Book Review: “Bill Hartack–The Bittersweet Life of a Hall of Fame Jockey”

In a perfect world, what would be the traits of the consummate jockey? For starters, how about someone who is intelligent, physically gifted, unabashedly honest, competitively driven, a stickler about honoring calls, and has a determined, diligent work ethic? Add to that the insightfulness to keenly assess Thoroughbreds while keeping the best interest of the animal at heart, and you have just described the horsebacking skill set of the late, great Bill Hartack.

But here's the rub–Hartack, a winner of a record-tying five GI Kentucky Derbies and a Hall-of-Fame inductee by the time he reached age 26–did not exist in a perfect world. Hartack, whose riding career spanned from 1953 to 1980, was a flawed, mercurial human being whose early life was scarred by one tragedy after another, and whose final years were difficult before he died alone and cut off from his family.

As fellow Hall-of-Fame jockey Johnny Longden once said of Hartack, “His riding and ethics are beyond reproach. He's as smart as they come. But where he can get along with horses, he can't seem to with people.” Or, as Chick Lang–the only one out of scores of agents who was able to work with the choleric jockey for more than a month or two without quitting or being fired–bluntly put it when Hartack was at his professional zenith, “He's the leading rider in the country right now but he's dissatisfied all the time. He abuses everyone in the sport, from grooms and exercise boys to trainers….It's his world, and the rest of us are just supposed to let him run it.”

For racing enthusiasts under age 50, the name “Hartack” only resonates in a record-book and yellowed-news-clips sort of way. Thankfully–for both Hartack's legacy and as a way for us to understand an era that too often gets glossed over by the sport's historians–we have author Bill Christine to set the story straight. His new book, “Bill Hartack–The Bittersweet Life of a Hall of Fame Jockey” (McFarland, $35 softcover) reads as both an overdue homage and a cautionary tale about what it's like for a dark, brooding athlete to try and maintain a firm grip on the pinnacle of his profession at the expense of driving off almost everybody who cared about him.

Given the redemption-strewn story arc of his lone-wolf life, it might surprise readers to learn that no one has previously written a comprehensive biography of the enigmatic Hartack. Christine, a multiple-award-winning California-based turf journalist, even admits in the book's preface that this came as a mild shock to him too, but it wasn't for a lack of trying by previous would-be biographers. At least three other people (including Hartack himself) had attempted to get his life story down on paper, and the research from those manuscripts (plus a massive scrapbook trove passed on by Lang's widow and an 80,000-word, three-part serial that ran in Sports Illustrated) helped to provide excellent source material that Christine augmented with his own deep-dive reporting. The result is an unflinching yet compassionate character illumination of Hartack.

Born in the Great Depression, Hartack was the son of a Pennsylvania miner who was known as strict disciplinarian and a no-nonsense overachiever who set records for digging coal. Clever but shy, the younger Hartack forever got picked on because of his diminutive size, but he never backed down from fights. When he was eight, his mother died on Christmas Day from injuries sustained in a car wreck. A year later, the family's house burned down in the middle of the night, leaving Bill, his two sisters, and dad homeless. Hartack would go on to excel in high school, but his career choices appeared limited. His father didn't want him in the mines, he was too young to work in the steel mills, and the United States Navy took a pass on his services because he was too small.

A family friend introduced Hartack to a Charles Town backstretch connection, suggesting riding as a profession in which his stature would work to his advantage. On this first-ever visit to a track, Hartack witnessed a vicious six-horse spill on a frozen surface and vowed never to climb atop the back of a horse.

Over time, Hartack changed his mind and proved a quick study. He rarely needed to be told he made mistakes because he generally figured out his own errors and sought to correct them himself. He wasn't pretty in the saddle, nor was he known as a “quiet” rider. Hartack's style was more about aggression and muscle, although that's not to say he wasn't intelligent about strategy and positioning. He gained notoriety as a rare but natural left-handed whipper; in his prime Hartack was so relentless with his stick that his left forearm was reportedly twice as thick as his right.

