Sportsman of the Year: Steve Cauthen

By Frank Deford

The following story originally appeared in the Dec. 19, 1977 issue of Sports Illustrated.

The high school in Walton, Ky. -- of red brick, fringed by a garden of daffodil buses -- lies in the lee of the interstate that winds out of the Bluegrass, roaring north toward the Ohio and the city of Cincinnati, 20 miles away. The school is the largest building in Walton, for it must be big enough to hold all the children in the town, and all those of the neighboring hamlet of Verona, and all the high school myths and memories of anybody who visits.

High schools are our commonest common denominator. Good Lord, they all even smell the same, that stale institutional odor that can be disturbed only by another ringing bell. End of the period. The children fall out into the corridors, moving with a special rhythm, at a pace they will never again employ in life. Nothing else in the human experience resembles the break between classes.

In a room just beyond the clamor, the assistant principle, Mr. Tyler, muses: "Let's see now, Steve would be a junior if he were still here, wouldn't he?"

"A senior, I think."

"Oh, yeah, that's right. He used to go around with Gordon and Stephenson, that crowd." There was nothing special about the boy; a nice little fellow, good family; an industrious enough student, but capable of the usual adolescent hijinks. He liked to trampoline, and some people knew he rode horses at 4-H.

There is a peace in the halls again, between-classes concluded, and soon only an outsider's heels click upon the linoleum. Almost as one, the students of Walton Verona High School stare curiously out their open classroom doors. Who dares violate these halls before the bell? And only now, looking back at these children - in this everyday setting, observing their normal, everyday routine -- only at this moment does a full incongruity and enormity of what Steve Cauthen has done loom clearly.

It is not enough to marvel at the age of 17 he has accomplished more in a year than any jockey in history. It is not enough that already there exists the mad school of thought that this little boy is the finest rider of all time. These are incredible things to ponder about someone so young but somehow, as young as he is -- and younger-looking still - the immensity of his achievement in 1977 cannot be properly understood until you stand in his high school and see the open county faces of the other children of Walton and realize that Steve Cauthen should be there among them still. He should be a senior in high school this day, hearing the bells and whiffing the smell.

And he would be ... but for the coincidence of his size and his family background, but for the depth of his desire and some amazing gift of God that no one can comprehend.

Instead, almost at this very moment, several hundred miles away, when the bell rings, Steve Cauthen will burst from the starting gate at Aqueduct, bound to his horse in consummate harmony, seamless one with the creature - a prodigy like none we have ever seen before, the leading money rider of any year, a fearless athlete, a resolute little doll-person, Sportsman of the Year, so very tiny, so very young, so very extraordinary and ageless in his grace at this one thing he does that he always calls "race riding."

His home is crosstown from the school, a horse farm of 40 acres, hard by a train track and the country line. His room has been left untouched, so that there is the sensation of boarding one of those ships in the Bermuda Triangle, where everything is in perfect order, but there are no people. Steve's textbooks -- Modern Biology being the most imposing volume -- and the ribbons he won at horse shows stand out as artifacts from that distant era.

In New York, he boards with old family friends, but Cauthen's real habitat is the jocks' room at Aqueduct (or Belmont or Santa Anita in season) where he has the honor of an end locker, catty-cornered from Jorge Velasquez who, coincidentally, held the New York riding record of 299 wins in a year. Cauthen will top that by almost 150, which, if you will, is comparable to a rookie hitting 90 home runs in the big leagues. His mounts have won more than $6 million, exceeding Angel Cordero's record of $4,709,500 by a full 27 %. Three times this year the kid rode six winners on a nine-race program; four times he rode five; one week he rod 23. His best mounts, the 2-year-old Affirmed and the grass-running Johnny D., won Eclipse Awards - top U.S. honors - in their categories, because Cauthen gave them perfect rides in a couple of their major races. Withal, he missed a whole month of work after a gruesome spill in which his mount broke a leg, and he broke a wrist and two fingers, cracked some ribs, took 25 stitches and a concussion. He came back, galloped horses two days, and won his first race out on a cold named (no doubt by angels in heaven) Little Miracle.

