Lord of the Reins
Horse racing was once dead in Washington State. The career of top jockey Ricky Frazier was once dead too. Hell, there was a time when Ricky Frazier was nearly dead. A story of courage, cunning, and redemption on the back of a thoroughbred.
FATHER, BLESS THESE JOCKEYS. The track chaplain prays with eyes shut so tight his brow ripples into little mounds. Father, bless the horses. He worries a baseball cap in his hands. They aren’t big hands, and he’s not a particularly large man, but the track chaplain is a giant among his acolytes: Hawkish, dark-eyed Joe Crispin, five foot four, 110 pounds, up from Vancouver, Washington, bows his head. Broad-faced Gary Baze, 52 years old, back from his third retirement, kneels on one knee. Bless this race. Twenty minutes before start, every rider in the jockey kitchen and rec room dressed in white—white shirt, white knickers, barefoot. Bald Juan Gutierrez, who began riding horses on his abuelo’s ranch outside Mexico City when he was eight. Tiny Kevin Radke, beset with injuries for the past four seasons—broken wrist, broken ribs. Bless their bones.
Next to Radke stands the best rider of them all: Ricky Frazier, who they say can look three, four yards into the future and see a horse’s next move before the animal’s ancient instincts tell it what to do. Ricky Frazier, 43, practically born in a backstretch barn in Arkansas, the son of a jockey. He keeps his head bowed. Father, bless them all.
Ten minutes later Frazier’s the sole jockey in the rec room. He looks out the window toward the paddock as his fellow riders, now in brightly colored silks, take their mounts for the first race; he’s not scheduled to ride until the second. On the rec room TV, the same scene: live feed of the jockeys climbing atop sinewy thoroughbreds and steering them onto the dirt track before a crowd of several thousand. The stands crawl with fans squinting under an unforgiving sun—a rare 90-degree day at Emerald Downs in Auburn in the middle of May. Kids on dads’ shoulders, collegians on dates, teen girls dolled like rodeo queens, and, most notably, vaqueros, off-duty Mexican stable hands in sharp-angled cowboy hats and alligator-skin boots, cellphones holstered on their leather belts—all eyes on the one-mile oval that rings a soggy, duck-filled marsh. A faded Mount Rainier looms at the south end of the track like a ghost. Deeper inside the $83 million, six-story complex, flabby men belching Coors Light huddle around monitors, clench betting tickets, and cheer horses in telecast races from around the country—“C’mon motherfucker, yeah baby, c’mon!”
Studying the TV in the jockey room, Frazier watches his fellow riders ease their steeds to the starting gate. Whether he’s in a race or not, he plays the same game: Read the horses and try to predict the outcome. His head holds the secrets of thousands of contests won and lost—the knowledge of what he did right, what went deadly wrong. His eyes, the color of Lake Washington on a -seldom-seen sunny day, stare through the screen. Twenty-eight years of races, and he remembers them all. Including that very first one.
Published: August 2008
