Day Of Reckoning

A cold wind blew straight down the stretch at Aqueduct racetrack, but that didn't deter the faithful who huddled by the rail to watch Saturday's Wood Memorial. They weren't there to cheer on their bets—there was no way to make decent money on this race. They were there to get goose bumps—not the kind that come with the chilly air, but the kind a horseplayer gets maybe once a decade or so, when watching a really great one run.

And sure enough, at the turn for home a shiny copper-colored colt, the 1-10 favorite, the one they were all waiting for, swung into the lead and began to draw off. Easy Goer floated down the stretch as if wind-borne, flashing under the wire three lengths ahead of an exhausted colt named Rock Point and four others.

On Easy Goer's back Pat Day sat quietly. He looked over his colt's ears, peering into the future. After crossing the finish line of the 1⅛-mile Wood, Day stood in the stirrups but made no move to stop his horse, letting him gallop out another furlong, matching the mile and a quarter distance the colt will have to travel at Churchill Downs on May 6 in the Kentucky Derby. Easy Goer just kept going, full of run even when Day finally tried to pull him up. In Day's mind, that answered any can-he-go-the-distance questions about the colt. And more. "This is not only the best horse I have ever sat on," said Day. "This could be the best I've ever seen."

Together, Day and Easy Goer make about as sure a Derby bet as any horse-player is likely to see. No jockey has ridden as many winners in the 1980s as Day—some 3,270. No one has come close. Some folks in Louisville joke that Churchill Downs should be named Day Downs. He has won more stakes races there than anyone else; in the fall of 1987 he had an astonishing winning percentage of .367 at the Downs. But he's never won the big one. He is 0-6 in the Kentucky Derby.

Ah, but surely this is the year, and Easy Goer is the horse. People talk about the colt as if he were Man o' War incarnate. If Easy Goer lives up to his press clippings, he will be draped with roses on the first Saturday in May, with Day on top, smiling away. Certainly. Or as certain as anything can be in this game—after all, racing is full of odd turns and bad luck. And Pat Day knows as well as anyone, it's so easy to fall.

The Days' kitchen in Hot Springs, Ark., is warm and bright, with blue-and-white country-chic accents—geese on the walls, on the dish towels, on the pot holders. Irene Elizabeth, 2, marches around wearing one shoe, humming, then stops to pull some pots and pans out of a cupboard. In a cardboard box near the dryer a Yorkshire terrier, Miracle, nurses five newborn pups. The microwave beeps. Pat's wife, Sheila, is preparing lunch: home-baked bread, apple juice (served in commemorative Derby glasses) and a chicken casserole topped with crumbled potato chips.

It's almost too much—too homey, too clean, too close to the latest baby-boomer blueprint for happiness. But it fits perfectly with Day's racetrack image: straight-arrow, God-fearing, modest, honest, polite. His new image, that is.

Sheila talks about the early years of their marriage: "When Pat did the drugs and the drinking he was a different person. When we were first together I used to pray, God we need help. He was just, uh...." Pat, always helpful, calls in from the other room with the words she is seeking. "A real Jekyll and Hyde," he yells.

"Yes, that's right," Sheila says. "Jekyll and Hyde."

In 1981, two years after they were married, a few days before he was to ride in the first Arlington Million at Arlington Park, Pat and Sheila had a fight. She slammed the door and drove away. "I just went nuts," Pat says. He ran to the balcony of their Chicago condominium and jumped off, landing two stories below. Heavy rains had soaked the grass, and Day was unhurt. Now, he says, it was all part of God's plan.