A Touch Of Gold In The Saddle

Johnny Rotz is 29 years old and weighs 112 pounds. In 1963, not his best year, he earned $56,410 more as a jockey than Mickey Mantle did as a ballplayer.

One bright morning during the early days of the meeting at Hialeah last month, Johnny came sauntering along near the paddock with his new agent, Bud Aime. Ordinarily Johnny does not come out to the track in the mornings unless an owner or trainer specifically asks him to work a horse. But this day Johnny and Aime had some business to discuss and some horses to look at as they were ridden in the morning workouts.

They stopped and talked earnestly for a moment, Johnny looking up at Aime, a big man. They had things to talk about, for a jockey's agent is a sort of sales manager. He represents only one rider but may also handle one apprentice. His job is to study the condition book, watch workouts, contact trainers of mounts he believes best for his boy. For these services he is paid a percentage of a jockey's gross earnings, usually about 20% for handling a top rider.

Johnny had not yet ridden a winner in 1964. He had taken a vacation after Aqueduct closed last December. He returned to riding during the last days at Tropical, and when Hialeah opened he began getting three or four mounts every day. Now, as he talked to Bud Aime, Johnny looked at the papers Aime was exhibiting and nodded. After a moment they parted, Aime hurrying off to the stable area and Johnny walking over and sitting down in a lawn chair outside the jockeys' room to pick up a conversation where it had left off a little while before.

"Of course," he said, his face relaxing into a puckish smile (opposite), "I guess I should have said my first mount was the pony my father gave me, on my eighth birthday, back on the farm near Warrensburg, Ill. That pony and the fact that I was small made me decide to try to become a jockey. My first real mounts were quarter horses and an occasional Thoroughbred in the fairs around Illinois. I started riding in the fairs when I was 13 and rode the circuit until I graduated from high school. You got $5 for a mount and $10 for a winner, provided you could catch the owner. My father approved of my ambition. In fact, he took me to the Fair-mount track, near St. Louis, to help me look for a job. We went from stall to stall and finally met a trainer named W. W. Morrow. He looked me over and said he could use a boy to walk hots and do other chores around the stables. I learned a lot from Mr. Morrow before I went on up to Chicago and started working for Mr. Harry Trotsek. He took me down to Kentucky to break yearlings, and when I was 18, he gave me my first mount as an apprentice rider. That was May 1953. A year later I lost the bug [the asterisk that denotes an apprentice in the race charts]." Harry Trotsek—Ken Church, John Heckmann, the Cook boys, John Sellers and Johnny Rotz. What was Trotsek's secret? What did he teach his boys about riding that made them all standouts among the top jockeys?

Johnny Rotz threw a leg over the arm of his chair. "Well, as I see it now," he said, "Mr. Trotsek taught you more about living than he did about riding. He could be pretty strict, and I suppose if you lived the way he taught you you would just naturally ride better. Mr. Trotsek is a wonderful man, a real gentleman, a great horseman."

Did he ever dream, back in those days, that he would be riding in all the big stakes—the Flamingo, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont and the other $100,000 races?

"I didn't dream I'd be just riding in them," Johnny said. "I dreamed I'd be winning them all. Every young rider's hero was Eddie Arcaro, who had won the Triple Crown on Citation in 1948. No horse has won it since. Let's see, 1948—I was just 13 years old at the time. If Eddie Arcaro could do it, I didn't see why I couldn't do it. Now remember, I said I was 13 at the time.

"I've had three Kentucky Derby mounts. Of course, that's the big one every jockey dreams of winning. So far, my favorite race is the 1962 Preakness—the only leg I've won on the Triple Crown. I won that Preakness on Greek Money, and I'll never forget the instructions I got from Buddy Raines, the trainer. Buddy said to me, 'Johnny, go out and ride him as if you owned him.' That was all. Now those are the kind of instructions I like to get."

That 1962 Preakness was the one in which Manuel Ycaza was on Ridan and claimed interference. But the films showed that he had leaned over and shot his left elbow squarely into Johnny's chest. Rotz shook his head. "Ycaza never touched me. His elbow was out there, all right, and I was riding right into it, but then the horses bumped and separated. There was no physical contact between Ycaza's elbow and my chest."