Bill Shoemaker's Journey as a Jockey

On March third, nineteen eighty five, Bill Shoemaker becomes the first jockey to win over one hundred million dollars in perse prize money writing Lord at War in Santa Anna. And not only was he the first, he may have been the greatest jockey of all time. And today we're gonna break down Bill Shoemaker on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history every day. Now. Being a jockey is really a thinkless job. Most of us we focus on the horse. Can you name a jockey that won the Kentucky Derby? Go ahead, try and think about it. You can't, but you can probably name a race horse. There are great horses that have won the Kentucky Derby, and there are great jockeys that have won the Kentucky Derby multiple times. You probably don't hear about them because it's not the focus of the race. The focus is the horse. But having a great jockey can make that horse even better. And that's what Bill Schuemaker was possibly, arguably, debatably the greatest jockey of all time. He was born in Texas back in the nineteen thirties during the Great Depression, So growing up in that era definitely changes your mindset about what you want to do and where you're going to go in life. And his parents divorced early in his childhood, and his father moved to southern California and he joined him and they lived next to a ranch, and there he got the job cleaning the stables for the Thoroughborets. And only months after working there and becoming an exercise boy, which is someone that rides the horses to get them ready through the routines every day. Then after that he got his first chance to ride a horse in a race on March nineteenth, nineteen forty nine. At that time he was only eighteen years old and was for eleven ninety six pounds. Now, if you don't know, that's very common for jockeys. The lighter you are, the better chance you have to win, because it's less weight that the horse has to carry. This is actually a very unique in sports that women are actually very good in the sport when given the opportunity, because they are also very small too. And less than a month after his very first race, he won his first race riding shafter v in a six furlong winning three thousand dollars. Now that is the purse, and a jockey normally takes home about ten percent of the purse because there's a lot there's people that own the horse, there's people that train the horse, and the horse doesn't actually take money because the horse can't have a bank account, so you're making a small percentage. But you can ride multiple horse horses, and that can make it a very lucrative career if you are very good, such as Bill was, because you can do multiple amounts in a day and win purses, but you're not always going to win the race. And he was having such success while being a jockey that that first year he rode two hundred and eighteen winners before the year was out. Now, these aren't really big publicly races, not all of them. We all know the Kentucky Derby and Freakness and Bellmont, those are big races. But every horse track in America has races every day, and you can win multiple times a day at those races. And then we moved to nineteen fifty three, after about fourteen years of him riding professionally, he sets to the record for the most wins in the year at four hundred and eighty five mark that was held for about twenty years, but not the only record he would set, and his very first Kentucky Derby came two years later when he rode Swaps in the nineteen fifty five Kentucky Derby. Two years later he won his second, and over his career he would end up winning eleven Triple Crown races and those are the races that's Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. From nineteen fifty five to nineteen eighty six, over a thirty year period, he won consistently, and in September nineteen seventy, after winning and winning and winning, he won his six thousand and thirty third win, breaking the record set by Johnny London. But he went on to win eight thousand, eight, one hundred and thirty three career victories. Shoemaker's last race last victory came from January twentieth, nineteen ninety nine, and then he would retire two weeks after on February third at the Santa Ana Park where he had all start. Shortly after his retirement, unfortunately, he was in a solo drunk driving accident in nineteen ninety one rolling his vehicle, and the accident actually left him paralyzed from the neckdown and he had to be using a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But luckily he could still train, and so he went back to training. He even was a trainer. In his seven years, he would have ninety wins with a purse of over three million dollars, and it also led to him writing three horse mystery books with fellow jockey Dick Francis, called The Stalking Horse, The Fire Horse, and The Dark Horse, all about murder mysteries featuring a jockey. But sadly he passed away in two thousand and three of natural causes. His accolades are are far beyond what we can list. If I listed every single race he had won, we'd be here probably for another two days. But he was inducted in the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame in nineteen fifty eight, the Fairgrounds Racing Hall of Fame in nineteen seventy one, and had a race named after him called the Shoemaker Milestakes at the Hollywood Park in Santa Anna. He might have been small and stature, but he was big in what he could do and really set the standard for being a jockey and horse racing and making a name for himself beyond the horses. He wrote, thank you for listening to today's Daily sports History. If you like this, please come connect with us at Daily sportshistory dot com. You can get all our shows in there, breaking it down by categories. So please come join our community, be a part of this, and come back tomorrow for more Daily sports History.