Chapter 5 A BOOT ON ONE FOOT, A TOE TAG ON THE OTHER
On a Saturday afternoon in July 1938, a half-starved teenager wandered into a bus station in Columbus, Ohio, appearing confused and disoriented. A policeman approached and tried to speak with him, but the boy seemed not to know his own name. In his pockets the officer found $112, a bus ticket for Petersburg, Illinois, and documents that identified him as Thomas Dowell, an obscure local jockey. Seeing that Dowell was in profound distress, the officer took him to the police station, where a police surgeon sat with him and tried to find out what was wrong. Dowell remained mute but appeared deeply shaken. Concerned that the boy might get hurt if released, the doctor sat him down in a holding cell and left to telephone his mother.
While the doctor was gone, Dowell slipped his belt off, coiled it around his neck, and hanged himself.
When word of the suicide made its way to the backstretch, no one seemed surprised. In his brief career Dowell had learned what Red Pollard, George Woolf, and countless other riders had long since known. A jockey’s life was nothing short of appalling. No athletes suffered more for their sport. The jockey lived hard and lean and tended to die young, trampled under the hooves of horses or imploding from the pressures of his vocation. For three years Dowell had known the singular strain of the jockey’s job, torturing his body to keep it at an inhumanly low weight, groveling for mounts in the mornings and enduring punishing violence in the afternoons, waiting in vain for the “big horse” that would bear him from poverty and peril. Dowell was no anomaly, and everyone on the backstretch knew it. His was a life no different from that of almost every other jockey. Under its terrific weight, Dowell had come undone.
They called the scale “the Oracle,” and they lived in slavery to it. In the 1920s and 1930s, the imposts, or weights horses were assigned to carry in races, generally ranged from 83 pounds to 130 or more, depending on the rank of the horse and the importance of the race. A rider could be no more than 5 pounds over the assigned weight or he would be taken off the horse. Some trainers trimmed that leeway down to just a half pound. To make weight in anything but high-class stakes races, jockeys had to keep their weight to no more than 114 pounds. Riders competing in ordinary weekday events needed to whittle themselves down another 5 pounds or so, while those in the lowest echelons of the sport couldn’t weigh much more than 100. The lighter a rider was, the greater the number of horses he could ride. “Some riders,” wrote Eddie Arcaro, “will all but saw their legs off to get within the limit.”
A few riders were naturally tiny enough to make weight without difficulty, and they earned the burning envy of every other jockey. Most of them were young teenagers whose growth spurts lay ahead of them. To ensure that they didn’t waste time and money training and supporting boys who would eventually grow out of their trade, contract trainers checked the foot size of every potential bug boy, since a large foot is a fairly good sign of a coming growth spurt. Many also inspected the height and weight of a potential bug boy’s siblings. Trainer Woody Stephens, who began his racing career as a bug boy in the late 1920s, always felt he got lucky in this respect. In vetting him for the job, his trainer neglected to look at his sister, a local basketball phenom.
Virtually every adult rider, and most of the kids, naturally tended to weigh too much. Cheating, if you did it right, could help a little. One pudgy 140-pound rider earned a place in reinsman legend by fooling a profoundly myopic clerk of scales by skewing the readout to register him at 110. No one is exactly sure how he did it, but it is believed that either he positioned his feet on a nonregistering part of the scale or his valet stuck his whip under his seat and lifted up. He made it through an entire season before someone caught him.
Most jockeys took a more straightforward approach: the radical diet, consisting of six hundred calories a day. Red Pollard went as long as a year eating nothing but eggs. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons confessed that during his riding days a typical dinner consisted of a leaf or two of lettuce, and he would eat them only after placing them on a windowsill to dry the water out of them. Water, because of its weight, was the prime enemy, and jockeys went to absurd lengths to keep it out of their systems. Most drank virtually nothing. A common practice was to have jockeys’ room valets open soda cans by puncturing the top with an ice pick, making it impossible to drink more than a few drops at a time. The sight and sound of water became a torment; Fitzsimmons habitually avoided areas of the barn where horses were being washed because the spectacle of flowing water was agonizing.
But the weight maximums were so low that near fasting and water deprivation weren’t enough. Even what little water and calories the body had taken in had to be eliminated. Many riders were “heavers,” poking their fingers down their throats to vomit up their meals. Others chewed gum to trigger salivation; Tommy Luther could spit off as much as half a pound in a few hours. Then there were the sweating rituals, topped by “road work.” This practice, used by both Red Pollard and George Woolf, involved donning heavy underwear, zipping into a rubber suit, swaddling in hooded winter gear and woolen horse blankets, then running around and around the track, preferably under a blistering summer sun. Stephens remembered seeing jockeys in full road-work attire gathering at a bowling alley, so lathered that sweat spouted from their shoes with each step. After road work, there were Turkish baths, where jockeys congregated for mornings of communal sweating. The desiccation practices of jockeys were lampooned by turf writer Joe H. Palmer in a column written on jockey Abelardo DeLara: “DeLara has to sweat off about two pounds a day to make weight. Last year, by his own estimate, he lost about 600 pounds this way. Since he weighs about 110, it is a mere matter of arithmetic that he would be a bit more than 700 pounds if he hadn’t reduced so regularly.”
Most jockeys ingested every manner of laxative to purge their systems of food and water. Diarrhea became the constant companion of many riders, some of whom became virtuosos of defecation. Helen Luther once watched a rider step on a scale, only to see that he was over his horse’s assigned impost. He shouted to the clerk of scales to hang on, raced to the bathroom, emerged a moment later with his pants still at half mast, and made weight. Such results could be had from a variety of products, including a stomach-turning mix of Epsom salts and water—chased by two fingers of rye to stop the gagging reflex—a plant-derived purgative called jalap, or bottles of a wretched-tasting formula known as Pluto Water.
But the undisputed champ of the purgatives was born in the enterprising mind of a jockey’s masseur named Frank “Frenchy” Hawley. Prowling around the Tijuana jockeys’ room in reassuringly medical-looking Dr. Kildare attire, Frenchy was the self-appointed mad scientist of the racing world. Operating out of a gleaming-white training room, Frenchy stocked every manner of weight-loss facilitator, including electric blankets, infrared lamps, electric light cabinets, baking machines, “violet-rays,” vibrating contraptions, and rubber sleeping bags and sheets. He also dreamed up a particularly foul-smelling recipe for self-parboiling that required riders to steep for up to thirty-five minutes (fewer if they became dizzy) in piping-hot water mixed with three to five pounds of Epsom salts, one quart of white vinegar, two ounces of household ammonia, and a mystery lather he called Hawley’s Cream. He kept careful records of the weight he had stripped from riders. By 1945, it totaled 12,860 pounds—more than six tons.
One of Frenchy’s cardinal rules of reducing was to “keep the contents of the bowels moving down and out steadily and regularly.” To devise a mix that would bring this about, he tinkered around with God knows what until he stumbled upon a home brew that delivered a ferocious kick. The caustic laxative worked so well that Hawley marketed it commercially under the disarmingly innocuous name Slim Jim. Former jockey Bill Buck remembered it with a shiver: “It’d
