasts. He was only eight when his parents gave him his first horse, along with a lecture on the responsibility that went with ownership. From his parents, he learned how to care for and properly groom his new prize. Soon his father started teaching him how to start yearlings under saddle. Tex was impressed with Steve’s ability to calm even the spookiest colts and with the boy’s amazing sense of balance, which allowed him to stick with yearlings that might have ducked out from under a less talented rider. At local 4-H horse shows, Steve won more than his share of ribbons for riding. He seemed to be drawn to anything related to horses. By the same token, all the coming-of-age rituals that appealed to his schoolmates—going to the movies, listening to records, hanging out at dances—left him bored. He wanted more, and he knew where he could find it.
One day when he was all of twelve years old, he went to his father and made a proclamation: “Dad, I want to be a race rider.”
Formulating a response on the spot, Tex Cauthen realized it was time to sit his son down and tell him the facts of race riding. His own riding hopes had faded when he shot up late in adolescence, ultimately to five foot nine and 150 pounds. In his travails as a blacksmith, he had seen too many jockeys killing themselves to make weight with starvation diets, vomiting rituals, sweatbox marathons. If he was the exact opposite of those stereotypical Little League parents living vicariously through their children, he also wasn’t about to dash his own son’s dreams. So when Steve announced his aspiration to become a jockey, Dad was ready with a facts-of-life talk that was at once pragmatic and supportive.
“I think it’s a good idea and I’ll help you,” Tex started, pausing for emphasis, “on two conditions.”
When the boy’s soulful brown eyes inquisitively wondered what those stipulations were, his father went on to lay them out. “First, don’t ever let it swell your head or change you as a person. And second, promise that you’ll give it up if you start to grow too big. The minute you have to start starving yourself to make riding weight, you’ll have to look for something else to do with your life.”
Steve nodded. The ground rules thus established, Tex had a game plan ready to offer. “If you’re going to try it, you might as well try to be the best,” he said. “There are a lot of fine points that some riders learn very late in their careers or never learn at all. I can show you some of them; and what I can’t show you, some of my friends probably can. Just pay attention. And be ready to work at it.”
If the seventh grader was merely an average student in the classrooms where he daydreamed about horses, he was determined to be an honors student in this crash course his father would teach at the farm and at the track.
To school him on the basics, Tex got films of nearly a hundred races at nearby Latonia and at River Downs just across the Ohio River in Cincinnati—the bush tracks where he spent most of his workdays—and, each evening after dinner, he would take them up to Steve’s room. Turning the boy’s bedroom into a classroom, they screened those patrol films over and over on a borrowed projector, running them backward and forward so Steve could dissect the jockeys’ moves, techniques, and strategies. They paid closest attention to the top jockey at River Downs, Larry Snyder, since he had won the most races in North America one year while riding low to cut down on wind resistance—a style that Steve decided to emulate.
The bulk of the homeschooling took place out behind the farmhouse in the red barn where Tex introduced his son to the fundamentals of holding the reins and the whip. That’s where Steve would practice the art of wielding the whip—not on a horse’s flank, but on the side of a bale of hay. He would routinely wake up at 4 A.M., trudge out to the barn in the pitch dark, and climb two ladders to the cramped hayloft. There, he would sit astride a bale of hay and, for two hours in the predawn silence, grab hold of the reins hanging off a post and practice his whipping technique with a stick, repeatedly passing the makeshift crop from hand to hand and snapping it down onto the side of the bale with an expeditious flick of the wrist. Alone in the barn, he learned to tag the horse precisely within an eighth of an inch of his target—in the process chopping up bale after bale of the hay his father had bought for $2.50 apiece.
The kid would become so engrossed while slapping away that one time he was startled to glimpse his father standing behind him in the hayloft. “What are you watching?” Steve asked. “Am I doing something wrong?”
“Nope,” Tex replied. “I was just wondering if you’ll ever be worth all these bales of hay you’re beating to pieces.”
“Sure hope so,” Steve said without missing a beat of the stick.
The education of a jockey became most intensive when summer school was in session and Steve could spend every day at the racetrack. He got a summer job at River Downs, where he would muck stalls, walk hots, and soak up every nuance of the jockey’s craft from dawn till dusk. Almost every day, he would spend long hours standing near the starting gate, studying the techniques of various riders and the reactions of various horses in the noisy steel contraption. One summer, he spent every morning in the clockers’ stand on the backstretch with the men who timed the daily works, developing a clock in his own head so accurate that he could judge without a stopwatch precisely how fast each horse was galloping within a fifth of a second. Then he’d watch the afternoon races from the starters’ stand near the inside rail, learning to anticipate the break from the gate and to navigate those first chaotic strides of a race.
