FINALIST, PROFILES PORTFOLIO, 2011 GREEN EYESHADE AWARDS
HOT SPRINGS — It was the year he turned 40, the year he won his biggest race, the year he shattered his right wrist and the year he stopped “flipping.”
Today, Calvin Borel, the uneducated Cajun jockey with the joie de vivre of a fat Frenchman and the sense of a good horse, is at the very top of his sport and headed for the race of his life. But the year he turned the corner nationally was 2006.
That was the year of Barbaro, that beautiful coiled colt who made the other horses at Churchill Downs look like Lipizzaners. At Pimlico racetrack, though, he pulled up before the first turn. For a brief, stunning moment, we saw him dancing sideways — the great Barbaro stuck in a sick country line dance, and the rest of the field lunging forward.
The sport mourned because a shattered leg for a horse is worse than a shattered back for a human.The sport of kings had lost its Galahad.
Borel was limping along as well, winning races but missing out on Grade I stakes winners.
Between 1993 and 2003, the jockey had appeared in four Kentucky Derbies, never finishing better than eighth. He had won lots of nice purses, many for owner John Franks. When Franks died in 2003, Borel had to regroup and prove himself to other owners and trainers who already had their first-call jockeys.
Here was a rider who beat Pat Day for the jockey title at Oaklawn Park in 1995 after Day had won 12 straight. Here was a jockey who guided 108-to-1 longshot Rockamundo to the winner’s circle in the 1993 Arkansas Derby, a veteran with more than 4,000 career wins. Still, from 2002 through 2005, he struggled to win Grade I races.
But in 2006 trainer Ron Moquett gave him a shot on an aptly named colt, Seek Gold, and Borel won the Stephen Foster and a $750,000 purse.That same year, he rode Street Sense to victory in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, which clinched the 2-year-old championship for the horse and made him the early favorite for the 2007 Kentucky Derby.
Then, on Thanksgiving Day, just after his 40th birthday, a horse buckled on the turf course at Churchill Downs and the smiling Borel was launched into the infield, where his right arm shattered like a test tube. He retains a hazy image of his valet lifting his arm off the ground, his hand swinging as if jointed above the wrist.
During a week-long hospital stay after the installation of a steel plate and eight pins, his attending physician exclaimed, “This man is severely underweight.”
His fiancee, Lisa Funk, felt almost embarrassed for the doctor. “Yeah, he’s bulimic.”
Known among jockeys as “heaving” or “flipping,” the desperation diet tactic had kept the 5-foot-4-inch athlete at an acceptable 112-pound riding weight, several pounds beneath a comfortable threshold.
“And I would always tell [Lisa] that that was my worst pet peeve, was freakin’ heaving. I hated it. Twenty years. It was so tiring. I was just doing it one time a day, I swear to God, but I knew I’d have to go home and eat and have to heave, ugh-h-h.”
The doctor put him on a strict diet that he took to, and the jockey continued his 90-minute workouts in “the hot box,” lifting weights in a sweat suit, wherein he can lose as much as 4 or 5 pounds in a couple of hours.
He was happy, strong, feisty.
The same was being said of a bay filly born earlier in 2006, the only surviving offspring of her dam, and named for its owner’s granddaughter, Rachel Alexandra.
STREET SENSE
“I’m just trying to find me another Derby horse,” Borel says, sitting slack in a leather armchair, fiddling with a Marlboro Light, his “Rachel Alexandra” ball cap backlit by the sun’s reflection off Lake Hamilton.
During the Oaklawn season, he and fellow jockey Joe Johnson share a modest ranch house in Hot Springs. The two fish for crappie in their off-hours. When asked where in the house the obsessively tidy Borel cleans the most, Johnson says, “the whole thing … and his car, too.”
In 2007, having ridden Street Sense to a Breeders’ Cup Juvenile victory 10 lengths ahead of the runner up, his colt was the slight favorite in the Derby. He calmly rode him out of the gate to the penultimate position, where he held him for most of the race.
Then he tightened the reins and nudged the bit, and the two surged along the rail like hot motor oil down a dipstick. By the 16th pole Borel was pumping his fist in the air, twisting his right eye skyward, the horse’s face mud caked and startled, and what happened next did more to make Borel a celebrity than his brilliant ride.
He bawled.
He cried during the postrace interview. He cried in the winner’s circle. He cried lifting the trophy. He talked about the death of his father three years earlier, and cried some more, and when he got his roses he tossed one into the air.
“A year after Barbaro, tears of joy. Months after enduring death, the racing game again has life,” wrote columnist Bill Plaschke. “Calvin Borel is horse racing’s new voice, with a thick Cajun accent, an eighth-grade education and little concern for anything not wearing a saddle.”
An “eighth-grade education.” Every profile is sure to mention the fact, but the truth is worse still: Borel is illiterate. He can put his name to a commemorative photo, but asked to add the note To Jennifer Cook, he hands the photo to his agent, Jerry Hissam, to finish. Asked to spell the name of his first pony, “Charlie,” he looks to his mate, Johnson.
