Bully & the Beasts

Miami's tourist season was a cortege of cold, corpse-grey days. Vacationers who checked in at the expensively cheap seaside palaces in hopes of getting sun with their sand were disappointed. But those who went South for another and more specific purpose were not disappointed: the ponies were running at Hialeah.

Even in Florida there are places where a dollar goes farther, and perhaps even some where it goes faster. But at the race track a man can get his money's worth. Tourist trimming stops at the gate. Whatever the weather, there is the bright sight of the silks rounding the turn and the convert-making thunder of thoroughbreds in a charge for the finish. There is also the base and altogether beautiful possibility of swift financial gain. A few hours spent studying past performances, a few dollars wagered wisely are said by some amateur gerontologists to be as healthful as fresh air and sunshine.

Amid Hialeah's flamingos last week a lot of horseplayers had a fine, healthful time watching, and a few had a fine, even more healthful time winning. When they looked up from their form sheets, they saw some of the finest thoroughbreds in the world. When they stepped up to bet, they could let their money ride with the country's winningest jockey. His name: William John Hartack Jr. If jockeys had their own colors, his would have to be red (for guts) and green (for money).

Three Years Running. As winter racing came alive with the big-stakes races that point the way north toward the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont, Willie Hartack began booting his way into the winner's circle with familiar regularity. Though he got off to an atrocious 1958 start (27 races without a first at Tropical Park), at Hialeah he is back in top form. One afternoon last week, for example, he turned in a superlative performance on Mrs. Allie Ruben's Stephanotis, kept the Irish-bred bay out of traffic trouble in a 16-horse field and won the $35,050 Bougainvillea Handicap by a widening length. Same day he brought in another winner and placed twice, pushing his record to 23 winners (plus 13 seconds, 11 thirds) out of 88 mounts in Hialeah's first 14 days. He is running at last year's pace--and last year's pace, a grand total of 341 firsts, including an alltime record of 43 stakes races, made Willie Hartack the No. 1 U.S. jockey. His horses ran off with a record $3,000,000, and the jockey's 10% pushed Hartack's gross income toward a comfortable $300,000. In only five years of racing, he had managed to top the field for three years running.

In the profession that gives the little man the reins, Jockey Hartack is now the biggest shrimp on the track. A dynamic, nicely proportioned (5 ft. 4 in., 111 lbs.) young man (25), Hartack works daily wonders with his extraordinarily sensitive hands and his uncanny communication with the reflexes of a running horse. His parlay of talents has already paid him with a jockey's dream: a swank new house in Miami Springs (midway between Tropical Park and Hialeah), an air-conditioned Cadillac, a speedboat, a big farm (in West Virginia). The calculating look of his eyes, the short forehead sloping away from a long brown pompadour, the narrow, impatient face and snappy, little-boyish swagger convey the presence of a winner.

Life has treated Hartack at least as well as vice versa, and his only vocal complaint is that a lot of people, including sportswriters, call him Willie, a name he detests; he prefers Bill, and the girls all call him Bill. His followers have a complaint as well. Too many people stake their cash on his talent, so the odds on a Hartack-ridden horse almost always take a dive before the field gets into the starting gate. This even Hartack deplores. "Every time I ride a horse that's a legitimate 4-toi shot," says he without unseemly modesty, "he comes up 8 to 5. Even I can't move a horse up that much."

Most racegoers agree. But thousands of them bet on Willie anyway. Their motivation is simple: Bill Hartack may not always win, but he always tries. From flag-fall to finish, he pumps and slashes. He scratches all over his mount as if it were a case of hives, endlessly intent on keeping the animal's mind on the work at hand. He comes down the stretch as though leading a Hollywood cavalry charge. The whooping and flopping of Hartack's style distresses purists. They call him the least stylish of successful riders in the history of racing. It is a criticism that other riders snort at ("He wins, doesn't he?") and savvy horse trainers shrug away. They know from experience that Willie gets every ounce of run out of his mounts.

