Native Dancer (19 page)

Moreno had been introduced to racing a decade earlier while sweeping the floor at his father’s barbershop in Chicago; there
was a lot of racing talk in the shop, and one customer was a horseman who brought Moreno to the track and tutored him as a
rider. Moreno wound up in Northern California, rode his first winner at the Alameda County Fair, and started working his way
up the ladder. He had soft hands and steady nerves and had experienced his share of success, but he was still unknown in the
East and hardly at the top of the game. Before signing with Cain Hoy and coming to Kentucky in early April, he had been struggling
for mounts at Tanforan, a smaller track in San Bruno, California. In Kentucky, he and his wife and young son were staying
at a tourist camp, a crude cabin hostelry outside Louisville.

Hayward hadn’t purchased his contract without reason, though: Calumet trainer Jimmy Jones had seen enough in Moreno to give
him the first call on Calumet’s horses at Hollywood Park the previous summer. Moreno rode Two Lea to victory in the Hollywood
Park Gold Cup, a $100,000 race, and delivered a handful of other stakes wins. He eventually lost Calumet’s first call in California
when Eddie Arcaro chose to ride at Santa Anita over the winter of 1953, but Hayward had seen enough to offer him a contract.

Even if they fared well in the Derby Trial, however, Moreno and Dark Star were destined to be the longest of Derby shots along
with Spy Defense, winner of four allowance races in fourteen starts; Curragh King, a former claimer who had won the Arkansas
Derby in a major surprise; and Ace Destroyer, a colt who had finished out of the money in six straight starts. Dark Star belonged
in that company, a fringe contender blotted out by the Dancer’s luminous presence. Most horsemen agreed that if the sire Royal
Gem II was going to leave a mark on the Derby with his first crop of horses eligible for the race, it would be with the stretch-running
Royal Bay Gem. Dark Star? Even with Guggenheim’s name working for him, the lightly raced colt with an unknown jockey and less
than $30,000 in career earnings was as invisible as a springtime breeze.

R
acing fans in New York who stayed home and watched NBC’s national telecast of the Wood Memorial knew what was coming when
broadcaster Win Elliott pulled Eric Guerin aside for an interview after the race. “First of all,” Guerin said to Elliott,
“I’ve got to say hi to my son at home.” The jockey then turned, looked at the camera, waved, and shouted, “Hi, Ronnie!”

He had begun his TV interviews with greetings to his son since local coverage of racing had started in New York in the late
1940s. “It was the early days of TV and [the greetings] had quite an impact on people,” Carey Winfrey, Bill’s son, recalled.
“Eric became well known for it I used to nag my father about it. I’d say, ‘Eric says hello to his son; what can’t you say
hi to me?’ ”

Now, on successive Saturdays, during NBC’s coverage of the Wood and Gotham, Guerin, twenty-nine, had introduced the custom
to millions of viewers across the country. His rise from a meager upbringing in a sparse Cajun backwater had moved slowly,
if steadily, for years, but it was accelerating dizzily now. Improbably, a blacksmith’s son with a ninth-grade education was
linked with a Vanderbilt and America’s most popular horse, at the forefront of the public’s sports awareness.

Guerin was already living far beyond the most fortunate circumstances he could have imagined as a boy growing up in the 1930s
in Maringouin, Louisiana, sixty miles northwest of New Orleans. He, his wife, Gloria, a dark-haired New Orleans native, and
Ronnie, aged seven, lived in a large home near the Jamaica Racetrack, with their basement fashioned after the dance floor
of their favorite nightspot, the Copacabana in Manhattan. Guerin shared tables with famous athletes and entertainers and had
made enough money to maintain a high lifestyle and buy a home for his parents in New Orleans.

Now he had the keys to the mightiest of equine rides, an undefeated Kentucky Derby favorite, raising his circumstances even
higher. If Eddie Arcaro was the face of racing in America, Guerin, for the moment, was a close second, his smiling face and
Cajun twang burnished into the minds of millions of fans watching at home on TV. He was the jockey who rode Native Dancer
and never forgot his son, not even in the winner’s circle.