Mentally, he already felt prepared to handle whatever a thousand-pound Thoroughbred could throw at a ninety-pound jockey while hurtling forty miles per hour through traffic. Physically, however, he was still just a wispy teenager with a cherubic, pale, cowlick-draped face that made him look even younger than his tender years. Once he had declared his ambition to become a jockey, his father advised him to lift weights to increase strength. A competitive all-around athlete who grew up playing baseball, football, and basketball until his peers got too big for him, he added yoga to his morning regimen to make his arms and legs supple enough for the demands of the sport he felt offered the most level playing field to a diminutive farm boy.
Three days after celebrating his fourteenth birthday, he made the pilgrimage to Churchill Downs to attend the Kentucky Derby, this time watching the race not as just another fan but as a student studying each jockey’s every move. Scrutinizing Angel Cordero’s triumphant trip aboard Cannonade in that 1974 Derby, Steve Cauthen vowed to someday capture the sport’s marquee race himself.
Soon enough, he started to demonstrate his own riding proficiency on the track, if only as an exercise boy galloping and breezing horses in the mornings before hitching a ride to junior high in time for the homeroom bell. On the backstretch at Latonia, he began to build a reputation for being able to handle the big, tough, headstrong horses that were running off with bigger, tougher, stronger exercise riders. That was a by-product of his unique ability to relate to horses—something he attributed to having been raised “to be a horseman, not just a jockey.”
Until he reached the legal age to become an apprentice jockey, sixteen, he would have to bide his time. During his sophomore year at Walton-Verona High School, where he was hitting the books hard enough to get A’s and B’s as part of a deal with his father, he would tell friends that he’d soon be dropping out to become “the best race rider in the world.” Even when they responded by teasingly calling him “Superjock,” he’d keep right on proclaiming his ambition—not with the cocky bravado of the stereotypical jockey, but with the quiet confidence of a shy, easygoing kid determined to break the mold.
On May 1, 1976, he fittingly celebrated his sixteenth birthday at Churchill Downs, watching Cordero ride Bold Forbes to a stunning upset over Honest Pleasure in the Kentucky Derby. The excitement always attendant on Derby Day was heightened this time by the sweet significance of turning sixteen—for this was the day Cauthen finally became eligible for his jockey’s license. “I thought this day would never get here,” he told his parents later that evening at a birthday dinner. “I’m ready to start, Dad. I’m ready to ride.”
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER the Derby, Steve Cauthen was back at Churchill Downs getting ready to ride his long-awaited first race as a jockey. He calmly walked into the storied paddock trying to appear as bold as any five-foot, ninety-two-pound sixteen-year-old possibly could on the headiest day of his young life. His first professional mount was a $5,000 claimer named King of Swat, who went to the post for the day’s opening race a 136-to-1 longshot. Cauthen got him out of the gate well and positioned him near the lead, but the sprinter predictably ran out of gas in the stretch and lugged home sixteen lengths off the pace, dead last.
Five days after his inauspicious debut, Cauthen readily returned to the familiar surroundings of River Downs, a minor-league track where the competition was softer than on the hallowed ground of Churchill Downs. Making this more of a homecoming, he was riding the featured race on a gelding owned by his mother and trained by her brother, his Uncle Tommy. Lagging in last place fifteen lengths out of it on the turn, Cauthen tagged Red Pipe with the whip just as he had practiced on the hay bales, and the stretch runner responded by charging home to win by a length and a half. In the tenth start of his young career, the rookie rider had broken his maiden.
Just a week and a half later, on May 27, he rode his fifth winner—a milestone for any rider because it officially starts the one-year clock on the weight allowance enjoyed by apprentice jockeys. That handicap, enabling a horse to carry lighter weight under an apprentice than a veteran jockey, is designed to compensate for beginner’s inexperience and the resulting difficulty getting mounts from trainers. When they first start out, fledgling apprentices are given a ten-pound weight allowance—denoted on the racing charts by three asterisks, known as “bugs”—until they win five times. Then the handicap drops to seven pounds—marked by two bugs—until they ride another thirty winners. At that point, it drops to five pounds—marked by a single bug—until the one-year clock expires and successful apprentices graduate from “bug boys” to full-fledged “journeyman jockeys.”
