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Article and narration by Barry Bearak

Images by Chang W. Lee Albany, California That afternoon, things were going Russell Baze’s way. The jockey won the first three races. “It looks like an easy game today,” he said after dismounting in the third.

He hummed as he walked,

nothing particularly tuneful,

just an intonation of joy. But he finished out of the

money in the fourth and

lost by a head in the fifth.

The very next race was the

one most anticipated. Baze was aboard a dark brown filly. The horse settled into the starting gate just as she should, her head straight and her feet well-set. SCROLL TO CONTINUE

Then the door burst open, and Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in American history, yelled “yaaah” as loud as he could. The Jockey











The Jockey

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Russell Baze, the ironman of thoroughbred racing — Lou Gehrig on a saddle — was about to ride in his 50,000th start, an astonishing milestone that by happenstance put him aboard an undistinguished filly. The horse, Finish Rich in Nyc, had not won in nearly a year. “She’s not the one I would have picked for the occasion,” the jockey remarked dryly.

At 55, Baze is near the outside edge of even a durable rider’s working life span. People credit this longevity to his avoidance of serious injury, which may seem an odd thing to say of a man who has broken his cervical spine, pelvis, tailbone and collarbone and suffered multiple compression fractures in his back and neck. But jockeys often sustain far worse, and Baze, having “hit the ground” well over 100 times, believes he has the benefit of an uncommonly resilient body and a conscientious guardian angel.

His back was hurting that afternoon. So was his neck, the pain outmaneuvering the anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants he takes each day. Certain aches have dogged him for 35 years, and he receives periodic injections of cortisone to pacify the discomfort. These lingering afflictions are accepted by him as the necessary dues for a fulfilling career, for he says a life in horse racing has been worth every throb and spasm. “If everybody was as happy with their job as I am with mine, it’d be a great world.”

It was a chilly Friday in winter at Golden Gate Fields, a down-on-its-luck racetrack perched on a marvelous nugget of real estate, a rocky outcropping that juts into the East Bay near San Francisco. But neither the view nor the horses are much of a draw these days. “The area has just forgotten about us here,” Joe Morris, who ran the place, wanly put it. Only a skeleton crew of fans was there. Tumbleweed could have blown through the grandstands.

A familiar sight: Russell Baze winning at Golden Gate Fields.

Nevertheless, a little ceremony had been planned, and Baze, who is remarkably humble, was uncomfortable with the fuss. “It’s just another day at the office,” he said dismissively with a shrug of his compact shoulders.

Think of it, though: 50,000 races, more than any other American jockey. The combined distance adds up to about 348,000 furlongs, or 43,500 miles, nearly twice the circumference of the earth. Just watching the wire-to-wire replays would require a nonstop marathon of 48 days.

Of course, winning races, not merely riding in them, is the more important thing, and Baze already held the American record in that too: 11,839, at the time.

He reached 12,000 on July 7 — 2,470 more than the previous leader, the great Laffit Pincay Jr., who in 1999 surpassed the even-greater Bill Shoemaker. The accruing win total is attentively updated above the racetrack’s tote board in huge black numerals on a yellow background, up there between the signs for Avión Tequila and Coors Light.

And yet who has heard of Russell Baze?

Baze rides almost exclusively in Northern California, the minor leagues in the world of horse racing.

Avid horseplayers would recognize the name but otherwise America’s winningest jockey is virtually unknown. This relative obscurity largely results from a career choice he made two decades ago, attempting, as so many people do, to find some happy medium between ambition and contentment. Baze rides almost exclusively in Northern California, where he is a decidedly local racetrack luminary — “Russell the Muscle” — particular to the region like the cable cars of the city and the vineyards of Napa.

There is a hierarchy within horse racing. At the top are places like Belmont in New York, Santa Anita near Los Angeles and Gulfstream near Miami. The purses are bigger, the mounts are better. San Francisco, for all its other charms, is a horse racing also-ran. It is the minor leagues.

And yet the minors can be a congenial place for a gifted jockey who likes to ride favorites and win and win and win. Nearly all the trainers at Golden Gate Fields want Russell Baze aboard their horses, if they can manage to get him.

On the day he was to ride No. 50,000, he was entered in six races. In the first five, the morning line had his horses at 1-1, 7-5, 2-1, 8-5 and 2-1: for Baze a typical rollout of extremely short odds. Among the field of plodders in the sixth, the mediocre filly Finish Rich in Nyc was actually the favorite at 7-5.

Baze’s wife, Tami, had asked if he wanted her to be there and he said no. She usually gets up around 5 a.m. and fries him a strip of bacon or a cocktail weenie, which he follows with a few swallows of fruit punch. That and six or seven peanut M&M’s are ordinarily all he eats until he sits down for a full dinner. “It’s a lot easier to stay thin when your livelihood depends on it,” he said.