In the process, Cauthen also became a phenomenon, which is really neither here nor there, but which does help us understand better the person and the exalted place he suddenly assumed in his sport's orbit. So much of Cauthen's saga is tied to the peculiar institution that is pari-mutuel horse racing, which has always been a hybrid entertainment and which recently has become a distressed industry as well. For a time the kid blew a breath of joy and humanity into a callous and cynical wheel. That moment is gone - the business of thoroughbread racing is a business - but in the nuclear glare in which young Cauthen was scrutinized, we could discern the man's elegance behind the boy's downy countenance.

But make no mistake: while all of racing is a bet, each race is a sport. What Cauthen does is as athletic as what Lydell Mitchell and Pete Maravich and Guy Lafleur do with their bodies. In a way it is even more so, for their bodies are their own, not, perforce, attached to some 1,000-pound beast, charging 35 miles an hour, with brains as fragile as its sesamoids. "The horse is such a beautiful animal," Cauthen says. "When you're on him, in control of him, moving with him as one, it is a beautiful feeling." And then in some reverie: "The best is when you're almost getting him to know that you want to do."

Almost. The very best is only almost. And sometimes you are all out, in close, side by side with jockeys who are as dim-witted or panicky as their mouths. Or, you are dead clear, unbothered - like in the fourth at Belmont on May 23, on Bay Streak. "What happened?" a microphoneperson demanded a few days later, as the child in the wheelchair came out of the hospital with his mother. "Horse snapped a leg," said Steve Cauthen into a metallic thing thrust into his bruised little face.

And Velasquez' mount, onrushing, had stumbled over him. Horse snapped a leg. Horse will snap a leg in some other race, too. "I haven't got any fears," the kid says now, summing up this old inconvenience.

Racing has few heroes. The Secretariats are shuffled off to the equine massage parlors as soon as they attract some fond attention to the sport. Jockeys are too small to identify with, and the general public perceives them as crooked little Munchkins at that. Besides, most of the good ones these days are foreigners -- "the Spanish boys," as they are dismissed cavalierly.

Unlike other well-known athletes, jockeys appear from thin air. This makes them even more suspect. Who are these elves? Had Steve Cauthen been comparably talented in any other sport, he would have been a community celebrity at 13, a high school demigod, his value certified by the presence of scores of college and professional scouts. Everybody in Boone County knew Lenny Spicer, who graduated from Walton Verona High in 1975 and signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But few in Boone Country were aware that Steve Cauthen was even contemplating a career. And you can't ride a race until you ride a race. There is no spring training. "I was ready to die after I rode my first race," he says. "There's no way to get fit galloping. People have no idea."

People had no idea that, for years, the little boy had sat up nights with his father, a racetrack blacksmith, studying patrol films from River Downs. No one knew that he had worked summers at the track, mucking stalls, walking hots, staying around the starting gate; listening, learning, ingesting every nuance of race riding. Who had any idea? His Todd Stephenson stayed over at the Cauthens one night, and so he found out that Steve would get up at 4 a.m. and, in the pitch dark, dress and go out to the barn and sit on a bale of hay, and for two hours, in the still predawn silence that might be disturbed only by a train whistle, he would practice whipping. Alone, in the red barn, he learned to switch the stick from one hand to the other, to tag the horse precisely upon his tailbone. He learned.

His father gave him the anvil, but it was Steve Cauthen, the child, who heated the metal and banged himself into the shape that stunned experts when they first saw him ride. "A lot of jockeys start training a few months before they start riding," Cauthen says. "I grew up to be a horseman, not just a jockey."

Because he was such a mysterious new presence and such an appealing figure (and because he was native-born), he captured the imagination of the country. Johnny Carson told Steve Cauthen jokes, gen-u-wine media celebs like Barbara Howar chased him cross-country for an interview; and such was the everyday journalistic crunch that once, by the scales, two TV crews fought a pitched battle over camera locations. "I'd come into the jocks' room in the morning, and there'd be five guys waiting," the kid recalls. "And they'd be screaming: 'I was first,' 'I'm next,' begging me to talk to them. It was ridiculous."