Cauthen needed barely two months of his River Downs apprenticeship to dispense with all but his single bug, riding 26 winners in the track’s spring meeting and a record 94 through its summer meeting. By summer’s end, his combined 120 winners in seventy days had shattered the track record for a full season despite his having ridden only a fraction of it.
Ready to take the next step up in class, he moved on to the stiffer competition of Arlington Park in Chicago. Ted Atkinson, a Hall of Fame jockey who had been the first ever to win more than a million dollars in a single year, was working as a steward there when Tex Cauthen asked him to point out any flaws in Steve’s riding style. Atkinson had to look hard for several days before he could find one—and even then it was only that the apprentice needed more race experience to hone his judgment in positioning his mount and anticipating openings. Otherwise, Atkinson reported back, “he’s the finished product now.”
During his three weeks at Arlington, Cauthen won 40 races to finish third in the jockey standings, 14 behind leader Larry Snyder, the very rider he had studied all those nights on film up in his bedroom. As the Chicago racing season moved crosstown to Hawthorne for a month, with Cauthen winning 27 races to Snyder’s 32, observers could see how well the rookie was mastering the veteran’s low riding style.
Crouching far forward with his back parallel to the horse’s neck and his head buried in its mane, Cauthen would ride so low that spectators without binoculars sometimes thought he had fallen off his mount. Opposing jockeys thought the same thing when they would glance back and fail to see him crouched down behind the horse’s head. He rode so level and so still that racetrackers joked about how you could serve drinks on his back at the quarter pole without spilling a drop before the finish line. It was as if he were one with the horse.
With his smooth style and silky touch, Steve Cauthen was being called the coolest apprentice to burst on the scene since seventeen-year-old Willie Shoemaker began his record run of 8,833 winners in 1949. Even more daunting than being labeled “the next Willie Shoemaker” was being hailed “the embryo Arcaro” and compared to the incomparable jockey revered as The Master, Eddie Arcaro himself. Cauthen possessed what Atkinson termed “the Arcaro seat,” meaning that he was always perfectly balanced on his mount whether crouching low over the withers or perched high in the irons. What’s more, Cauthen possessed the Arcaro feel, meaning that his hands, notably outsized, were as soft as they were strong, sensitive enough to perceive through the reins clues about a horse’s status at a given moment and then to communicate tactical commands back to his mount. That, more than anything, defined Cauthen’s magic touch. He was at his most sublime when hand-riding down the stretch: his hands, tucked in behind his mount’s ears with reins and whip gripped by his long fingers, pumping back and forth to urge the horse on, two athletes flowing in perfect rhythm to the wire. As if all that physical prowess, tactical skill, and natural instinct weren’t enough, he also possessed an intangible that none of the greats who had it before him could articulate: an inexplicable ability to inspire racehorses, to calm the most skittish of them, to get the very best from every one of his mounts.
For all his precocious poise, however, he was still just a babe in the backwoods, a virtual unknown outside the Cincinnati and Chicago tracks where he was progressing like a minor-league ballplayer from Single A to Double A to Triple A. The prince of the bug boys had a long way to go before he could ever be accepted as a bona fide “race rider”—the term the hardboots reserved for only the best of major-league jockeys. Before he could challenge the era’s star race riders like Willie Shoemaker, Angel Cordero, Laffit Pincay, and Jorge Velasquez, Steve Cauthen had many more baby steps to take.
For the next steppingstone in his painstakingly plotted progression, Cauthen returned from Illinois to Kentucky for the fall meeting at Churchill Downs and rode 24 winners in three weeks. One day, Churchill’s leading jockey, Don Brumfield, came back from winning a stakes race at Aqueduct and mentioned to Cauthen that there was no standout apprentice up in New York. “Take a shot up there,” the veteran advised. “I think you’ll do real good there.”
Tex Cauthen agreed that his son was ready to try the big time in New York, to test himself on the major-league racing circuit that boasted the best horses, the best jockeys, and the best purses. All he needed was a big-time jockey agent to book the mounts for him from trainers notoriously reluctant to entrust their best horses to green apprentices.
