Little Winner

Horsemen! Racing Fans! Keep Abreast of Racing News While Driving to Florida. The Morning Telegraph May Be Purchased While En Route.

Wind-chilled East Coast horseplayers hardly needed the Morning Telegraph's solicitous ad to remind them it was time to head south. But what good was the knowledge that the horseplayers' paper would be available at Jake's News Stand, 116 Julia Street, Jacksonville, if all a man had was a pocketful of losing tickets? Raising a stake was getting to be a tough proposition. Too many short-priced horses were galloping home; too many potential long shots were going to the post at low odds just because a jockey named Willie Hartack was perched in the saddle.

At 22, after only three years of racing, Willie is just about the hottest jockey in the saddle. This year he seems to have a hard time losing. Last week, at Maryland's Pimlico track, just before the ponies were shipped south, Willie had already ridden 385 winners. He is an odds-on favorite to wind up the year as the country's leading jockey. More impressive still, he has drawn a bead on the 400 victory mark, a record broken only by Willie Shoemaker (with 485 in 1953), the only jock to outscore Hartack for the last two years.

Third Try. Willie Hartack's success story, once it got started, moved almost as fast as the horses he rides. Born in Ebensburg, Pa. in 1932, Willie graduated from high school too scrawny to work in the coal mines with his father, so skinny that he was even passed over by his draft board. He became a potential Dead End kid, living as high as he could by gambling and shooting craps.

When a friend suggested that the youngster look for work at the race track in Charles Town, W. Va., willing Willie went down and picked up a job cleaning stalls for a small-time owner named Norman Corbin. Before long he was working as an exercise boy, and two years later, in October 1952, Corbin gave him his first mount. On his third try, riding a horse named Nickleby, Willie won his first race. Overnight, Willie became one of the hottest riders on the half-mile "bull rings" around West Virginia and Maryland.

Sneaking Through. The bull rings gave Willie a concentrated course in his new craft. "On small tracks," says Willie, "you learn a lot about manipulating. If you can't sneak through on the rail you're not going to win. You learn to save ground, to steal it; if an opening pops up on the rail, you learn to drop in there quick. A lot of tired old horses run on the bull rings, but you learn you can win on 'em if you can get 'em to duck in or out at the right moment. Another thing: the stewards are not so strict. You can ride the way you want to, pretty much."

Riding the way he wanted to, pretty much, little (5 ft. 4 in., no lbs.) Willie moved up to the big time permanently in the spring of 1954. His rough and ready tactics have already earned him seven suspensions. But Willie is fast learning a proper respect for the film patrol. He claims he can remember the racing characteristics of every horse he has ever ridden (some 1,500 mounts this year alone) and that he knows the tricks of every horse that ever finished a race in front of him. Armed with this knowledge, he is a sharp operator in the saddle. He bounces along over his mounts' withers looking as awkward as an apprentice "bug boy," but he wins.

He wins so often that he admits to banking over $25,000 a year--enough to buy a Charles Town ranch for his father and to indulge his own taste for fast boats, fast cars (he owns a Jaguar and a Cadillac) and sharp clothes. Says he: "If horses were machines, you could learn all about them quick, but they're not. It takes a long time to get to know them. For maybe eight years more I'll still be learning."

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