Desire Under the Shoe. Even a novice needs no more than one visit to the track to learn that there are other ways for jockeys to win. Such great riders as Eddie Arcaro (TIME, May 17, 1948) and Ted Atkinson, though they may look just as rough as Willie when they are going down the stretch in a scrap for a big purse, sit their mounts with something that could be called style. Even more in contrast are the sensitive, stylish operators of the genus Willie Shoemaker, who win even the close ones without seeming to try.

Shoemaker is the only jockey besides Hartack ever to win more than 400 races in a single year, and he has a statistical edge on Hartack in years on the track, in races won, in friends made. (As if to prove it, Willie the Shoe last week brightened the ninth year of his career by becoming the seventh jockey ever to ride 3,000 winners.) He is a patient, gentle, honest rider who somehow transmits his gentility to his mounts. They seem to run for Shoemaker out of sheer desire not to let him down. Shoemaker's finesse is a private communication with his horse.

The apparent ease of Shoemaker's success sometimes lulls spectators into forgetting that a horse race is basically a contest of wills between man and beast, and ill prepares them for Hartack's method. There is a split between horsemen who think that horses think, and those who rate the horse's intelligence below that of the oyster. But they are all inclined to agree that running a race is often the last thing a thoroughbred wants to do. He will strive to get out of it; on the track, he will try to frustrate the man on his back who is forcing him to work. He will run up on another horse's heels; he will jump shadows; he will lug out; he will take the bit in his teeth and run himself to a fatigued walk long before the finish line. Willie Shoemaker keeps his mount under control with a soft, soothing touch. Willie Hartack terrorizes his horses into trying. He is the leading exponent of the "bully-the-beast" style of riding.

Short Route Home. "The basic question," says prominent Racing Official Frank E. ("Jimmy") Kilroe. whose wise words are law on the country's best tracks, "is whether the horse is going to get his way or the rider is going to get his." Hartack. Kilroe is convinced, is admirably equipped for the contest: "His ego is such that he means to win the race, and no stupid so-and-so of a horse is going to stop him."

The argument between horse and rider, Kilroe is quick to add, is hardly "the whole plot of racing. After that you get into the matter of judgment under pressure. Jockeys have to make tremendously fast decisions in races that are sometimes run in less than a minute. They may have to disregard a trainer's instructions and make up a whole new script for a whole new set of circumstances right after the start of the race."

Most jockeys who get past their apprentice days (one year or 40 wins, whichever is longer) can think and react quickly enough. Hartack is simply quicker. He can spot a hole in the pack with swift precision; he can steer his mount into the clear with chilly skill. His casual and continual flirtation with danger would seem sheer recklessness in a jockey who boasted less success. Given a split-second's chance, Willie heads for the rail. His fetish is a facet of Euclid's rule: the shortest line is the shortest route home.

Fortunately for Willie, his breakneck style has a great ally in modern racing's "film patrol." At every major track, movie cameras record every foot of every race from every angle. Every jockey knows that when the stewards study the pictures he will be called to account for the least hint of fouling. So when Willie calls on his skill and nerve to steal a race by sneaking through on the rail, he moves with extra confidence. "Twenty years ago Willie would have been dead." says a Hartack admirer named Edward G. Burke. A successful horse owner who made his stake as a clubhouse bookmaker back in the days when the law countenanced such activities. Eddie Burke insists: "The film patrol has been the making of boys like Hartack. Now when Willie sees daylight and drives through, he isn't bothered. In days before film patrol, the other boys would have put him through the fence."

Racing Luck. It is probably part of Willie Hartack's racing luck that he came up when he did. It is certainly part of Willie's racing character that he grew up as he did--under the heavy hand of a hard-working coal-mining father.

Just as Willie goes vigorously to the whip to let a horse know who is boss, so William Hartack Sr. wielded a switch with old-fashioned regularity to keep his kids in line. He had three children--Bill Jr., 8, Evelyn, 9, and Maxine. 1-- when his wife Nancy died on Christmas morning of 1940 as the result of an automobile crash. He was far too busy scratching out a marginal living as a Colver. Pa. coal-miner to indulge his family in any subtle systems of discipline. "I used to take the stick a lot to Billy," father Hartack recalls. "I don't believe in letting no kid have his way. He'd do anything I'd tell him; he had to."