Tex had begun shopping for one a few months earlier, recognizing that a well-connected agent is worth every penny of his 25 percent commission on a jockey’s earnings. Larry Campbell, the local jockey agent who had been securing Steve’s mounts at River Downs, recommended the one regarded as the best not only in New York but in all of America: Lenny Goodman, a fast-talking Brooklynite who over three decades had built a reputation for smoking expensive cigars, for sporting Brooks Brothers suits and Gucci shoes, and for representing only star race riders at the top of their game. For the past twelve years, he had lined up mounts for Braulio Baeza, the steely-nerved Hall of Famer who had reigned as a five-time national champion but was now battling weight problems and depression. Though agents are allowed to represent two jockeys at a time, one journeyman and one apprentice, Goodman had not deigned to manage a bug boy in a quarter of a century. But with Baeza sidelined by his weight and verging on retirement, Goodman seemed primed to make an exception in pursuit of his next meal ticket.
So the Cauthens flew to upstate New York during Saratoga’s August meeting on a mission to find the high-powered jockey agent who was being recruited by more than a dozen established riders. At the quaint old track, Tex spotted Lenny Goodman smoking his trademark cigar outside the racing secretary’s office and introduced himself. “My son Steve is riding two horses here today,” Tex said. “He’s the leading rider at River Downs, and I was hoping you might look at him and see what you think.”
Goodman unfolded his copy of the Daily Racing Form and studied the bug boy’s two mounts. “These are terrible horses,” he said, returning his gaze to Tex. “He’s got no shot to win. But I’ll take a look at him.”
Watching this unknown rookie finish next to last in both races, Goodman could nevertheless see the talent—the fearlessness, the patience, the balance, the skill in switching the whip. “I like your kid,” he told Tex after the audition. “But we got a problem here. He’s sixteen, a baby. I don’t want some racetrack hustlers latching on to him and getting him broads and telling him he’s the greatest thing since Arcaro. They could ruin him in record time.”
Tex assured Goodman that his levelheaded son exercised as much mature horse sense off the track as he exhibited on it. What’s more, Tex went on, a family friend who trained horses in New York, Chuck Taliaffero, and his wife would welcome Steve into the stability of their home in Floral Park, Long Island, near Belmont. Goodman rolled the cigar around his mouth in contemplation. “Fine,” he said at last. “When you can work out the arrangements and you want to come to New York, just call me.”
Two months later, after Steve finished up his successful steppingstone at Churchill Downs, Tex made the call. “Send him up here,” Goodman responded. “Let’s get started.”
IF STEVE CAUTHEN’S reputation hadn’t preceded him to New York in late November of 1976, the country boy wasted no time making a name for himself in the big city. After losing on his first four mounts the day he made his Aqueduct debut, he threaded a longshot mare named Illiterate through an opening down the stretch to win the featured race by a neck over a favorite ridden by Cordero. From the moment the tote board lit up at $61.20 for a $2 bet, Cauthen exploded on the big time like a supernova. Burning up the track through a December cold snap, the hot apprentice proved he belonged by capturing one in every five races—the best winning percentage of any jockey for Aqueduct’s fall meeting. In one seventeen-race stretch, he brought home twelve winners. Over one two-day span, he became the only jockey ever to win six straight New York races and then captured his first stakes, outriding Cordero and Velasquez on a 19-to-1 longshot that had been struggling in claimers.
No rider had ever made a grander entrance on the center stage known as New York’s “Big Wheel.” In just twenty-one days at The Big A before the track’s 1976 season adjourned for Christmas, Cauthen won an eye-opening 29 races and $375,000 in purses—bringing his year-end total to 240 winners and $1,244,423 (of which the rookie earned the standard 10 percent jockey’s share).
Beyond the races and the money, he had won over the toughest fans in all of sports: the hard-bitten New York railbirds notorious for judging jockeys most critically and most profanely. Before each race, horseplayers at The Big A and at Off-Track Betting parlors throughout the city would scour the Racing Form looking for his asterisked name while asking aloud, “Who’s the kid riding in the next race?” And then minutes later as his mount turned for home and invariably made a well-timed move, they would chorus, “Here comes the kid!”
Before long, that became his nickname: “The Kid.” It may not have been as catchy as “Stevie Wonder” or the other appellations bestowed on him, but it was the nickname that best suited his personality and riding style for its understatement and efficiency. The Kid was rewriting not only the record book but also the lexicon, with vanquished jockeys and horseplayers said to have been “Cauthenized.” While a New York accent could be forgiven for mispronouncing Cauthen as “CAW-thin” rather than the correct “COTH-in,” it was easier for everyone—from the inveterate railbirds to the veteran riders in the jocks’ room—to simply call him by his nickname.
When racing resumed at Aqueduct right after New Year’s, The Kid was no longer just a jockey, just a prodigy, just a sensation. He was now a full-blown phenomenon.
