Issue date: September 29, 1999
By BARBARA WOOD
Talk to Russell Baze about what he does for a living and it's easy to get the impression that the man is nothing special -- just someone doing a job he loves with modest success.
"I've just been real lucky," says the winningest jockey in the country, who lives quietly in Woodside with his wife and four kids. "Just happy to have the success I've had. I don't think I'm better than anyone else -- I've just been lucky to ride faster horses."
But hang around the racetrack at Bay Meadows in San Mateo and you'll hear enough talk about "Russell" to realize that this guy is actually the superstar of Bay Area racing.
"People bet on Russell Baze, whether the horse has a chance or not," says Bay Meadows track photographer William Vassar.
If you want to hear superlatives about Russell Baze, though, you definitely have to talk to someone other than Russell Baze. Former jockey Art Lobato, who now does public relations work for Bay Meadows, will do.
"The guy is amazing," says Mr. Lobato, who describes Mr. Baze as a "very humble and shy" person who "never gets high on himself."
Mr. Lobato, who used to race with Mr. Baze before a track accident ended his career, can give you a whole litany of reasons why Mr. Baze wins, over and over and over again:
"Because of his dedication, because of his work ethic, because of his hands, because of his seat on the horse."
And then there's the fact that Mr. Baze just plain "hates to lose," Mr. Lobato says. "I don't know a more competitive person in the business," he says. "He never gives up on a horse."
And, says Mr. Lobato, "Russell has no fear."
Stuart Whittelsey of Woodside, who with Mr. Baze is a member of the Mounted Patrol of San Mateo County, says Mr. Baze has a knack for bringing out the full potential of a horse.
"He has a way with horses," Mr. Whittelsey says. "I don't know what he tells them, but he enters into a pact with them and they win."
Just looking at the numbers associated with Mr. Baze's career is pretty awe-inspiring all in itself. He's won more than 6,700 races -- a figure bested by only seven jockeys in history, some of whom he's a sure bet to catch up with. Mr. Baze, 41, has won more than 400 races every year since 1992, a feat no other jockey, anywhere, ever, has done more than three years running.
And he plans to keep riding for the foreseeable future. "I'm still going strong -- I've got no intention of quitting," he says. After all, Willie Shoemaker, who tops that list of wins with 8,833, didn't retire until he was 57.
Horses with Mr. Baze on board have won more than $94.5 million. (He gets a 10 percent cut, with 25 percent of that going to his agent, Ray Harris.) His biggest single win was last year with the $600,000 Jim Beam Stakes at Turfway Park in Florence, Kentucky, on Event of the Year.
Although Mr. Baze confines the vast majority of his racing to the Northern California Circuit -- Bay Meadows, Golden Gate Fields and the county fairs -- his feats have not gone unnoticed. Mr. Baze was inducted into the Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame in August and has he won just about every racing award he can, including a Special Eclipse Award in 1995 -- his fourth year of more than 400 wins -- and the Isaac Murphy Award for having the best percentage of wins in the nation, which he's won every year since it was first given in 1995.
In Northern California, Mr. Baze just can't be beat. He's won the riding championship at every major Northern California race meeting series he's competed in since 1981, including 21 titles at Bay Meadows and 20 at Golden Gate Fields.
It could be that part of the reason for his incredible success is that Mr. Baze, quite literally, has racing in his blood. His grandmother successfully raced horses for years in the Blue Mountain circuit in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Mr. Baze says his grandmother was "4-foot-nothing" and "they used whoever was light enough" to race.
His uncle Earl and his father, Joe, were also jockeys. Joe rode for 20 years and then opened a training farm in Granger, Washington, where Russell grew up. He and his three brothers and sister rode the ponies and cleaned the stalls before school each day.
At age 13, Russell began seriously racing, and he loved it from the start. "It was exciting," he says.
As soon as he was old enough, at 16, he got his racing license and began his professional career. He rode weekends and summers while in school, receiving $17 for each horse he rode.
He didn't win right away, or even soon thereafter. Not until his 13th start, on September 16, 1974, on Oregon Warrior at the Yakima Meadows Racetrack in Washington, did he come in first.
But he was already hooked. "I was having fun," he says. Once he finished high school he began riding full time, with never a thought of doing anything else.
Although Mr. Baze was successful in the Northwest, he came to California to ride because the weather allowed a longer racing season. In 1978 he met his wife, Tami, the daughter of horse trainer and former jockey Jack Arterburn. They married the next year and put down roots here.
The Bazes have four children, daughters Trinity, 19, Brandi, 17, and Cassie, 14, and son Gable, 8. They've lived in Woodside for seven years, and before that lived in Portola Valley for three years.
While Mr. Baze says his chosen career is "fun," horse racing is a brutal profession. On September 10 a rider was killed in Southern California, one of the average of three riders a year who is killed, Mr. Baze says.
On the race track, an ambulance follows right behind the horses, every race.
Mr. Baze's own list of injuries "not counting concussions and bruises and sprains" sounds daunting -- a broken bone in the neck (three weeks off), two compression fractures in the spine (six weeks off), a broken pelvis (three weeks off), a torn disc in the back (no time off), and broken little toes on both feet, from hitting the sides of the starting gate (no time off).
But most jockeys, even those with decades less in the business, have had many, many more injuries.
"I've been lucky," Mr. Baze says.
Others say, however, that he knows how to keep a horse, and himself, out of trouble.
The other brutal thing about a job that involves perching oneself on the back of a high-strung animal that weighs about 10 times what the rider does is -- size matters.
Horses are handicapped by the amount of weight they carry. "They adjust the weight so that theoretically all the horses hit the finish line at the same time," Mr. Baze says. If a jockey weighs too much, he just can't ride.
Mr. Baze is 5 feet, 4 inches, on the tall side for a jockey, he says, and he weighs 113 pounds.
To keep at that weight, he says, he allows himself to eat what he wants, but in limited amounts. When pressed, he admits that limited amount is usually a sports drink or orange juice and a candy bar to hold him until dinner time.
That means he often works 10 to 12-hour days, starting at 6:30 a.m., exercising horses at the track, riding in six or seven races and getting home at 5:30 or 6, on nothing but a drink and a candy bar -- no breakfast, no lunch.
"I'm pretty hungry by the time I get home," he says.
His body fat, measured at an annual physical, is usually around 5 percent. One year, he says, it was 4.4 percent.
It is easy for a jockey to get run down, Mr. Baze says. "It is a very physically demanding job." But, he says, he takes his vitamins and "I feel great."
Mr. Baze says that as a jockey, success breeds success. Because he's a known winner, he gets his pick of mounts. Mr. Lobato says 90 percent of the trainers ask to have Mr. Baze ride their horses. That means his agent can pick and choose from the horses he feels are most likely to win, and least likely to cause trouble for Mr. Baze.
And because Mr. Baze works out the horses at the track each day, he knows a lot about them and their current condition.
That's one reason he came back to Northern California after his only long-term venture into a more lucrative racing market in Southern California. He was moderately successful, but when he came back from the layoff after breaking his pelvis, "things just weren't working out for me."
Matters were made worse by the fact that his agent didn't make the move with him, and he decided to return.
"I could have stayed and done all right," he says.
It would probably be hard to find anyone to disagree.
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