HARRY THE HAT ISSUE 24_Jerkins feature.qxd 15/04/2012 22:28 Page 2
HARRY HACEK
HARRY THE HAT The story of the colorful jockey’s agent Horseracing occupied a prominent place in the culture of old, and racetracks overflowed with enthusiastic crowds. The sport’s stars often became heroes and celebrities, their stories sometimes told on television and radio but more frequently on the front pages of the daily sports sections. And behind the scenes, one of the sport’s most prominent characters, Harry Hacek, flamboyantly wore his hat. WORDS: GARY WEST PHOTOS: HORSEPHOTOS.COM
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LTHOUGH his vision has degenerated, he can still clearly see and recall some of horseracing’s best years. Perhaps that’s why today’s racing, by comparison, seems so bland to him, a relentless buffet of gruel. For more than four decades, at racetracks from California to New York, Hacek was known as Harry the Hat, and until 2005 he worked as an agent for many of the era’s most successful jockeys. When Steve Cauthen found himself mired in a slump a year after winning the Triple Crown on Affirmed, he called Harry the Hat. As it turned out, though, their partnership lasted only a day or so before Robert Sangster signed the jockey to a contract and took him to England. Eddie Delahoussaye, Chris McCarron, Randy Romero, Sandy Hawley, Darrel McHargue, Earlie Fires, Kent Desormeaux, Alex Solis, Larry Snyder, Jorge Velasquez, Robbie Davis, Eddie Maple, Garrett Gomez, Gary Stevens – Hacek worked with them all. “Harry the Hat was a character,” Romero said, his face lighting up with recollection.
“Once the nickname stuck, I switched mainly to baseball caps of different themes. My ploy worked well. To this day, many people who don’t know who Harry Hacek is know me as Harry the Hat” “But he really worked at it, at getting his jock the best mount.” Hacek once bet a bookmaker $7,500 that he could get his jockey the mount on a certain horse pointed to the Kentucky Derby. And then Hacek paid the trainer of the horse $7,500 to give his jockey the mount. Yes, in those days, Hacek was a character, the sort of person only found at racetracks or in Damon Runyon stories. Just ask anybody
who walked the backside in those days about Harry the Hat, and you’ll get a smile, or maybe a smirk, but certainly an anecdote. “Harry had a gift for gab,” said McHargue, who topped the national standings shortly after going to California with Hacek in the late 1970s. “He wouldn’t leave a stone unturned, and he had a way with diplomacy.” In his teens, Hacek made what seemed to a kid a small fortune as a bellhop at the Morris Hotel in Chicago, and then in the winter, he said, he’d travel to Florida to find work at the racetrack walking “hots.” He lived in a tack room but thought it was paradise, for how could life be any better than life at the racetrack? He and Craig Perret were roommates for a time, which is to say they shared a tack room. And it was Perret, Hacek recalled, who first suggested the smooth-talking youngster should be an agent. Hacek soon found his niche. To stand out and distinguish himself from other agents, Hacek began wearing a snappy fedora. That prompted Gene Cilio, a successful trainer in Chicago, to give Hacek the nickname that would become familiar at racetracks nationwide.
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