But if Cauthen was a comet in the insatiable Famous People Industry -- in the 1977 parade, videotape highlights will show him marching somewhere between Anita Bryant and R2-D2 -- he threw a monkey wrench into the machinery of racing wherever he rode. Until June 28 he kept a five-pound apprentice allowance -- hey, gang, let's give Rod Carew four strikes! -- that utterly destroyed the equipoise of the ancient system. Worse, there was no price to be had on his races.

Strangely, Cauthen's success proved how far horse racing is out of the mainstream of American life. He didn't sell. To be sure, for a substantial fee, he rode Steve Cauthen Days at various outback ovals -- Penn National, Latonia, Hazel Park, etc. -- and invariably he pulled warm, record-type crowds, but his was largely an intramural matter of churning up a devoted existing constituency. Horse racing has no rub-off. While Cauthen is the Bruce Jenner of 1977, the Simpson or Seaver of his sport, while he grossed 600 or 700 grand, he made little beyond the fringe; not a single endorsement.

Thus, in a perverse way, while Cauthen is the biggest star in the most crass sport of all, he has quietly returned to his roots, as pure a major athletic commodity as there is to be found. Often nowadays he rises at dawn and goes to the track just to drink coffee and hang around. "Saturday was always my favorite day when I was growing up, because then I could be around the racetrack people," he says. "Nobody makes me come out mornings now. I just like the atmosphere. I like the people at a racetrack - that's my people."

His is a scrawny little voice, rather what you might expect, given his size. But it is of honest timbre, almost devoid of backwoods inflection, and those grown-ups who have spoken to Cauthen intelligently about things within his kin have found him articulate, even garrulous.

"I'm not a headline freak," he says. "I never wanted the publicity. All I wanted was to be appreciated by the people around me, racetrack people. But I understand the publicity stuff. In New York, everything's got to do with business. Somebody comes to you because they need you. They don't necessarily have bad intentions. They just need you at that time. I don't mind. Now last spring, I was a tired kid. But it's O.K. now. I always wanted just the one thing, to be a race ricer, and this is the place to be one."

Professionally, Cauthen is bred as well as any foal ever dropped in the Bluegrass. On the home side is the father, the blacksmith, Ronald (Tex) Cauthen. On the shop side is his agent, Lenny Goodman. One was raised in Sweetwater, Texas; the other came outta your Brooklyn. Between the two, between Streetwater and Brooklyn, there is no virtue or value in race riding that has not been imparted to the child.

Tex Cauthen is the salt of the earth. He grew late, to 5'9", and so no matter what the doctors say, he is not altogether convinced that his oldest son won't shoot up a few more inches from his present 5'1". If so, if so. Even now, the father's primary emotion about his son is being happy for him. The rest he takes in stride. "I just feel that Steve's doing what he's supposed to be doing," he says.

His wife Myra has trained horses, as have a brother and a brother-in-law. And her father owned horses. It's in the family. She met Tex at the track. They are nice-looking people, but they don't look a thing alike. He is dark and rounded, and she is light and angular. And Steve doesn't look at all like either of them. Apparently, he got the least of their height and the best of the rest of them.

The Cauthens bought the farm in Walton in 1965, when Steve was five, and they keep broodmares there. At tracks like Latonia, a few miles up the road, or at River Downs, Tex Cauthen earns $27 for shoeing a horse. It is one of the most honest professions. There are no shortcuts. All about the Cauthen living room are pictures of horses winning races for members of the family -- trainer or rider -- but the one large painting over the fireplace is of a smith shoeing a bay. This helps to keep things in perspective. The Cauthens remain very much in perspective. The neighbors, ever-vigilant watchdogs in strike-it-rich cases such as this, detect no new airs. The Walton Advertiser wrote a nice story on the local boy when he passed Cordero's earnings record, but, in keeping with priorities, the lead story that edition featured John Williams of Bracht Piner Road, who was cited for raising a 17 3/4-pound muskmelon.

The Cauthens did splurge and buy a phone-recording machine, but this marked change in life-style mainly assists strangers who mispronounce the family name. Most say the first syllable as in coffin or cough, while correctly it is as in cotton, with an h: Cothin.

