My Feuds With Officials And The Press

The funny thing about it is that it is actually more difficult to ride the half-mile tracks than the mile tracks. I think the main thing that stops you from being good at the milers after you've been at the halfers is the fact that you get stamped with the half-mile reputation, and unless you defeat it immediately it's a tough thing to combat. There are lots of good jocks around the half-mile tracks. I'm not saying they're as good as what you have at the mile tracks, but I think there's plenty of them that have the potential to ride at the milers if they ever got that break. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Sammy Palumbo, for example, should be compared to the top five, but I consider him a lot better than plenty of jocks that I've ridden against on the mile tracks, then and now.

Of course, talking about getting a break, you're not guaranteed a break when you do anything. Things have to come natural or you have to have people who have faith in you. The fortunate part about it for me was—well, the first thing that a bug rider has to do is overcome the apprenticeship thing. I won about 300 races as an apprentice, but I'd seen other riders do practically the same thing—and then they're dead for a couple of years. I lost my bug in October of 1953, back at the same place where I'd broken my maiden, and I was doing so well the first part of the meeting that when I lost the bug I never lost any mounts over it. That happened for two reasons. First, there was nobody there to take my place and, second, I had gotten heavy in that year. I was actually doing 112, 113 with the bug, so I was three or four pounds overweight on a lot of horses that were in with the bug. So, actually, my horses weren't getting the difference in the weight, maybe just one or two pounds. Then, when I dropped the bug, they only gained two pounds rather than five. This helped me quite a bit, the fact that there was no transition for me between being an apprentice and a journeyman jockey, which a lot of riders have to go through.

The important thing is that for the moment I kept the same mounts that I had as an apprentice. I had been winning with them, and I've always maintained that good mounts are going to make a good rider. There's no good rider can do anything with horses that can't run. The No. 1 thing is a start, but then after that it's what you do with it. I think that the difference between a good rider and an ordinary rider is that a good one can get more out of a horse that can run. He's not gonna get a heck of a lot more out of a horse that can't. That, and the fact that a good rider makes fewer mistakes than the ordinary rider.

I rode at an extremely good clip after moving up to the mile track. As a matter of fact, I think I won more races on the mile tracks than I did at the halfers. The first year I was riding I won 323 races. For the next four years I don't think I was ever under 300 winners. My career steamrolled.

[During these four outstanding years—1955, 1956, 1957 and 1960—Hartack won, respectively, 417, 347, 341 and 307, enough to earn him the national riding title each time.]

When I left the half-mile tracks I had a certain amount of confidence that I could hold my own. I felt that I had learned a lot in that year and a half and that I knew what I was doing, but I still felt that I had a lot to learn. Now, with the Rice outfit, I was fighting the same battle of confidence all over again, only on a different level. It was like after I found out I could go through high school I had to go through college, only it was tougher.

I don't suppose that real confidence came to me until I had been riding for at least three years. It built after that. But it wasn't the fact that I was the leading rider in the country; it was that I finally discovered that I knew what to do right. I made all the right moves. I seldom made mistakes, and my reflexes have always worked to my benefit. Plenty of times you don't depend on what you think. Sometimes in a race you just don't have time to think. Then you depend solely on your reflexes. And I just happen to have good reflexes. You don't learn reflexes. You either have good reflexes or you don't have good reflexes. And, fortunately, I have them. Something comes up, I do it. I can't take any credit for my reflexes. I just happen to have 'em.

And my attitude about worrying also changed. I just never worried anymore. Concerned—I'm always concerned, but I'm not a worrywart anymore. If a situation comes up, I'll be able to handle it. And if I can't handle it, no amount of worrying is going to eliminate it. But I do look ahead, so that I won't put myself in a situation that will involve making a mistake in judgment. You eliminate a lot of your difficulties after a certain period of time because you know how to see ahead. And when the situation comes up a surprise I'm not worried, because I feel I'll do the right thing. Before, I was just hoping that I'd do the right thing.

Almost from the start of my riding career, and right up to now, there has been a great deal of commotion about my relationship with the press. There's no question that this ill feeling seems to have gotten worse over the years instead of improving. Because who wrote about it? I never wrote the whole story about myself until this article right now. I never asked a newspaperman to give me a good interview, nor did I ask one to give me a bad one. All I ever asked them to do was to print the facts—not the half-truths but the straight facts. When they do, they'll get a whole lot of cooperation out of me, a whole lot. Never was anything printed viewing both sides. No reporter ever wrote, "Bill was rude, but the reason he was rude was because when I talked to him he was in the middle of a racing day and he had to ride the last race and he didn't want to be bothered with me." When did you ever read that? But you read many a time that Bill was rude and uncooperative and said, "No comment." Not once has any newspaperman come out and said the reason for it was that he (the reporter) approached Bill Hartack in the wrong way at the wrong time.

The press has printed half-truths that made people who didn't know which way to think see only the reporter's side of it. So who is going to get the repercussions from it? The newspapermen? Hell, no. But I knew it and I could see it coming. And I knew that I could butter them up and do everything they wanted me to do to change it, right from the beginning. But then I would be compromising principle. I would be taking away from my work, taking away from everything I based my whole work on. For an image? For a stupid thing like an image? I know what I am. People who read about me don't. That's the difference. And who's responsible? I'm surely not. I challenge anyone to even attempt to show me one time where they can lay the blame on me. Impossible. Because there's not one incident, not one in my entire career, where I was out of line with the newspaperman before he was out of line with me.