The Harder They Fall (31 page)
Read The Harder They Fall Online
Authors: Gary Stromberg
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the
whole world, and lose his own soul? or what
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
—Matthew 16:26
(jockey)
P
AT
D
AY LEARNED
to ride bareback as a boy on his parents’ small ranch in Eagle, Colorado. His father was an auto-body repairman who had been raised on a ranch in South Dakota. Pat helped his father break and train horses for neighboring ranchers. He was a natural-born rider with an uncanny ability to relate to horses. After high school, Pat managed a gas station and, on weekends, rode in rodeos. It was by riding bulls that he learned how to fall and get back up again. This is a talent that would serve him well as a jockey and as an alcoholic/drug addict.
I met Pat for our interview at his condominium in southern Florida, while he was rehabbing a shoulder injury prior to the winter racing season at Gulfstream Park. Pat was about to resume riding after a six-month layoff. He was eager to get back in the saddle, and I could feel his excitement as we spoke. Pat’s story is flamboyant, but he tells it quietly. He seems to want to minimize what addiction did to him and to focus on the part of his life when he found salvation and got back on track.
Coincidentally, my sobriety date, January 2, 1983, was the date of a wild binge for this then-young jockey. I was throwing in the towel, while Pat was going the other direction. Both of us had long runs, and abused drugs and alcohol for many years, but Pat hit the wall without ever getting thrown from the saddle.
Pat found sobriety through his religious conversion, which he speaks of with great enthusiasm. After we finished the interview, Pat invited me to go to a prayer meeting with him. Looking for an opportunity to experience his world, I readily agreed, thinking that we’d either be going to someone’s house or perhaps a local church. I said, “I’m Jewish, but I’m happy to come with you to this thing.” He nodded. “Good.”
I took my own rental car, as I planned to continue on to my hotel after the meeting. Following Pat in his new Chrysler convertible, I noticed his license plate says “JESUS.” We drove for what seemed like a very long time, passing some unique attractions along the way: a sushi diner where you can get sushi for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and an intimidating-looking roller coaster situated only a few feet from the highway. It looks like the old, wooden Cyclone at Coney Island. The hand-painted sign says “Ride All Day for $10.”
Finally we arrived at an extremely large parking lot, the kind you find at a major sporting event. Pulling in behind Pat, I observed a theater-like structure with a huge marquee proclaiming the evening’s prayer meeting. I thought we were going to a Bible study with a few friends, but it turned out to be a full-scale revival with more than four thousand loyal followers. The meeting was fire, brimstone, and spectacle. Standing next to Pat, watching him completely caught up in the spirit of his God, I was truly impressed by his dedication and devotion.
Pat is a terrific example of what someone living a sober life can achieve. About a year after our interview, I saw Pat on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon at Saratoga Racetrack in New York. He is still one of the premier jockeys in the country. To be at the top of this demanding game at more than fifty years of age is quite an accomplishment. I’m sure if you asked this humble man, he’d tell you he owes it all to Jesus and sobriety.
I was raised in Eagle, Colorado, in a great environment. My mother and father weren’t opposed to having a drink on occasion, but they were not drinkers. My father was home every night. He wasn’t an alcoholic that we had to pull out of the bars; he was probably the most responsible man I’ve known. If my father told you something, you could bank on it. He was a person of integrity, and the environment in which I was raised was opposed to over-abuse of anything.
I didn’t have my first drink till I was a junior in high school. I started drinking a little bit of beer with kids on the weekends and didn’t foresee it being a problem. After I graduated, it slowly became a problem, an every-night thing.
Two years after I graduated high school, I got introduced to the racing profession. In Arizona I went through the trenches, so to speak, and in July of 1973, I began riding races. I started doing very good almost immediately. My life-style at the time was going to the bar as soon as the races were over, partying until all hours of the night, and then getting up and going to work in the morning, going to the races in the afternoon, and starting right over again. It didn’t seem to have a real negative effect in that I was able to do what I was doing and do it with tremendous success.