The Kid was larger than life, if not larger than five foot one and ninety-five pounds. Not only had he become the biggest story in the insular world of horse racing, but he was in the process of transcending the sport like no two-legged athlete ever had. A breath of fresh air and athletic purity lifting a Runyonesque pastime out of its smoke-filled shadows, he single-handedly transformed a utilitarian racetrack—all cold steel and concrete dotted with piles of dirty snow—into a golden mecca. Newspaper, magazine, and television reporters flocked to the frozen Queens track hard by JFK Airport to chronicle the storybook legend of the Kentucky farm boy who looked ages younger than his sixteen years but rode like a grizzled old master.
Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of him—from the morning shows to the evening news to The Tonight Show. “I want to get Steve Cauthen on; we’re trying,” Johnny Carson deadpanned in his Tonight Show monologue. “He’s the only jockey in the world you can bet on to win, place, or break out. If he keeps going from the finish line to the winner’s circle as often as he does, the racetracks will have to hire crossing guards.”
Nothing captured that wholesome youthfulness better than The Kid’s first Sports Illustrated cover: a baby-faced boy next door with a sweet smile and clean-cut chestnut hair swept low across his brow, his pale complexion clashing with the splashy green and yellow silks he was wearing. The cover line beside his winning smile said it all: THE CAUTHEN PHENOMENON.
Here was a prodigy like none the sports world had ever seen. Never before had an athlete so very young made such a meteoric rise to dominate an entire professional sport. Old-timers had to reach back fully four decades for a comparison to “Rapid Robert” Feller, who was a seventeen-year-old farm boy when his blinding fastball started setting major-league strikeout records. The Cauthen Phenomenon evoked closer comparisons to Nadia Comaneci, who as a fourteen-year-old pixie just the previous summer led the Romanian gymnastics team to Olympic gold and became history’s youngest all-around champion. No sooner had she dazzled the world with her unprecedented perfect 10 than Cauthen began redefining greatness in another sport favoring diminutive athletes. That he was so slight and frail-looking made his prodigious performance all the more astonishing. And with each succeeding winner he rode, the legend only kept growing.
The Year of The Kid, as 1977 was destined to become, got off to a blazing start with Cauthen winning twenty-three races in one spectacular week, breaking Cordero’s record not only for New York State but also for the entire country. During that record run, Cauthen astoundingly won almost half his starts and came in the money three-quarters of the time. The following Saturday, he won six races in a single afternoon to tie the New York State record shared by Cordero, Velasquez, and Shoemaker—a feat he would become the first jockey ever to repeat. By mid-February, Cauthen already had surpassed the million-dollar mark in purse winnings faster than anyone ever had in a calendar year. As the brutal winter thawed into spring, he was on pace to win 900 races and $6 million by year’s end—incomprehensible numbers that would smash the all-time national records.
The Cauthen Phenomenon could be quantified on the tote board by how his mere presence in the irons transformed a live longshot into what the handicappers call a “false favorite.” With horseplayers betting the odds down on all his mounts, the payouts from his winners were petering out like oil from a field that had been drilled by too many prospectors. But not even that could stop bettors from backing his mounts. In the least predictable of all sports, Cauthen was the closest thing there was to a sure thing. So horseplayers were happy to put their money not on the horse, but rather on the jockey.
That flew in the face of the age-old racetrack axiom, “Jockeys don’t win races—horses do.” Though a smart ride can help a horse almost as much as a flawed one can hurt, a jockey is ultimately only as good as his mount. Even if fully 90 percent of the winning equation comes from the horse, as racetrackers suggest in explaining the jockey’s 10 percent share of the purse, Cauthen’s contribution could still make the difference between finishing first or out of the money. So while Lenny Goodman initially had to hard-sell horsemen to get his little-known client mounts back in the fall, now the agent had his pick of the best horses from trainers who were finding the wunderkind’s weight advantage and talent to be an irresistible combination.
The pace was dizzying both on and off the track. After dominating Aqueduct from Monday through Saturday against the East Coast’s top jockeys (Cordero, Velasquez, et al.), he would hop a flight to California for Sunday showdowns at Santa Anita against the West’s top guns (Shoemaker, Pincay, et al.) and then grab the red-eye back to New York in time for Monday’s first race at The Big A. While proving himself on both coasts in the nation’s two most important winter meetings, he somehow found time to make command performances at racetracks that lured him to points in between with unheard-of appearance fees. While fans had always flocked to tracks to catch fleeting glimpses of every superhorse from Man o’ War to Secretariat, this was the first time they were being drawn expressly to see a two-legged superstar. Everywhere he rode on a “Steve Cauthen Day,” the guest of honor inflated attendance by thousands just as he deflated the odds on his mounts.