Just a year after Mrs. Hartack died, the shack where Billy grew up burned down. William Hartack was finally forced to move his family from Colver to his father's 300-acre farm near Belsano, Pa., where Black Lick Creek runs down the western slope of the Alleghenies. Young Willie did his share of farm chores, took the bus to Black Lick Township school, found time to play the drum in the school band, and got into enough extracurricular trouble to be a regular visitor at the principal's office. "I didn't like girls much then," says he, almost with surprise.

Bill rarely cracked a book outside the classroom, but he graduated at 17 in the upper third of his class. There was nothing to do but hang around the farm until his next birthday, when he would be eligible for a job at Bethlehem Steel. Then, just before the birthday, Bill got a letter from one of his father's friends: How would he like to take advantage of his size and go to work at a race track? Because it seemed as good a way as any to get away from home, Bill boarded a bus for Charles Town, West Va. and a job as exercise boy.

The luck that saved Bill from the steel mills still held when he got to Charles Town. He was hired by Norman ("Junie") Corbin. a shrewd trainer, a wise and patient teacher, and probably the ideal man to bring Bill along. Hawkfaced Junie Corbin needed an exercise boy to work horses, muck out the stables and clean tack, and Bill was glad to get the job.

Hartack's introduction to racing might have unnerved a less cocky boy. His first time on the track, he saw five horses fall in a frightening pileup. "Jocks were lying all over the place," he recalls. Corbin talked fast to assure the boy that such accidents were rare, and a few days later he conned Bill into climbing aboard a horse. First, the beast tried to run away with its helpless rider, and Willie just managed to hang on. Next time, says Corbin, "the horse went down on its knees and Bill slid onto its head. He just sat there, asking, 'What'll I do, Junie? What'll I do now?' It was pretty funny to see."

But "a week after he came, I knew he had it," says Corbin. "I could tell from his nerves and those strong hands. Tell him something once and he'd learn it."

But Corbin could not persuade Willie to try the next step up on the track's social scale. "I don't want to be a jockey," Hartack kept saying. "I just want to be a good exercise boy."

"Junie kept pushin' me to ride," Bill remembers. "But I was a good enough exercise boy, and I was satisfied. Finally Junie said to me: 'If you ever do ride, your father has to okay the contract. So why don't you drive my car to Pennsylvania and have it signed?' Well, I was tired of listening to him, and I wanted a trip home, so I went and got the contract signed. On the way back I stopped at a dairy bar. I was looking at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and all of a sudden I see I'm named to ride Hal's Play the next day.

"Man, you never seen a guy get out so fast. Goddarned, I was scared. I went back to the motel and I banged on the door and I woke Corbin up. I said, 'My God, Junie, I ain't even got any equipment.' He said, 'Just go to sleep.' Next day I told Corbin I was sick. But that didn't do no good. Junie bought me a saddle, boots, pants, all my equipment, and got me a valet."*

Bill rode in the second race. He was so thoroughly scared that he forgot to pull his goggles down, could not get his hands set right on the reins and was last out of the gate. ("All I saw was horses' tails.") He finished last. "You see how silly this is?" he asked Corbin. The trainer simply answered: "You ran fine. He was 65-to-1."

Two days later, on a 50-to-1 shot, Bill finished out of the money once more. But Corbin was satisfied. He said, "All right, you'll ride Nickleby tomorrow, and he'll win." The new jock was still riding scared. "When I got up on Nickleby," says Hartack, "I just sat and posed. I never moved, never hit him or nothing. If I'd 'a hit him I'd have fallen off, I was so frightened. But Nickleby win and paid $18, and I break my maiden [i.e., won his first race]."

Out of the Mines. Once started, Willie Hartack never broke stride. There were only two weeks left until the Waterford meeting ended on Nov. 1, 1952; yet he managed to ride six more winners. The next year Hartack was suddenly riding in full career. He bought a Jaguar, a batch of suits, and he still had enough left over to keep a youthful promise. Although a jockey gets only $20 for merely riding a race (this is pushed up to $50 for winning, $35 for second place and $25 for third), he also usually gets 10% of any purse his mount wins. After several 10% cuts, Hartack called his father and said: "Well, Dad, pack up your shirt. I'm taking you out of the mines. I just bought a farm near Charles Town and you're gonna run it."

