Day Of Reckoning

"Yes!" Sheila says. "The bum!"

Irene is delighted to hear a word she knows. "Yes!" she shrieks. "Yes, yes!"

"Hush now, baby," her father says, gently. "Hush now."

The old Pat Day is gone, say those who knew him back then. No more temper tantrums, no more Mr. Hyde. But how can such anger just disappear? When he talks about the old days, Day mentions the devil a lot. "Old-Satan-is-the-master-of-deception-and-the-father-of-all-lies" rolls off his tongue with the speed of a mantra.

Day says his riding talent is natural, that riding is something he was obviously born to do. He has a point: At 4'11" and 100 well-proportioned pounds, he could be the prototype for the perfect jockey. But at first Day wanted more than anything to be a cowboy. The second son of an auto repairman, he grew up in Colorado in places named Brush, Rifle and Eagle. When he graduated from Eagle High in 1971, he pursued his true calling, bull riding.

"In my mind," he says, "to be a cowboy was to drive all night to the rodeo drinking coffee, and as soon as the rodeo is over you get to drinking and phasing women. You do that until the sun comes up and you have to hit the road again." Day loved the life.

Trouble was, the rodeo clowns soon learned to be extra alert when Day left the chute. "I didn't show much promise," he admits. Again and again, the diminutive cowboy would sail off a bull, pick himself up and knock the dust off his chaps. "Uh, Pat, did you ever think about being a jockey?" people asked.

"I wasn't interested," Day says. But eventually, inevitably, the way a seven-footer one day finds himself on a basketball court, Day found himself exercising racehorses. In July 1973, seven months after he first sat on a thoroughbred, just a few months before he turned 20, Day won his first official race, on a colt named Foreblunged, at Prescott Downs in Arizona, for a $347 purse.

From the beginning, Day had a special touch; he won steadily on the mile tracks in Massachusetts, New Orleans and Chicago. "Knowledgeable people who saw me claimed they knew right off that I had something," Day says. "I didn't have to be taught—it was just there. And I was cocky before I got on the racetrack. When I did good immediately, I started to think I was the center around which the racetrack revolved."

He also started using drugs, going from marijuana to cocaine, and continued to drink like a real cowboy. In 1976 he married Deborah Bailey, daughter of New Orleans trainer and former New York rider P.J. Bailey. "If you don't make it in New York," his new father-in-law told him, "you're just a bum in the ballpark." So Day took his act to the big city.