Word: hartack
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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...
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...
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...
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...