Cauthen: A Born Winner

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A fine ride, such as Cauthen's Preakness win, is composed of many parts, most of them beyond quantification. Horsemen sputter and maunder when asked to specify reasons for the success of the few truly great riders. Seat and balance, a clocklike sense of pace, strength, intelligence, courage, they say, and, most important, most mysterious of all, "the hands"—instinctive, intricately articulate, the medium of communication between horse and rider. Sometime, somehow, someone gets it all and then they say: "He's a natural."

Jockeys are born into all kinds of backgrounds—Arcaro to the tough streets of ethnic Cincinnati, Jorge Velasquez to the barrios of Panama—but a handicapper of naturals would take odds on the Walton, Ky., home of Tex arid Myra Cauthen. Walton is small (pop. 2,200) and Bluegrass (60 miles north of Lexington). Horse country is one place where a kid could grow up small and not develop an inferiority complex. He could imagine himself a jockey. And when his father is a blacksmith and his mother a second-generation owner and a trainer, when he looks forward to celebrating his Derby Week birthday every year at Churchill Downs, the dream doesn't seem so farfetched. If, in addition, he has been sitting on horses since his toddler's legs were long enough to splay across a saddle, he would have a natural head start.

Much has been made of the fact that Cauthen was preparing for the jockey's craft at the age of twelve. His zeal was tireless: flailing bales of hay to practice his whip technique, huddling with his father over race films to decipher the art of moving a horse up in traffic or setting him down for the stretch run, crouching along the rail at the starting gate to learn how to navigate those first chaotic moments of a race. At 13, he was practicing yoga to develop his concentration—yoga at 13!—because he knew he would need it. "All I thought about was riding. In school, I thought about riding. On weekends, I thought about riding. I thought about riding all the time."

But perhaps even more crucial training for Cauthen began years before. He was reared, his mother says, "to be polite to everyone and to have good table manners." Put it another way: to be a gentleman, to be a gentle person. Human beings may or may not detect this quality, but a Thoroughbred race horse —willful and fragile, high-strung and intuitive—certainly does.

Young, very young, Cauthen also accompanied his father on his smithing rounds at nearby race tracks. He began to help calm animals unnerved by shoeing or perturbed by a stranger's presence. He started to use his hands, and in his hands, horses relaxed. Whether coming from God, genes or good manners, this is the priceless gift for a jockey, the difference between wrestling a horse around a track, only to blunt his spirit for the run, and rating him kindly, handily, through the pace, while conserving enough of his energy for the stretch drive. Steve had the gift even before he had the jockey's dream. Says Tex Cauthen: "He had horses bred in him as a small child and was a good horseman from a very young age. He could make them do whatever he wanted."