But Tami slept in that day, and Baze ate an Oreo instead, washing down the cookie and some vitamins with those restrained mouthfuls of punch. He then walked Pearl, the family dog, and left home in his 2009 Jaguar XK for the 45-minute drive to the track, taking a route that went past the San Francisco airport and over the Bay Bridge. He listened to talk radio and occasionally squeezed a tennis ball to loosen up the joints in his arthritic right hand.

Baze arrived at Golden Gate Fields at 6:30, sitting for a few moments in the small restaurant at the entrance to the stables and, along with friends, doing the Jumble in the newspaper. (“Sea the World” was the scrambled answer.) He exercised some horses and sat in the whirlpool, perspiring off a pound to get down to his riding weight of 115. TVG Network, a horse racing channel, wanted to interview him, but the timing interfered with his nap.

That’s the morning ritual: work out horses, cut weight, nap and then read for a while, maybe a Jack Reacher novel or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Finally, he watches replays involving the horses he is about to ride, trying for a sort of precognition of how each race will go, which mounts will vie for the early lead and which will hang back and for how long.

“Finish Rich in Nyc, she’s certainly not the best horse I’ll be on, no sir,” Baze said, lying in his tiny cubicle in the jockey’s room, his iPad balanced on his chest. As usual, he sounded as likable and down-home as Andy of Mayberry. “The horse has enough want-to for one little move and that’s it.”

The jockeys’ hangout at Golden Gate is a two-story building at the end of the grandstand. It is a crowded space, smelling of deodorant and well-earned sweat. Each jockey has a cubicle with adjacent shelves and cubbyholes. Baze’s space is unusual for its library of a few dozen books. Racing silks dangle from hangers. Black boots, sprayed with Pledge and buffed to a shine, are lined up in neat rows. Riders go in and out of “the box,” the steam room where they melt away pounds. Baze shaved, brushed his teeth, inserted some eye drops.

He is 5 feet 4 inches and rock solid, especially in his arms and legs. He needs to be. Thoroughbreds weigh about 1,200 pounds and circle the track at 40 miles an hour. Jockeys do not sit on a horse but rather stoop above it, perched like hood ornaments on a shimmying, lurching vehicle. Their entire weight is balanced with toeholds on thin metal stirrups. Their fingers clutch the reins and a handful of mane. Each race demands exhausting effort.

Horse racing may keep Baze physically fit, but the years have chiseled the customary wrinkles in an older man’s face. His forehead has annexed new territory as his hair has thinned. It is not hard to believe he is a grandfather.

“Hey Old Man, you ready for your big day?” Frank Alvarado, one of the other riders, said to him with a smile. “We love you, but it’s time to retire.”

For now, however, quitting is unthinkable. Yes, there is the continuing risk of a devastating injury. Paralysis, concussions and calcified limbs are among the hazards, as is death. But Baze is too competitive to give up a sport he is so good at, and he is riding as well as ever.

“I forget who said this: there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse,” he remarked one morning in a moment of reflection. “They’re such nice animals, big and powerful. They have nice soft noses.”

He is an adrenaline addict, and horse racing satisfies the craving. “You never lose the thrill of having that gate come open and the feeling of that horse surging up beneath you,” he said.



Video compiled from two races.







Baze was the winner in one of the two races.



He is an adrenaline addict, and horse racing satisfies the craving. “You never lose the thrill of having that gate come open and the feeling of that horse surging up beneath you,” he said. “It feels like you’re on top of one big muscle. It’s exhilarating. You’re in command of all that power.”

The challenge then is to outwit the other riders. “It’s like a chess game where you need to see the moves ahead. You can influence what the others do. If a guy is going too slow, you let your horse creep up on them and give them a little goose, get them started a little sooner than they’d want.”

Or you can squeeze an opposing horse to the inside or push it to the outside. “The race is constantly changing. It helps that time slows down for me. The horses don’t seem to be going all that fast. I can usually predict what the other jockeys will do. I know how to react. I’ve done this so many times.”

Horses have a small gas tank and there is no fuel gauge: “But you know how fast you’ve gone and, if you have any sense of pace, you know how much horse you’ve used up. You can feel it in your hands. Sometimes you can hear it in their respiration. Hopefully, they’re not lying to you. Some make you feel like you’ve got a ton of horse left and then you turn for home and pfft, nothing, the dirty lying son of a gun.” But a good jockey usually knows.

And then comes the homestretch. “It’s really fun to come from behind. When you’re in the lead, you’ve got the target on your back. But when you come from behind, you’re the one doing the target practice. It’s fun to wheel out and pass everyone. It’s even more fun to get through on the rail, because you are exploiting a flaw in somebody else’s plan and you feel extra smart.”

Baze is well paid for this work but thinks if he had to, he would do it for free. Who wouldn’t, he wondered. Wouldn’t anyone pay a fortune to do it just once?

Winning a horse race is that rapturous. And it is just another day at the office.