Day Of Reckoning

When Pat Day speaks he looks you straight in the eye. Trainers prize his ability to analyze a race; when he jumps off a horse they learn far more about the animal from Day than from an ordinary jockey. Reporters know he'll have more than the standard riders' comments of "My horse, he run good." Day doesn't equivocate, and he has the unnerving effect of sounding absolutely honest, even if sometimes undiplomatic.

Shug McGaughey, who trains Easy Goer, first used Day as his jockey some eight years ago, at Keeneland. "Pat came into the paddock before the race, and he kept telling me what a good-looking horse another horse in the race was," says McGaughey. "That didn't really go over too good. I didn't think my filly could beat the overwhelming favorite, but I wanted to get a good race into her, and I thought Pat was concerned more about riding the other one than mine." After the other horse won, McGaughey resolved never to use Day again. But the next year at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs the trainer stood at the rail and watched Day win race after race. "I told my wife, I got to get on this bandwagon," McGaughey says. "This guy is just making fools out of the rest of us."

It didn't take other trainers long to catch on, either. "Pat has a sixth sense of knowing where he is in a race and how much horse he has and what he can do with that horse," says D. Wayne Lukas, the country's leading trainer.

"He's a very smart rider," says Hall of Famer Woody Stephens. "He don't rush horses off their feet."

"He has marvelous hands, gentle hands, and horses respond to this kindness," says Mack Miller, also a Hall of Fame trainer.

At 35, Pat Day is at the top of his profession. In 1984, 1986 and 1987, he was voted the Eclipse Award as the nation's outstanding rider. He won three consecutive national riding titles from 1982 to '84, a feat matched only by Bill Hartack in the mid-'50s. He makes more than $1 million a year and has ridden many of the best horses of recent years. Trainers beg for his services.

"He's a very patient rider," says McGaughey. "He'll stay and he'll wait and wait to make a move, and sometimes you wonder how in the world he can wait as long as he does."

But there was a time when Day didn't live the way he rides, a time when he would wait for nothing and no one. Day's mother, Carol, remembers him in the old days: "He had such a temper. He would throw things, blame everyone but himself."

"I called it the cowboy in him," Sheila says. "He had very certain ideas about what a wife should be and should do. I had to cater to him all the time. Once, he went out to buy a Racing Form and didn't come back until three in the morning. And then he didn't even have a Form with him! Remember?"

Pat nods, and mentions the influence of one of his low-life friends.