All of which made him a transcendent celebrity appealing both to grownups who had never been to a racetrack or placed so much as a $2 Derby bet and to young girls who inundated him with fan mail requesting his photo as if he were a rock star. Other jockeys surely would have relished the kind of attention he was drawing, particularly the ones who’d stride out of the jocks’ room before each race brandishing their whips like swords. But not Cauthen, who’d quietly and calmly file out with all the nonchalance of a kid spilling out of homeroom and heading to his first-period class rather than to the paddock. To him, the swarm of reporters awaiting his arrival in the jocks’ room every morning was an occupational hazard to be tolerated with perfunctory politeness. Shy and humble, he answered questions like he rode races: with no wasted motion or wasted words. Inquiring minds wanted to know everything about him: what he ate (“Whatever I want”), how much he dated girls (“Maybe one a month”), what time he went to bed (9 P.M. in order to get to the track by 6 A.M. for the morning works), what he read (the Racing Form and textbooks for the English and American History correspondence courses he was taking toward his high school diploma).
At the very time a fellow sixteen-year-old named Wayne Gretzky—already the most eagerly anticipated child prodigy in the history of any big-league sport—was still playing junior hockey, The Kid had the teen idol market cornered. He recorded an album titled And Steve Cauthen Sings Too—a rare failure that was widely panned for what People magazine called his “frail, reedy voice,” but that at least proved he was human. More telling, he was entertaining bids from publishers for his authorized biography, which would be authored by respected sportswriter Pete Axthelm and titled—what else?—The Kid. It was on one of his Sunday jaunts to Santa Anita that Cauthen had met Swifty Lazar, the high-powered literary and showbiz agent who represented everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Ernest Hemingway to Richard Nixon. Lazar, who at five foot three was himself a jockey-sized horse owner, wasted no time signing and promoting The Kid. “He’s one of a kind,” raved Lazar. “When will we see another like him? He’s going to tell his life story at sixteen. The endorsement offers pour in daily; they’re in the millions. He’s got dignity, poise, perception. Ninety-five pounds on a horse. On the rail, through horses. Fearless. Good-looking. . . .”
ON MAY 1, 1977, The Kid celebrated his seventeenth birthday—still too young to vote, to drink, even to place a bet on a horse in New York State. But the boy, who had not even begun to shave, was about to grow up in a hurry.
On May 27, the prince of the bug boys was scheduled to graduate from his apprenticeship. Although he had already proved himself by winning his share of stakes races—in which apprentices must forfeit their bug and get no weight advantage over journeyman jockeys—the skeptics maintained that his dominance would disappear along with his five-pound allowance.
The hardboots also warned about another rite of passage that the apprentice had yet to face, what Arcaro considered the final initiation into that exclusive club of genuine race riders. “Let’s not put Steve Cauthen on a pedestal yet,” Arcaro cautioned from the highest perch. “The hazards of racing lie ahead. If he rides long enough, he’s going to have spills, and you never know how he will react. Some jockeys can’t take the physical shocks of injuries. Don’t start telling me how great a jock is until he’s broken his collarbone about five times.”
On May 23, as New York’s Big Wheel turned from the asphalt jungle to the leafy suburbs for the opening day of Belmont Park’s spring meeting, Cauthen would be put to that test. Bay Streak, his mount in the fourth race, suddenly snapped a front leg just as he was turning into the stretch on the lead and went down. The young jockey was thrown to the turf and trampled instantly by Velasquez’s onrushing mount in a gruesome three-horse spill that resulted in both of their horses being destroyed. Barely conscious when he was carted off the grass, Cauthen was hospitalized with a severe concussion, a broken arm, two fractured fingers, some cracked ribs, lacerations requiring twenty-five stitches—and the psychological scar of his first serious spill.
Two days later, a swarm of microphones and cameras surrounded him as he was leaving the hospital’s pediatric wing in a wheelchair, a slouching figure looking tinier than ever with his mother by his side, a cast on his right arm, and stitches and purplish bruises on his boyish face.
“What happened?” one of the reporters pressed him.
“Horse snapped a leg,” he mumbled as he was wheeled out of the hospital lobby, succinct as ever.