The scrutiny was intense, but Guerin had deftly handled such pressure since his first winning rides in the early forties.
Like Teddy Atkinson, Conn McCreary, and the rest of the top jockeys other than Arcaro, he was cast in the Master’s shadow
and relegated to a second tier; but he was successful in his own right and possessed an assortment of winning qualities. With
calm and consistency, Guerin excelled at breaking quickly from the starting gate, judging pace, and avoiding trouble. “He
took a very mathematical approach, knew where he was going all the time and didn’t take a lot of crazy chances,” Arcaro said
years later.

Then there was his greatest attribute, unseen by the public. “The guy just absolutely loved horses, lived and breathed them;
and loved being around them,” recalled Frank Curry, Guerin’s nephew, years later. His affection for the animals enabled him
to get more out of skittish fillies and two-year-olds than other jockeys. “He was maybe the best filly rider there ever was,”
trainer Allen Jerkens recalled. “He liked horses, fillies especially. Some jockeys would lose patience with them, but Eric
never did. He was a levelheaded, natural jock with a great affinity for horses, and that served him well.”

Relationships between jockeys, trainers, and owners could be fragile and rife with distrust, but Winfrey and Vanderbilt were
comfortable with Guerin. Unlike some jockeys, he was dependable on and off the track, courteous and professional in his dealings,
and never rash; he had many friends and few enemies. And although he was easygoing, there was no doubting his will: he had
come back from several horrific accidents early in his career and had struggled constantly with his weight, yet here he was,
at the top of the game. He had won numerous races on Bed o’ Roses, Next Move, Loser Weeper, and others in recent years, and
with those memories still fresh as the 1953 Kentucky Derby neared, Winfrey and Vanderbilt were brimming with confidence in
their jockey.

He wasn’t the first jockey to come out of Louisiana’s bayou country; a generation of hard-driving boys named Hebert, Martin,
Duhon, Dubois, and Leblanc had carved out the pipeline before him. They were descendants of the French Canadians who had migrated
to Louisiana after the British exiled them from Acadia, near Nova Scotia, in the 1750s, and these Acadians—nicknamed Cajuns—developed
unerring balance while navigating narrow bayous in pirogue canoes twelve inches wide and ten feet long. Decades later, that
exceptional balance gave Cajun jockeys an advantage, or so the story went.

The prototypical Cajun rider started at the bawdy, unlicensed “bush tracks” around Lafayette, where there was weekend racing
for raucous fans who wanted to drink, gamble, and see fearless boys ride to win at any cost, even tying rocks and cans to
their quarter horses to “make weight” and shock the animals into running. Guerin never rode at such a track: Maringouin was
forty miles from Lafayette, and his family had no car to get him there. “We were poor as hell,” said Charles Ray Leblanc,
who was Guerin’s first cousin and, like Guerin, grew up in Maringouin and became a jockey.

Maringouin was little more than a main street and a few side streets, a church, an oil company office, and a few houses; only
the wealthy had cars, and the rest depended on horses and wagons for transportation, even in the 1930s. “It was pretty unsophisticated;
when the little plane carrying the mail flew over, we all ran outside to look,” Leblanc said. The weather was stiflingly hot
and humid in the summer, and people worked hard for small wages and hunted possum and squirrel on weekends. “Eric’s father
would come home with a catch and his mom would cook it up for dinner,” said Frank Curry, who was the eldest son of Guerin’s
sister.

The Leblancs were sharecroppers; the family rented a small farm and gave a share of their crops and proceeds to a landlord.
Guerin’s father, Oliver, worked as a blacksmith at a farm machinery shop he owned with a partner, and moved his wife and three
children from house to house while carving out a living. Oliver never shod horses, and his son Eric didn’t ride much. “I would
ride a horse to the store for my mother, but Eric didn’t live on a farm and didn’t do that kind of stuff,” said Leblanc, who
was three years younger than his cousin.