No sooner was his father settled on the farm than Willie got another big break. One of the horses trained by Junie Corbin was found to be doped, and according to racing law, the trainer took the rap. Junie needed money badly, and the most valuable property he owned was Hartack's contract. Willie's services were sold to Mrs. Ada L. Rice for $15,000.

Another Country. "Corbin's losing that contract made all the difference," says Hartack. "He was a halfer [i.e., raced mainly at half-mile tracks], and I don't think I would have left him. I had no great ambition for the milers. It was like going to a different country."

But if the surroundings were strange, Jockey Hartack learned his way around quickly enough. He was riding high-bred horses now, and he was really in the money.

When his contract with Mrs. Rice ran out, Hartack saw no need to stay tied down to one stable. He was good enough to risk the life of a freelance, with a broader choice of mounts and the pleasure of hiring out to the highest bidders. After a couple of years of getting up at dawn to work horses and muck out stables, Bill found it nice to lie in bed late, then drive to the track to ride horses hand-picked by his agent.

Boy with the Answers. Hartack ran through six agents, finally settled down with 30-year-old Chick Lang, son of the jockey who won the 1928 Kentucky Derby on Reigh Count. Chunky Chick Jr., an admirable foil for his rider's furious disposition, studies the available horses at the meetings where Hartack rides, matches them against the condition book (an advance schedule of races), and picks probable winners. For 20% of the Hartack earnings, it is Lang's job to get his boy hired to ride winners and still not anger the trainers he has to turn down. It is cited as evidence of Chick's skill that Willie's long losing streak at Tropical Park early last month came while Chick was on vacation and Willie was booking his own rides.

"I've made a study of the boy, as well as the condition book," explains Chick Lang. "I had to. My biggest problem isn't mounts, but Billy's personality. I spend most of my time trailing around after him, apologizing to people he's insulted. He's particularly rude if he hasn't won. He's the most competitive athlete I ever saw. If he doesn't win, he won't talk to anybody."

A typical display of the Hartack temper took place last spring in Louisville the evening after Bill's Derby mount, Calumet's Gen. Duke, was beaten in the Derby Trial. A Los Angeles turf writer approached the jockey at dinner and asked a polite question about the race. "I didn't come here to answer questions," Hartack snarled. "I came to eat. If you want to ask me questions, see me around the barns tomorrow."

Four days later, around the barns and in the clubhouse as well, Willie Hartack was a hero. He had climbed aboard Calumet's second stringer, Iron Liege, and won the Derby when Willie Shoemaker stood up in his stirrups on Gallant Man a few yards from the finish. As the 1957 racing season galloped on, Hartack went on to ride almost every champion horse of the year. When Hialeah opened its current meeting with a parade of eight of last year's top horses, the only compromise that would satisfy the owners was to have exercise boys in the saddles. Hartack had won big stakes on five of the eight racers.

New Bride. Though he enjoys his fame and his riches, Willie Hartack has not yet found how to be comfortable with either. From his $50,000 ranch house, among the garish candy-colored villas of Miami, Bill indulges his passing whims (e.g., water skiing and skindiving). Visitors make him nervous as they leave burning cigarettes on expensive table tops and track sand on lush new carpets, stare at his specially commissioned mural of knights in armor, gawk at the somber black decor of the master bedroom with its giant closet of 40 suits, or at the bookshelves stocked only with Racing Form chart books. Hartack walks around the house like a new bride, emptying ashtrays, positioning furniture, fidgeting over the least speck of dust. He is strictly an afternoon-and-night man, and his nightly dates require almost as much concentration as riding in horse races. It would not do to let things get mixed up, and the very idea of marriage is disturbing. "My God!" says Willie. "After three years in Miami, I know hundreds and hundreds of dames. I might have to give them up. It's a helluva problem."

For Hartack, unlike many of his colleagues, weight is never a problem. He eats outlandish combinations of foods--potato chips, pickles and ice cream, for example; yet he seldom needs to glance at a jockey's sweatbox. Nor does he need much sleep; no matter how late he bids his date good night, he sits up for an hour or two examining the past-performance charts to prepare himself for the next day in the saddle.

