Larry Jones ducked through the gap after handing off Proud Spell and began walking along the apron, through the crowd gathered between the benches and the outside rail. His white cowboy hat gives him away; he signed autographs, shook hands, accepted good wishes from old men, young ladies, teenagers.
The people like him.
Jones found a spot in front of a TV under the box seats to watch the Alabama. A friend on one side, an old exercise rider on the other. A regular guy watching a classic race.
He won it, just as he did the Kentucky Oaks, the King’s Bishop and other big stakes around the country.
On the way out of the track it was the same thing. Autographs and good wishes.
It didn’t feel like this three months ago. Jones suffered a tragedy when Eight Belles broke down in the Kentucky Derby for all to see and debate. PETA protested, Internet chat rooms were atwitter with theories and rumors. Jones stood up and took his punches.
“It’s not easy. Just the tragic loss of such a tremendous animal will send you on your head, spiralling. We’ve taken so much abuse from people thinking we had done things that we hadn’t,” Jones said. “You think back on the Ruffians, the Go For Wands and all these things that have happened. It does happen, as much as we hate to think about it, it does happen in front of the public eye. We’re sorry it happened. It’s been a very eventful three months, a whirl of a rollercoaster ride. It’s been tough; hopefully we’ll endure and move forward.”
The racetrack crowd will see to it. The critics and the poseurs who vilified Jones and our sport don’t go to the track. They don’t know the track. They don’t know Jones. They don’t know the horsemen. They know a moment of easy opportunity, and with press-agent’s eye for the limelight, they took it.
“I know it’s not the people here – that’s the only thing that made me keep going through everything,” Jones said. “The people that really knew horses and had a love for them, they weren’t criticizing. It’s the people that just want to criticize. I found out the thing about PETA – it’s not that they love animals, it’s that they hate people.”
How could you hate Larry Jones? He brought three cowboy hats to Saratoga on this trip. He gallops his own horses. He stops talking to Proud Spell’s owner Brereton Jones in the Trustees’ Room to introduce himself to my 12-year-old nephew, then challenges him to a game of pool when they get back to Fair Hill.
“I think we’ve shown we’re regular people. Maybe I’m not Bob Baffert or Wayne Lukas or somebody put on a pedestal, but people actually feel like I’m maybe one of them,” Jones said. “Believe me, if you knew how I started in this game, you’d be surprised that I’m still here.”
Jones ran track in high school. He was pretty fast. Then he broke his left leg while qualifying for the national finals in flag racing, where you race on horseback, picking up a flag at one end of the arena and bringing it back to the other. He was sending when he should have been pulling and ran through a fence. That ended his track-and-field career. He still walks with a limp, and his left leg bows out like he had a bad day on Boot Hill. Jones was about 20 when he bought his first Thoroughbred. He was proud of the filly, brought her home to show his dad.
“My dad said, ‘What do you got?’ I said, ‘It’s a Thoroughbred.’ He looked at her and said, ‘What are you going to do with her?’ I said, ‘I’m going to race her.’ He walked around her and said, ‘Son, I think you’re going to beat her in a race.’ I said, ‘Come on, Dad.’ ”
Dad was right; she wasn’t much horse. Jones battled through lean times. About 10 years ago, he was about to give it up. He and his two kids were trying to survive on four horses at Ellis Park.
“My kids were getting close enough to grown that when I went to Ellis Park that year, I said, ‘There’s basically three adults and four horses, somebody might need to get an outside job,” Jones recalled. “They said, ‘We’re big enough to do all the grooming and all walking with the four we’ve got, so you go back to galloping horses.’ I’d come by and gallop their horses for them and then gallop outside horses. I was OK with that. Then a guy I used to train for called and said he wanted to claim some horses. That turned it around. We claimed one for $13,000 and made $83,000 from July to the end of the year. That got it all back rolling, got the flow going and the whole family was back working.”
They’re still working.
