Word: ridings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...