In the 1950s, Hartack rose from the “leaky roof” mid-Atlantic circuit to top-dog status in Chicago, New York and Florida. Christine is at his best when laying out the scuttlebutt behind how Hartack acquired (and sometimes frittered away) mounts on prime, big-name Thoroughbreds, especially the tale behind his first Derby winner, Iron Liege, in 1957. Of his five Derby victories–Venetian Way (1960), Decidedly (1962), Northern Dancer (1964), and Majestic Prince (1969) were the others–it's worth noting only Majestic Prince was favored. Hartack carved out a stellar reputation as a rider who could coax the best out of horses that weren't necessarily considered the best on paper.

Yet at the same time he excelled in big-money races, Hartack's antics and attitude were derailing his day-to-day business. He told trainers outright what he thought was wrong with their horses and ordered stakes mounts scratched at the gate if he felt they weren't totally sound. He sometimes didn't show up to take part in winner's circle trophy presentations and often snubbed owners, refusing invitations to dinner because he thought sucking up to them was frivolous. Hartack rarely socialized with rival riders (he said it dulled his competitive edge), routinely berated his agent in public, got into petty arguments over rigid principles with racing officials, called out starters and gate crew members for perceived incompetence, and at least once doused a railbird heckler with water.

On top of all that, Hartack had a nasty, career-long feud with print reporters (television and radio were OK because those forms of media didn't twist his words) that extended to his even refusing interviews after winning Triple Crown races. As his career began to decline, some writers seemed eager to see the caustic jockey get what was coming to him. In 1963, the same week his father was shot to death in an altercation with a girlfriend, Sports Illustrated was putting the finishing touches on a takedown piece titled “Whatever Happened to Bill Hartack?”

Hartack was proud of the fact that even though he had numerous self-made enemies, almost every racetracker agreed he rode $1,500 claiming races as smart and as hard as he rode the Derby. But unfiltered honesty was at once his most admirable trait and the undoing of numerous relationships. “Ask him what he thinks of your wife, and if he thinks your wife is ugly, he'll tell you so,” said one owner who employed him. Hall-of-Fame trainer Jimmy Jones, who gave Hartack the leg up on Iron Liege, rationalized it this way: “He was a headstrong guy. Ill-tempered. You had to be a real diplomat to get along with him. But I put up with it because he could ride. My gosh, he could ride. Best finisher I ever saw in racing. I can't recall him ever getting beat in a photo finish.”

By 1970 Hartack was scrounging for mounts wherever he could find them. A lifetime loner who never married but had plenty of girlfriends, he criss-crossed the country–northern California, Philly, Tampa–smoking three packs of menthols a day while running out of backstretch acquaintances who still tolerated playing racetrack rummy with him. He was self-aware enough to realize his own inflexibility had cost him dearly. “It was very easy for me to have principles when I was on top,” Hartack said as he approached age 40. “Now's the time to see if I can take it.”

Even as Hartack's mounts dried up and the Internal Revenue Service was after him for staggering back-tax debt (it's hinted he was bamboozled by a crooked accountant), Hartack frequented exclusive New York nightclubs with football star Joe Namath and was known as a big tipper who dated pop singer Connie Francis. In 1974, just when it appeared as if Hartack was out of options, he unexpectedly rebooted his career by moving his tack to Hong Kong.

The end of the book includes a poignant tale about how Hartack's true best friend provided a final resting place when Bill died and his kin were difficult to track down. But it's best to leave it up to Christine to artfully wind down Hartack's final decades back in the U.S. as a part-time racing broadcast commentator, irascible racing official, and avid outdoorsman who was more at peace in the solitude of nature than among the company of racetrackers.

“That's just the way he was,” one acquaintance explained after Hartack died. “It's a shame, when you think about what a valuable asset to the sport he could have been, as a spokesman, for a lot of years. But his personality just wouldn't let him do it.”