His fiancee bought a third-grade reader and audio cassette tapes, and they’ve been working on his literacy for years, Borel says.
“No, I knew what I wanted to do, so that’s why I never let that really bother me. I can’t read and write. Are you not going to like me because I can’t read or write?”
The son of a French-speaking sugarcane farmer and a bilingual but uneducated woman, Borel heard very little English before school, and as a result he quickly fell behind his classmates. By third grade, his teacher offered to let him pick up pine cones in the schoolyard instead of taking lessons. He did it.
“Hell, yeah. I’d have rather been in the barn. Oh, I hated school every year. How I got to eighth grade, I didn’t know.”
Borel sat upon his first horse when he was 2. Nicknamed “Boo-Boo” because his conception was unplanned (and more than a decade after the couple’s fourth child), he grew up in an insular clan, one that valued racing horses above everything.
“It was almost like they were from central casting for a Cajun racing family,” says Ed McNamara, author of Cajun Racing: From the Bush Tracks to the Triple Crown. “They were farm people, didn’t have much money, [and] horses were their pastime. Also their way out.”
Calvin was his father’s pride from those first match races at the age of 7.
In eighth grade, he broke his leg in a race, and curiously, that’s when he told his mother he was done with school. He was going to race, forever.
“I think if moms and dads let their kids go ahead and do what they want to do in life instead of making them do something else, it would be a lot easier. You know? I mean, I see kids go to college and all that and then have no job, and maybe they wanted to be something else in life.”
Now as tall as he’d ever be, the 13-year-old left home in Catahoula, La., for Lake Charles, to live with his horsetrainer brother Cecil and race at Delta Downs. As a teenager, he extended himself to the Evangeline and New Orleans racetracks.
He wasn’t a prodigy, but he was an earner. One weekend he won 17 races on his brother’s horses and earned $3,200. After he started driving — at 14 — he bought a Camaro and paid in cash.
“Believe me you, every day, winning races, that’s how you get rich. It’s not the big races make you rich. It’s the everyday money. That’s why you have to be consistent.”
Here’s another thing about Borel: From the time he could toddle to his teenage years racing his brother’s best colts, he was massaging horses, whispering Cajun sweet nothings in their big ears, reading their moods and thoughts. He broke the animals and mucked their stalls and he still does.
MINE THAT BIRD
His mount in the 2009 Derby was the most improbable yet. After being voted Canada’s champion 2-year-old male the year before, Mine That Bird finished dead last in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and had no wins in early 2009 racing. His graded stakes earnings, however, qualified him for the Derby’s field of 20. Now on his third trainer, a hobbled cowboy named Chip Woolley — himself on a 1 for 32 streak at his home track in New Mexico — the gelding arrived at the Derby without a jockey.
Borel worked Mine That Bird for the first time just a few days before the Derby. Like Street Sense, the 3-year-old was a come-from-behind horse, perfect for Borel.
Watching the animal from video, Borel understood what Woolley meant when he warned him not to let the horse go too early. “That’s all he asked me. ‘Calvin, please, take him back to last and make a quarter-of-a-mile run.'”
In morning workouts, “I worked him. I worked him slow. I stood up on him, and I, tch-tch, [swung my crop], and he took off. He went the next eighth mile in like 12, real quick. ‘Ooh, he might have a good turn-of-foot. The man might be knowing what he’s talking about!’
“So, it was a no-win, uh, a no win-lose situation.”
It was indeed a no-win, no-lose situation. Only two horses that day had longerodds, and only one other gelding had won the Derby since World War II. In a sport known for its strange onomastics, the principal reason Borel’s mount warranted mention was his discordant name (a blend of Birdstone and Mining My Own, his sire and dam). Out of the gate, Borel fell so far behind the pack that the announcer literally forgot about him.
Then, just as Borel promised, at the 3 /8-mile pole, he tch-tch-ed and the horse “turned a foot.” That Bird flew. While a couple of million people stared at the tangle of front-runners, the most brilliant spectacle played out down the track. A 50-1 longshot was making an audacious move along the inside rail, blazing a trail so perfect and so thin that in passing West Side Bernie the gelding nearly got wedged.
It was a no-lose ride borne of no-win expectations. It burnished for a racing nation a nickname Borel earned years earlier in the jockey colonies on the backside of the tracks — “Bo-Rail.”
The announcer missed the call, again. By the time he uttered the words Mine That Bird, the horse was three lengths ahead.
RACHEL ALEXANDRA
Then Borel did what no jockey in history ever has. He ditched his ride.
He wouldn’t race the Kentucky Derby winner in the next leg of the Triple Crown, The Preakness. He would race the favorite, the front-runner, the filly with the preternatural stride. She was, simply, the ride he’d been waiting 30 years for.
The world outside thoroughbred racing said Borel wasn’t dancing with the one that brought him. Veteran racing analyst Steve Haskin suggests that it wasn’t “a question of loyalty as downright stupidity. Why would anybody give up the mount on the Kentucky Derby winner, especially to ride a filly!”
