Mike Smith © Benoit Photo
The amazing Mr. Mike Smith has a birthday this Sunday. But hold on a minute and hear him out. He knows what you’re thinking, but he’s here now to let you know just what’s really real.
For the past decade (and for years before that) the Hall of Fame jockey – the man who has put together a stellar racing career that is virtually unmatched – has been heralded for the fact that though he has been riding his way through his 50s, he’s still out there alongside the young guys and still showing them more than a thing or two along the way.
And this year was supposed to be the one – the one where he hit the BIG SIX O.
But hold on….there’s more to the story.
So let’s go back to Smith’s beginnings. He was born in a New Mexico town named Roswell (which became ‘famous’ for a supposed UFO crash there in the 1940s), then raised in a farming town called Dexter about 15 miles away. For a short spell, his father was a jockey. And he had an uncle who broke and trained horses. From very early on, he was into the horses.
“I rode match races at 11,” he remembers. “We’d ride in New Mexico and Texas, too. There was a little circuit. They’d bring some Quarter Horses up from Mexico and, man, were they fast. I saw All American Futurity winners get beat by Mexican match horses.”
So now Smith is 15 and he’s getting serious about wanting to ride Thoroughbreds. He goes to apply for a jockey license and is told he has to have a legal guardian sign for him. His uncle volunteers and next thing you know he’s got a license to ride.
“Back then, they were a lot more loose about it,” he recalls. “I was only a couple of months away (from 16, the ‘legal’ age to ride) and it was no big deal. Over the years I tried a bunch of times to get it corrected, but I was told over and over ‘Hey, you’re in the system that way and it would be too much trouble to correct it.’ So I just left it alone.”
Well, now he’s an almost-16-year-old with a license and next he needs to get a horse to ride. He tries and tries around the backstretch of Santa Fe Downs, but nobody was willing to give the little kid (“I only weighed about 100 pounds”) a shot.
That was until he made a good impression at the barn of a trainer named Wilson Brown – and more specifically with his son, Todd
Wilson Brown, now 82 and retired in Stillwater, OK, remembers clearly the circumstances around Smith’s first winner.
“I had a nice enough New Mexican-bred horse named Future Man,” the former trainer says. “I’d turned him out for the winter, fired his legs, got some good works in him and we were ready to run.
“My son, Todd, was giving me a push on this young apprentice that would come around the barn. ‘He’s so polite,’ he said. (Smith remembers back then: “I was ‘Yes, sir, No, sir, Yes, ma’m’ to everyone.”)
“So,” Brown recalls, “I said all right and we gave him a shot.”
And on June 12, 1982, Mike Smith and Future Man both became winners.
“After that, business picked up,” Smith states. “I rode a couple more winners, but I knew I still didn’t know enough. I’d only been riding Quarter Horses ‘til then and I didn’t want to start my ‘bug’ until I was really ready to ride.”
Then another touch of kismet blew Smith’s way. He’s made a friend on the backstretch in a successful apprentice named O.A. Martinez. And when Smith heard that O.A. was going to Louisiana Downs with a string of horses for trainer J.J. Pletcher, he asked to come along.
“They said I could and it was a real experience for me,” Smith recollected. “I stayed there for a month and just watched. I watched everything. They had some very good riders there back then – Larry Snyder, John Lively – and I took it all in. I learned a lot.”
Oh, and as a side note, the car trip to Bossier City, Louisiana, had an interesting makeup. J.J. did the driving and O.A. rode shotgun. In the back was young Mr. Smith and another teenager – fellow by the name of Todd Pletcher. Two Hall of Famers side by side on their way to learning about horse racing. You can’t make this stuff up, paley.
“After I got back to New Mexico, I was ready to go,” Smith stated, “and things took off. I was riding winners, winners, winners. Then I headed to Arkansas, Nebraska, Kentucky – all over the Midwest. After that I went to New York in 1989.”
His star rose high in New York and subsequently he came to California in 2001. By then his exploits and reputation had grown so large that the Hall of Fame came calling in 2003.
Name something special in racing for a rider and Smith has done it: more than 5,700 winning rides; more than $355 million in purses won; a Triple Crown winner; a two-time Kentucky Derby winner; winner of the most Breeders’ Cup races; more than 660 graded stakes with, amazingly, more than 240 of them Grade Is. The list is unprecedented.
You can put his name next to that of some of the sports champions of champions. “Big Money Mike” (a well-earned nickname) was the pilot for the likes of superstars such as Holy Bull, Lure, Sky Beauty, Heavenly Prize, Royal Delta, Shared Belief, Drosselmeyer, Prairie Bayou, Skip Away, Azeri, Arrogate, Songbird and Justify.
And then there’s just about everyone’s favorite – the mighty mare Zenyatta, the star of stars and the one who makes the rider’s heart warm every time he gives her a thought. (“Un-be-lieve-a-bal.”)
So anyway, back to the point here: Mike Smith still rolling after all these years. He told our Notes writer Jim Charvat last year that one of the keys to his longevity is that he “sucked at golf.”
As a young rider, he’d go out with his fellow jocks on an off day and try putting the golf ball in the hole. He wasn’t very good at it.
“Finally I said that’s it – no more golf, I’m going to the gym,” he declared. “I was so competitive I had to find another way to go. And I’ve been in the gym ever since.”
His two-hour gym workouts have become legendary. He’s got a personal trainer at Del Mar and another up at Santa Anita. Young apprentices come around and try to keep up with the “old man” in the gym. Not a one has.
How does he do it after all these years?
“It’s not just one thing,” he says. He notes the model of Claiborne Farms: ‘Just do the usual unusually well.’
“Go back to the basics,” he states. “If you’re a professional athlete you’re going to have slumps. All athletes do. And that’s when you have to put those basics in play; you have to do them really well.”
He also credits his Mom (who didn’t want him to be a rider; she wanted him to stay in school) for this bit of wisdom: ‘Be careful who you hang out with. Always surround yourself with good people.” He says he remembers that one again and again and does his best to make sure that it happens.
As he starts to near the possible end of his riding days, Smith still is reaching out for that one last hurrah. “I want to win one more Derby. Three would be nice,” he says.
“Bob (Baffert) just told me he’s got a 2-year-old for me,” Smith offers with a smile. “That gets me excited. One more time would be perfect.”
So if you see Mike this weekend, offer him a ‘Happy Birthday’ salute. But don’t be saying “Happy 60.” This one is, in fact, No. 59, and he wants everyone to know that that is absolutely true.
And it’s also true that despite the years, he’s still got that fire in his belly. He’ll continue to take on teenagers and 20-year-olds and show them how it’s done in a scenario that couldn’t possibly exist in any other sport. But then, of course, we know the reason why: there is only one Mike Smith.