Leblanc’s older brother, Norman, served as the family’s instrument of change. He became a jockey at a track in nearby Plaquemine
and went on to ride in New Orleans and elsewhere, his career peaking with a victory in a stakes race at Saratoga. His travels
and tales from the racetrack sounded impossibly exciting to his brothers and cousins back in Maringouin, who knew of little
beyond their rural environs. By 1935, Norman had retired and become a trainer, and, one by one, began bringing his kinfolk
to the track as jockeys. His brother Hubert joined him in New Orleans, spent two years learning to ride, and went out on his
own, later winning the Widener Handicap and other races. Another brother, Euclid, followed Hubert and developed into a highly
successful rider, the best of the Leblanc brothers.

But the best in the extended family was Guerin, who dropped out of school at age fourteen, in 1938, and joined Norman in New
Orleans, intent on immersing himself in racing and learning to ride. For two years, he mucked stalls, exercised horses, and
kept his eyes and ears open. Norman then sold his contract to Fred Wyse, a mannerly Texas businessman who operated a stable
and took the sixteen-year-old Guerin around the country for a year, giving him mounts and breaking him in as a rider. The
older man’s influence was invaluable; Guerin’s respectful behavior was attractive to clients throughout his career. “Fred
Wyse was like a father to me; I learned more from him in one year than most people learn in 10, and I don’t mean just about
horses,” Guerin told the
Blood-Horse
in a 1975 interview.

He finished ninth in the first race of his career at Florida’s Tropical Park on March 12, 1941, then made thirty more starts
for Wyse before winning for the first time on a filly named Sweet Shop at Boston’s Narragansett Park on August 29. Less than
a month later, he fractured his skull and collarbone in a fall at Narragansett and was in the hospital for a month. He came
back strong, winning a riding title back home at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, with the help of the apprentice’s bug (weight
advantage). When Wyse decided to get out of racing, he sold Guerin’s contract to Joe W. Brown, a wealthy New Orleans sportsman
and bookmaker who operated a top stable.

Riding for Brown and trainer Johnny Theall at age seventeen, Guerin was flying high—but not for long. He was leading the nation
in wins in the summer of 1942 when he took a hard fall at Chicago’s Washington Park that left him unconscious for twelve hours
and out of action for six weeks with a concussion. His year with the apprentice’s bug [weight allowance] was up when he returned,
and the slump that often befalls young jockeys at that point in their careers hit Guerin hard. He slumped miserably in 1943,
ending the year with yet another fall that resulted in a broken shoulder, a concussion, and seven weeks in the hospital. Then
he tried, without success, to establish himself in New York in 1944 and 1945, attracting attention only as one of the riders
in a rare triple dead heat at Aqueduct.

“It was a tough time to be a jockey,” Clem Florio recalled. “The money was bad. A couple of guys had contracts or understandings
that they would get 10 percent, and everyone else had to fight for everything. There was no obligation. You might get forty
bucks if you won, and if you didn’t win, you got blamed. They were paying guys off in the dark. Jockeys were the most underpaid,
undervalued guys in the business. That’s when they had big fields, with guys all hungry, trying to get every hole. Sometimes
guys would cook something up and split the money. It’s surprising there wasn’t more larceny.”

Guerin had talent, but he was over his head competing at age nineteen against Arcaro, McCreary, George Woolf, and others.
The older jockeys took his mounts and took advantage of him before the advent of the film patrol, elbowing him and cutting
him off. “A lot of things happened that officials didn’t see; the film patrol changed everything,” said Charles Ray Leblanc,
who followed Guerin’s career path, breaking in with Norman in 1941 and ultimately riding for Joe W. Brown.

Still, Guerin’s biggest problem came from within as he struggled to establish himself. Tall for a jockey at five foot four,
he gained weight easily and had to go to extremes to get the extra pounds off. He jogged in the heat, spent hours in jockeys’
room “hot boxes,” read books in his car with the windows rolled up, and when all else failed, stuck his finger down his throat.
“Eric did that a lot,” Leblanc said. His normal weight was close to 130 pounds, but he raced at 115, and sometimes even less.