But Rachel Alexandra was Borel’s mount long before Mine That Bird. The two had won two graded races by incredible margins, including a record-setting 20 1 /4 lengths in the Kentucky Oaks the day before the Derby. Throughout the year, Borel told interviewer after interviewer the same thing: He has never asked her to run. Not really. She wins races on her own.
One of only two close finishes the two had was at Pimlico — the Preakness — when they were nearly caught by the jilted gelding, Mine That Bird. The filly held on to win by a length.
Could Calvin have won the race if he had been on the Kentucky Derby winner?
It’s the question no one wants to answer — not Borel, not his friend, Johnson, not his agent, Hissam. It’s Hall of Fame jockey Laffit Pincay Jr. who comes closest to suggesting Borel could have won on Mine That Bird. “I saw him winning many races that the only reason he won is because he rode [the horse] the way that he did.”
Regardless, Borel now was positioned to be the first jockey to win the Triple Crownon different mounts. The filly was out for the Belmont, and Mine That Bird was back, this time as the favorite.
The Cajun was the crowd favorite, appearing on the late-night shows and “Today” and ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, but now there was a sour note.
David Letterman touched on it in his interview: “Now, will the horse be angry with you? Because you weren’t there for the middle jewel of the Triple Crown. You were out running around with a girl.”
Borel flashed his tight smile and all but promised victory, but it was not to be. The little gelding was just tired, Borel says.
“He’s been taken off so many horses in favor of other jockeys in his career. He relates to the horses given no chance out there,” Funk says.
THE TOP
On April 9, the filly is scheduled to meet the mare Zenyatta at Oaklawn for the Apple Blossom Invitational and the biggest purse the racetrack has ever dangled — $5 million. It is being called the Race for the Ages.
Last month, Rachel Alexandra was named 2009’s Eclipse Award winner for Horse of the Year, but Borel wasn’t even in the running for top-jockey honors despite winning the most money at Churchill Downs and racing the top horse to an undefeated season. Haskin says the snub was an embarrassment for the sport.
“Calvin was the face of thoroughbred racing,” he says, but he’s also “that hillbilly come down from the mountains.”
Borel is magnetic, with stirring hazel eyes and a deferential manner (almost every answer begins “Yes, sir,” “No, sir”). His post-race histrionics are charming, and he’s without question at the top of a very competitive, very capricious sport.
He’s also a country boy. His hands are gnarled like a dairy farmer’s and just as powerful, and his Cajun tongue makes D’s of T’s and T’s of Th’s, so “thirsty” is ‘tirdy.” When Lisa discovered a mole burrowing in the backyard of their suburban Louisville home, Borel fetched his shotgun and blew it out of the ground.
The future? He’ll turn 44 this year, seven more than the number of bones he’s broken racing.
“I put myself in his position. He’s riding well, especially after the year he had last year. You get used to it, addicted to it, winning races and making people feel good,” says Pincay, who was forced out of the sport only after breaking his neck at 56. “I wasn’t ready.”
Borel says he’ll quit the sport the first time he mounts a horse scared or indifferent – he means to go on forever.
The day after winning the Derby on Street Sense, Borel eagerly rode in a $15,000 claiming race, and finished fourth.
“You can never do good enough,” he says, splayed out in his favorite leather armchair.
SELF PORTRAIT Calvin Henry Borel
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Nov. 7, 1966, Catahoula, La.
MY NICKNAMES ARE Boo-Boo and Bo-Rail.
MY FAVORITE PART OF A HORSE IS its rump. I love a pretty horse with a good rump, high.
THE WORST THING I EVER SAW ON A TRACK WAS the filly breaking down in the [Kentucky] Derby, Eight Belles.
A MEMORY THAT STILL MAKES ME CRY IS winning the [Kentucky] Derby the first time, and that my momma got to see it.
THREE PEOPLE I WOULD INVITE TO A FANTASY DINNER PARTY ARE Shania Twain, Willie Shoemaker and Muhammad Ali. And I went to supper with the Queen [of England].
HORSES ARE LIKE PEOPLE: They’re creatures of habit. And they know what you know, and you know what they know. If you get on a horse and you’re scared, he does know.
A SMELL THAT WILL MAKE ME NOSTALGIC is DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, an anti-inflammatory rub used on horses’ legs). It got in my system, and everything I ate smelled like DMSO.
A FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY IS my brother and me, hunting. He and I were supposed to be hunting rabbits for food.
I’M SUPERSTITIOUS ABOUT going in front of where a black cat has passed. If I’m going down the road on a horse and I see a black cat pass, I’ll go around it.
THE ONE THING EVERY MAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WOMEN IS they’re very hardheaded, very temperamental.
IF I WEREN’T A JOCKEY, I’D BE a cop.
A WORD TO SUM ME UP: Giving — maybe too much.
Originally published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 21 February 2010.
