| RACING |
REMEMBER ING RAND Y ROMERO Bill Heller
H
all of Fame jockey Randy Romero began winning races when he was nine years old—races at the bush tracks of rural Louisiana before hundreds of witnesses with lots of money on the line. If it was too much pressure for a little kid, he never showed it. He rode the rest of his life that way, seemingly impervious to the pressure of big stakes races and in defiance of a litany of serious injuries that would lead to life-long illness that he battled until the day he passed on August 29th. He was 13 when he fell while working a horse and fractured his kneecap. Three years later, he had his first serious accident at Evangeline Downs. Another horse came over on Randy’s horse, who went down. Randy was trampled on by multiple horses. It punctured his lung, liver and kidney; and doctors would have to remove his spleen. He was unconscious for two days. When he awoke in the hospital, his mother begged him to stop riding. He told her, “Momma, I want to be a jockey.” He was born to ride. When he retired at the end of 1999, he was the 26th leading jockey ever with 4,294 victories despite missing some six years from injuries. He won 25 riding titles at 10 different tracks including Arlington Park, Belmont Park, Fair Grounds and Keeneland. What would his numbers have been if he only missed two or three years? Or if he hadn’t been nearly burned to death in 1983 in a freak accident in a sweatbox? Randy flicked off a piece of rubbing alcohol on his shoulder and it hit a light bulb and caused the sweatbox to explode. Randy suffered second and third degree burns over 60 percent of his body. Doctors gave him a 40-percent chance of surviving. He was back riding in 3 ½ months and won his first race back on a horse trained by his brother Gerald. Randy will always be linked to two great fillies he rode: the undefeated Personal Ensign and the ill-fated Go for Wand. Randy’s incredible ride on Personal Ensign in the 1988 Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Churchill Downs—when, in the final start of her career, she struggled early yet got up to edge Winning Colors by a nose—was voted by fans in 2008 as the best moment of the 25-year history of the Breeders’ Cup. She was the first undefeated major horse with more than nine starts in 80 years. Go for Wand’s career also ended, and tragically her life, just two years later when she went down in the same race—the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Belmont Park.
10
TRAINERMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 54
Eclipse Sportswire
Randy loved the filly. He said she would grunt like a pig just before she entered the starting gate in every race, announcing her presence. Randy said he’d never heard a horse ever do that. Randy suffered injuries from that fall—hairline fractures of his shoulder and eight ribs. The injuries were initially misdiagnosed by two doctors, and Randy lived with pain from those injuries for a year and a half. “I was never the same after that,” Randy once told me. But he was the same person. He never asked, “Why me?” Even when his health got much worse. In February 2002, he nearly died from kidney damage. Doctors were ready to do a kidney transplant, but they discovered only 25 percent of his liver was functioning. Without knowing it, Randy had been carrying Hepatitis C—a virus he might have caught from a tainted blood transfusion during the treatment for his burns from the sweatbox explosion 19 years earlier. Randy was put on dialysis, three four-hour treatments every week for the rest of his life—17 years of that routine right up to his final days. I accompanied him to a fourhour treatment in New Orleans as I worked on his 2010 biography, Randy Romero’s Remarkable Ride. In the waiting room at the dialysis center, where there were many patients in worse shape than him, he was just another person. They didn’t seem to know that he was one of the greatest jockeys ever, and he never bothered to tell them. Instead they just traded stories of what it took to cope with all the problems each one of them endured. Randy was the bravest, sweetest, most upbeat person I ever knew. I was honored to write his biography and delighted that we became close friends. He remained upbeat no matter how many times he’d been to the hospital—a number that kept growing as his health deteriorated. Stomach cancer had been added to all his problems. Yet he’d tell me, “Can’t complain.” In the book’s dedication to his “precious granddaughter Mia,” he wrote, “You have brought such joy to me as your grandfather, Mia; let it be known that you should always follow your heart, even if it does not turn out for the best. There will always be bumps and left-handed turns throughout life, but always remember that you must never give up.” Lord knows, he never did. Randy’s final weeks, especially the last one, were brutal. His brother Gerald said Randy fought death until his final breath. Speaking on the phone with him the day after, Gerald and I sobbed like babies. We consoled ourselves with the realization that finally, Randy was free of pain. Rest in peace, my brother.