The family is from England, possibly Cornwall, and moved west to sweetwater via Carolinas. Myra Cauthen is a Bischoff, from the Bluegrass. She grew up on a horse farm not four miles from where she is raising her family. Besides Steve, there are Doug, 14, and Kerry, eight. The house is comfortable, and the home is filled with ample amounts of affection and respect.

"I got everything from my mother and father," Steve says. "They're loving parents. And the main things is, they gave me the love I needed when I needed it. And that's why I'm where I'm at."

Nonetheless, to maintain this felicitous location, it helps to have Lenny Goodman sharing the address. A jockey's agent is crucial to the rider's success, as his fee of up to 25% attests. Agents are allowed only one customer, so a kind of symbiotic relationship develops. This is revealed best by the agents' sloppy use of pronouns. They say things like "I ride the six-horse," when, to every other naked eye, it appears that the 75% is in the irons.

As Tex Cauthen discovered when he went comparison shopping among agents, Goodman is regarded as the best in the land -- a view that probably is shared by Goodman himself. Quite often he prefaces remarks with: "Tell me if I'm wrong" -- which a person never dares say unless he is secure in the knowledge that no one will and he isn't.

In tandem, Goodman and Cauthen resemble characters out of Dickens. A single glance suggests that this backstreet sharpie must have obtained this innocent child from a foundling home in order to perpetrate some nefarious caper. But stay around, and see that it is not overlay. The kid, in his way, is every bit as dapper as his emissary. Cauthen finds it hard to pass a mirror by without slyly inspecting his profile and searching for wayward hairs to put back into place. In civilian attire he favors a soft camel-hair cap of a sort fashionable half a century ago, and his dark, melancholy eyes give the eerie sensation that his 95-pound child is Babe Ruth, shrunken by jungle specialists.

Goodman, on the other hand, comes prepackaged: Guccis, pinkie ring, hefty cigar, color coordinates. His silver hair, brushed back, glimmering, suggests that he was watched too many Victor Mature movies. And tell me if I'm wrong: Lenny Goodman can touch his tie. This is a lost art, going the way of shooting cuffs. Just a touch at the knot at the right time. Very few gentlemen can still do it just so. And, for that matter, with all the Sunbelt turning away from four-in-hands to wearing chains and necklaces, you are not going to see much more tie touching.

There is wonderfully sly communion between this disparate pair: Goodman, with his crinkly eyes, jesting with his pink-cheeked meal ticket. The kid does a great deadpan. "I'm riding this in th' ninth Sat'day, yahear," Lenny announces, making subtitles in the air with his big cigar. The farm boy cocks his head, just enough to indicate which one it is who is still drawing the 75%. Lenny smiles. Neither one of them is going anywhere. "Lenny's making more money than the United Fund," another agent explains.

"Natural talent, sure," Lenny says of his boy. "But tell me if I'm wrong. There is no one around with a head like this child. Instinct, talent, intelligence. Put it all together, it spells Mother ... or somthin'."

Cauthen goes to his locker to prepare for another ride. He is truly scrawny, a fact accentuated by his ghostly complexion. But then, all jocks must be transformed. Their room is like a wizard's laboratory -- such a surprising drab place of browns and blacks, tack and trunks, peopled by tiny specimens in white knickers and, even, terrycloth robes.

Only at the last do they change and leave, suddenly adorned in gaudy colors, flicking whips in the air with bravado. Cauthen inspects his whips before the day's races, testing them. Then, carefully, one selected, he trims it with scissors. A whip is a crucial instrument, but ultimately it is a merely an extension of the hands. It is his hands that measure a jockey. "A horse gets the knowledge through your hands," Cauthen says. "He gets confidence in the way you use your hands." In the final strides of a close race the accomplished jockey puts the whip away and rides the horse a cappella, tight to the body, flowing with him, lending him energy and the human competitive element in ways that a whipping cannot transmit. The whole body is intimately involved in the exercise. The thighs, the feet, the shoulders, all pumping. But always it has been known as a hand ride, for it is the hands that tell the tale in race riding.

Cauthen's hands are outsized, the only large aspect of his body. But they are not farm boy ham hocks. Even with the mean scar from the Belmont spill cutting across the top of his right hand, Cauthen's hands appear to be fine long instruments of the esthete. And down to the wire, they ride a horse. Already, on the backside, there are whispers that some of the very best riders are spooked now when they hook the kid in the last furlong.

