When All The World Is Young

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 of 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 principal, 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 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 the full incongruity and enormity of what Steve Cauthen has done loom clearly.

It is not enough to marvel that 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 country 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 a 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 county 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.