Only when he gets to the track, when he slips into the frowsy, unbuttoned atmosphere of the jockey's room, does Willie really relax. Mumbling around a sandwich while he plays a game of pool or knock rummy before a race, Willie almost seems one of the boys. His quick answers are not always cutting; the casual remark is often actually friendly. But warm spontaneity is seen so seldom that even among the other jocks Hartack has no real intimates.

"I'm not going to tell you what I think of him," said Veteran Rider Steve Brooks. "He don't care what we think." From his position as elder statesman of U.S. jockeys, the great Eddie Arcaro is more charitable. "He's a good rider," says Eddie. "There's no doubt of it. His records show that. As to his uneven riding, the only time he does that is in the stretch. Hartack's always been good, and I think he's improved now over what he was. Some people think he's cocky, but he doesn't mean it the way a lot of people interpret it. He don't believe anybody can beat him doing anything. Whatever he does, he does well--particularly ride horses."

Once he gets a leg up on a horse, a look of fierce and scornful concentration takes over Hartack's features. By then he knows that he is a big factor in the calculations of thousands of bettors, and he is constitutionally unable to give them anything less than the best he has. That best is so good that few trainers bother him with pre-race instructions. "He's like Ben Hogan, concentrating shot by shot," says Trainer Tommy Kelly. "He doesn't look right or left or smile. I tell you, Bill'd get the mostest out of any horse. If the horse can't win with him on it, hell, I'd peddle the horse."

Bachelor Athlete. For Hartack, getting the mostest out of a horse starts with the warmup jog to the starting gate. He seems to examine his mount with the seat of his pants and the toes of his boots. "If a horse has a bad leg I change the stride in the warmup so's the horse will put his weight on both legs. Even if the leg hurts, you can't pity him and let him favor it. A horse's ears give you a lot of tips. If they're pinned back on his head, something's bothering him. Maybe the girth might not be set right, and you have to adjust it. Sometimes I make my inside stirrup a notch or two shorter than the other. It makes no difference if I'm comfortable; my object is to finish good, not look good.

"When I get into the gate, it's instinct mainly. I hold both reins in one hand, crossed in my palm. I twist a forefinger around a lock of the horse's mane. I never have a tight rein because the horse would rear up. He has to have a free head, but you have to have that pull on your finger. You have to sense when the gate is going to spring. When I leave the gate, sometimes I take my finger off the horse right away, sometimes not. You keep the horse loose. Then, out of the gate, you gather him up and set the bit in his mouth and settle his stride to the snugness you want."

Once out of the gate, Willie drives into his familiar dash for position and then takes the shortest road home. Says Jimmy Kilroe with professional admiration: "You almost never find Willie in what they call 'the married man's position,' that is, playing it safe on the outside of the pack so he can get home healthy for dinner. As a matter of fact, I think that not enough has been made of the frame of mind of the bachelor athlete. The bachelor is without the normal, settling tendencies. The other boys, the married ones, the homebodies, so to speak, have an awareness of people dependent on them. All Hartack has going for him is an extraordinary pride in his standing, which is usually No. 1."

Willie Hartack has been No. 1 long enough now so that he is sure to have his choice of horses for the big races ahead. Some book will not be made until Hartack's choices are made. Come Derby Day, will he ride Calumet's unbeaten Kentucky Pride, on which he has already won some Florida sprints ? Will he stick with Trainer Moody Jolley's favorite Nadir? Will he risk riding Mrs. Charles U. Bay's fast little filly Idun?

Committing himself on the track too soon would be, in Bachelor Hartack's eyes, as simple-minded a mistake as, say, getting into the "married man's position" at home. "Maybe I'll get married in a year," he says somberly, "but there are three girls I'm thinking of. I haven't met 'em yet, but it's all arranged and I'll meet 'em in the next three months. It's the same as it is with racing. No matter how good a horse you're on, you're always looking for a better one."

*Today Hartack spends more than $5,000 a year on his equipment, including more than 40 pairs of boots, some $1,300 worth of saddle girths, five dozen goggles, 36 pairs of breeches and a dozen saddles.

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