There is no way to explain this magic that Cauthen has with horses. He is a natural athlete, of course. He has the necessary instincts. He senses pace: the clock in his head. Reflexively, he stays out of trouble. Joe Hirsch, columnist for the Daily Racing Form, who has seen the boy ride a thousand or more races, swears he has never once seen him make a mistake. Never.

But nothing else matters if the jock lacks the ability to inspire the animal. That is the mystic gift, which none of them - Shoemaker, Cordero, or the child -- can explain. Cauthen says that the horses he rides again exhibit no recognition of him on sight, but they often do seem to remember him when he settles upon their backs. Somehow this is revealing. Perhaps the horses sense that he cares.

"You always want to win, sure," the kid says, "but the important thing is to get the most out of your horse. If he runs the best he can, wherever he finishes, I feel good -- for him and for me. And when you cross that finish line first on a horse who is not the best -- and you know it -- that's the greatest feeling of all."

There is a moment, somewhere, when the most beautiful and accomplished part of sport turns to art. But athletes are probably wrongly identified as artists. Rather, they are the art, not the author of it. Julius Erving is not a poet of the basketball court; he is a poem. As Reggie Jackson is not a drummer, but a tympani flourish; Muhammad Ali not an actor, but a prim-time series. What more shall we say: that Walter Payton is a brushstroke, Jimmy Connors a rousing chorus, Pelé a hymn? And Cauthen, what is he? It is hard yet to be certain. There are times, at the wire, when he reposes upon an easel, but other times when he seems too lusty for that, and we think of him as a ballad:

"When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And eery goose a swan, lad,
And round the world away ..."Hey, hey, for boot and horse, lad!
Yes -- but in the end, Steve Cauthen remains a fairy tale, for it is not only that he has come so far so quickly, so improbably, it is that he has come from one existence to another, overnight, like frogs and princes. He may be the last of the line. Cincinnati will swallow up Walton, Ky. Soon enough. Horses and blacksmiths will be confined to racetracks, as hoop skirts and carriages are to Williamsburg. No boy will grown up as a horseman, ringing horses from childhood, feeing and tending to them, practicing to master them upon bales of hay before dawn.
Riders will be made in Taiwan.
Walton will be made into suburbs. Already, says Ab Ryan, down at his implement store, his business in Walton is going toward lawn mowers, away from farm equipment. The kids drive up the interstate to Florence, where the big shopping mall is, and kick tires over at McDonald's; the town got government money for city-style sewers (instead of septic systems) and now ranch houses are flying up.
Oh, it is not all gone yet. There is still a town water tank, inscribed with high school class numerals and the names of first loves. The main street, named Main Street, still features an inordinate number of houses of worship, beauty parlors and auto body shops, and a billboard at the edge of town urges that citizens re-think this business about our getting mixed up with the United Nations. Posters advise that a turkey shoot is coming up: "So come out and enjoy a shoot and win a little something."
And there are still the trains in Walton. Two tracks run through town: the L&N, which goes by the Cauthen farmhouse. The engineer pulls his whistle right there, as the freight chugs into Walton, and it sounds loud and clear in the house, shrill enough to disrupt conversation, and shrill enough, for sure, to nourish the dreams of any child who ever hear it there, just as train whistles have sung ambitious farm boys down through all the years.
Steve Cauthen knew exactly where he was going. He would tell his friends he was leaving very soon to become the best race rider in the world. He would tell them that flatout, says his classmate Mark Gordon, who will himself be leaving Walton after graduation this May, to join the marines. And the other kids would hoot and mock Steve, call him "Superjock," and flick towels at him. But is was in fun, and Steve would keep saying it, matter-of-factly. It was no big deal, it was just that he thought he could go out and be the best race rider in the world.
And he was absolutely right. "What Steve had done, you can compare it with soap opera," says Mark Gordon.
Steve Cauthen, his old friend, class of '78, says: "It's a pretty good achievement. It never happened to any other kid in the business."
Tell him if he is wrong.