Recuperating weeks faster than doctors had ordered, he returned to Belmont Park a month to the day after the spill, raring to show that he hadn’t lost his magic touch or his steely nerve. Immediately met by a media mob even bigger than the indomitable Seattle Slew had drawn there twelve days earlier for his Belmont Stakes triumph and Triple Crown coronation, Cauthen shrugged off any suggestion that he might be gun-shy by cracking, “I’ve been falling on my head since I was two.”
As befit his storybook career, he then got right up on a horse with the cosmically fitting name of Little Miracle—a four-year-old Harbor View homebred who happened to be Affirmed’s half brother, another chestnut son of Won’t Tell You and grandson of Raise a Native. And as so often happens in fairy tales, Cauthen went on to drive Little Miracle through a tight opening between horses in the stretch and win his comeback race going away. Then he calmly handled the horde of cameras, microphones, and notebooks that stalked him into the teeming winner’s circle. When two rival TV crews jockeying for position got into a pitched battle over camera locations, the bemused object of all this attention admonished the combatants. “Be patient,” Cauthen lectured, “it’s a virtue.”
Just three days later, The Kid would come of age once and for all when he lost his bug, which had been extended by the spill’s injuries until after he could resume riding. For the past year, while he was shattering all apprenticeship records with 524 winners and $4.3 million in purse earnings, rivals had complained that giving him a five-pound weight allowance was like “a license to steal,” akin to granting major-league baseball hit king Pete Rose four strikes every at-bat. “Let’s see how it goes,” Cordero challenged, “when he loses his bug, when he’s riding in tough competition all summer, when maybe he goes a few days without a winner.”
Now that the weight allowance was gone, the big test would be whether Cauthen could prove that he didn’t really need the advantage considered to be worth a length in most races, that he could keep beating journeyman jockeys on equal terms, that he could continue getting the quality mounts that trainers had been giving him. Many a hot apprentice before him had flashed like a shooting star, disappearing as fast as his bug. For a cautionary tale, Cauthen had only to look at George Martens, who had outpolled him to win the 1976 Eclipse Award as the nation’s top apprentice but was already sinking into obscurity his first year as a journeyman jockey. Now Cauthen was determined to prove he wouldn’t wind up with the same fate.
In his first start as a full-fledged journeyman jockey, well aware that every trainer would be scrutinizing his every move that day at Belmont, Cauthen rode a claimer named Crab Grass around four horses in the stretch to win going away. Then he proceeded to win the next two races on the program handily with the same patented here-comes-the-kid stretch runs. After Cauthen hopped off his third straight winner, having passed his biggest test and silenced the skeptics, Lenny Goodman could be seen lighting up one of his victory cigars. “Tell all the people who’ve been wondering,” Goodman smirked, “that the kid and I won’t have to look for a new line of work for a while.”
The loss of the bug notwithstanding, Goodman continued to line up classy mounts and The Kid kept winning on them. As an apprentice, Cauthen had won one in every four races. Now, as a journeyman, he was winning once every five times out—and still running away with the jockey standings. No one could deny now that he was indeed a bona fide race rider. More important, it was clear that he would have no trouble continuing to get mounts, continuing to get the classy horses from the top trainers.
Among those trainers lining up for his services was Laz Barrera.
ONE FRIGID MORNING early the previous December, Barrera had been taking care of business as usual in his Belmont Park barn—home of the nation’s top stable led by 1976 Kentucky Derby winner Bold Forbes—when he spotted Lenny Goodman headed in his direction with a big cigar clenched in his teeth and a young boy at his side wearing a camel-hair newsboy cap, looking like two characters out of a Dickens novel. “Oh,” the trainer thought, “some friend of Lenny’s must have sent his little kid to see Bold Forbes.”
Barrera reached out to shake the agent’s hand, smiled, and said benevolently, “I’d be glad to meet this little kid—”
“No,” Goodman quickly corrected him. “This isn’t just somebody’s kid. This is my new rider.”
“Hoo, Lenny, you gonna go to jail for this,” Barrera laughed. “This kid looks like he’s twelve.”
Steve Cauthen was now on the personal radar of the trainer who had burst into national prominence the same year as the boy wonder had. That winter, Barrera began keeping a close eye on Cauthen’s races. The trainer liked what he saw: not just a jockey, but a true horseman. Horses may not have remembered what Cauthen looked like, but they certainly recognized who he was the minute he hopped up on their backs. He was a finesse rider whose cues were so subtle that you couldn’t see them, only their results. He got his mounts to do whatever he wanted without ever getting into a battle. All of which made him Barrera’s kind of rider.
