Cauthen: A Born Winner

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Cauthen tries to explain: "It's in the hands. Your hands are how you communicate with the horse. When you're setting down on the final drive, that's how you keep in touch with him. Some jocks can communicate with horses better than others. The horses sense it through the hands." He pauses and then shrugs: "Who knows how they sense it?" Cauthen admits that horses seem to remember him not by sight but when they feel him in the saddle and the touch of his man-size hands on the reins. Paddock punters watch with amazement as colts, skittish during saddling and fractious in the walking ring, suddenly relax when Cauthen goes up in the irons.

Cauthen broke in when he was 16 at nearby little tracks like Kentucky's Latonia, where the horseflesh was less than prime and the riding more than a little rough. He handled that trial by guile and nerve and then moved on to New York's Aqueduct race track, the Big Apple. He was riding "bugboy light," a 5-lb.. weight allowance granted apprentice jockeys. But on the home turf of Angel Cordero Jr., Ron Turcotte 'and Jorge Velasquez, that was the only allowance he got.

His 1977 racing year was like none the horse world had ever known. His mounts won more than $6 million in purses, a record. He won 487 races. In one incredible week, he won 23 of 54 races, and people began betting not on the horses but on their rider. Cauthen was clearly something to tug at a horseman's heart, a manifestation of genius, present palpable and future prodigious, that occurs only rarely in any human endeavor. He was a born winner.

Cauthen left such flights to others; he has settled into a life that he clearly loves, reports TIME Correspondent Peter Stoler. He is addicted to the track and to track people. Cauthen often leaves his bachelor's apartment in Floral Park, Long Island, before dawn and drives his 1977 Mercury Cougar to the track, whether or not he is scheduled to work a horse. He breakfasts in the track kitchen, then kills the hours between daylight and early afternoon post time in the jockeys' quarters. He changes into white breeches, boots and T shirt and studies the Daily Racing Form to dope out the day's competition. Cauthen also spends a good deal of time with his agent, Lenny Goodman, a shrewd, showy horseman up from the streets of Brooklyn. (Cauthen's earnings, about $750,000 in two years so far, go home to his father, who has a New York financier investing the money in conservative stocks and bonds.)

When it is race time, the jockeys stride out of the locker room, most flicking their whips with bravado. Cauthen goes calmly. Decked out in the splashing silks of his trade, he seems terribly young, frail, unknowing—until you look at his eyes, when those eyes are examining a horse he is about to ride. Then there is an eerie, almost existential quality to his face, an absorption so total that his life becomes encompassed by it. For the twelve minutes required to mount, parade to the post and, finally, run the race, the ride is Steve Cauthen.