The following May 24, the day Cauthen’s harrowing spill was splashed across banner headlines as the lead story of every sports section in New York, his name also appeared in agate type in the Belmont entries for that afternoon’s fourth race—as the jockey slated to ride Affirmed in the two-year-old’s maiden outing. As fate would have it, Cauthen spent that day hospitalized while Affirmed’s ride went to another apprentice: the colt’s regular exercise rider, Bernie Gonzalez. With Cauthen still convalescing three weeks later, Affirmed’s second ride went to Cordero, a longtime Barrera favorite who had ridden Bold Forbes to glory a year earlier. Cordero would ride Affirmed twice in a row, then Pincay would substitute when the colt was shipped to California for his fourth race. Now that both of those established stars had opted not to ride Affirmed in the Sanford Stakes at Saratoga, Barrera decided to offer the mount to a jockey who might stay in the irons “forever.”
Cauthen, who had by this time been riding regularly for the trainer, made perfect sense. “I know Cauthen is young, but I take a chance,” Barrera said. “It is very important to have the same guy ride your good horse all the time. When you take a rider off to use another, it drives the horse crazy.” When Barrera approached Goodman, the agent didn’t hesitate to agree to the “forever” commitment.
For his part, Cauthen jumped at the opportunity. Not only would he be riding for Barrera, one of the top trainers, but he’d be doing it in a stakes race.
Having conquered Aqueduct and then Belmont, Cauthen was ready to step up to the third spoke of New York State’s Big Wheel: Saratoga, America’s oldest and quaintest racetrack as well as host to racing’s most prestigious meeting. Unlike those other big tracks, Saratoga’s cozy ambience put the fans and jockeys in intimately close contact. The path from the jocks’ room to the paddock took riders right through the crowds, allowing fans to see the jockeys up close and to maybe even get autographs. That tradition posed a unique conundrum for a celebrity like Cauthen, who was besieged by autograph seekers wherever he walked on the hallowed grounds. He would pause to sign as many autographs as he could, but sometimes he would have to keep walking and focus on the ride to come. Despite the efforts of the Pinkerton guard accompanying him through the crush, fans would occasionally grab at him, hang on to his silks, even trip him. He would run this gauntlet before and after up to nine races a day, which was a little like a major-league ballplayer meeting the public and signing autographs between every inning.
Early in Saratoga’s 114th meeting, the teen phenom reached a milestone in the Whitney Stakes, one of America’s most prestigious races for older handicappers, by riding Nearly on Time to an easy front-running win over a field that featured Forego, the three-time reigning Horse of the Year. It was Cauthen’s three hundredth New York winner of 1977, breaking the record that Velasquez had set the previous year over a full twelve months.
A few days later, Cauthen met the horse who would carry him into posterity.
Leading up to the Sanford, Barrera asked Cauthen to ride several works on Affirmed so the jockey could get a feel for the horse. Cauthen liked the way the colt looked and moved. But it didn’t take long for him to get an introduction to Affirmed’s lazy side. The colt would gallop in the morning, but he wasn’t going to do anything he didn’t need to do. He’d just lumber along at a reasonable clip.
On the day of the race, the Wolfsons visited with Affirmed in the morning as was their custom, Patrice giving the colt a big hug and telling him just how wonderful he was. When afternoon came, they walked over to the paddock to watch the colt being saddled. When Barrera boosted Cauthen up, Patrice was struck by how young and unfinished both the colt and the jockey looked. “They look like babies,” she thought.
As Cauthen and Affirmed headed off to the track, the Wolfsons walked up to their box, which was located just behind the one Patrice’s mother had been occupying for years. Part of what made Saratoga so enjoyable for Patrice was the proximity of extended family. It was one place she could share the big moments with her mother, just over the back of a box seat.
At the bell, Affirmed broke alertly with Cauthen but galloped at a relaxed pace, allowing two others—Tilt Up, who had gone off as the co-favorite with Affirmed, and the sprinter Jet Diplomacy—to set the early fractions. Halfway around the turn, Affirmed started to lug out, but Cauthen was able to bring him back in the stretch and then asked him to get serious. The colt perked up and turned it on, flying by the leaders down the middle of the track to win by two and three-quarters lengths. His time for the six furlongs, 1:093/5, was only a fraction off the stakes record. While it wasn’t exactly like being on a rocket ship, Cauthen was impressed. “This is a really neat little horse,” he said to himself.
Pleased with the outcome, Barrera figured he’d finally found his “forever” jockey. He asked Cauthen to ride the colt again the following week, in the Hopeful Stakes.