After I’d been riding for about a year, drugs started becoming readily available. I went from drinking daily to messing with drugs. I began smoking dope and using little speed pills known as “white crosses” or “bennies.” The next winter I was riding down in New Orleans, which is a pretty wild town, and the partying continued. In the spring of 1975, in Chicago, I had drug paraphernalia and some drugs in my car. I was searched and they were found. I was suspended for fifteen days and put on probation for six months. You’d have thought that would have been a wake-up call of some kind, but it wasn’t. Success, especially in the sporting arena, can lead you to believe you’re above the law. You can get out of a lot of jackpots, which just perpetuates the problem.
By the grace of God, I was able to regroup after that. I got my business back together and started doing good again. Then cocaine became my drug of choice. As time wore on and I continued to do well, the thrill of victory on the racetrack and the success I was having didn’t seem to satisfy me. That
gave me a good excuse for drinking and doing drugs. I told myself, “I’m in a high-stress environment, and I need this to unwind.” When you want to do something bad enough, you can make some pretty good excuses why you could or should do that. That’s what I was doing at the time.
Doing coke made me feel I was bigger and better. I remember going into the jocks’ room with coke on me, but determined I wasn’t going to use that day. I would go out and ride two or three races and wouldn’t do good. So then I would succumb to the temptation. I’d do some coke, and it seemed like the next horse would win. Which further convinced me that “Yeah, that’s my go-to medication. That’s what I need.” There again it’s a lie right out of the pits of hell because it takes you down the road to destruction.
I’ve ridden considerably better without the drugs than with them, but while I did cocaine and rode, I had myself believing I was much superior when I indulged. It was a false sense of bravado. Eventually I phased out the drugs, but I was drinking every night. I was a blackout drinker.
I failed to tell you that I was raised in a Christian home. I was confirmed in the Lutheran faith. We went to church. I wasn’t living a Christian life-style yet considered myself a believer—there was never any doubt on my part of that. In 1982 I was the leading rider in the country, but as time wore on, that success didn’t hold the meaning or feeling that I thought it would. That sent me searching for answers and asking some serious questions: “Exactly what am I here for?” “What is life all about?” “What is my purpose in all of this?” I remember vividly going out at night and looking up at the sky, at the immense heavens, and saying, “Where do I fit into this picture? There’s got to be more to life than what I’m doing.”
I think probably in large part due to the fact that I’d been raised in a Christian home, taking that upbringing for granted, ultimately that would be the last place I would look. I thought I was a Christian, and that didn’t seem to be the answer I was looking for. Sort of like in that old country western song—“looking for love in all the wrong places”—only I was doing that for the meaning of life. I was looking behind every bush and under every rock, figuratively speaking. Yet I think God had been working on me ever since I’d gone to church, that I was raised the right way, but
during the early years when I made a name for myself in racing, I kept patting myself on the back. The fame and the abuse had developed a horribly destructive mind-set. My ego had got more and more out of hand, and I was not listening.
Where cocaine gave me a false sense of superiority, I never drank and rode. I’ve come to realize that drugs of any kind are mind-altering merely in that they send you in the direction you’re already going. People think if you drink it will lift your spirits. I believe it plays as a catalyst. For example, if you are down and depressed, alcohol drives you farther down. Now if you go out for an evening and are having a great time and have a couple of drinks to loosen up, it could enhance your evening. But I wouldn’t recommend that, you see; I’d recommend instead you just go natural and enjoy it, just have fun and try to live each moment to the fullest.
There was a cartoon some years ago captioned “The Power of the Martini.” The first frame depicted a bar with a man at one end and a woman at the other, both not very handsome or attractive, not blessed in the area of looks. And it shows one martini and they’ve changed and are looking better. Two, and they look a lot better. Then three. By the fourth martini, they’re glamorous—you’d think it was some god and goddess sitting there. The power of the martini to change your perceptions: I’ve thought about it often, how drugs and alcohol mess with our perception of people, places, and situations.
In 1983 I was the leading rider again, but by now I knew that it was going to be a short-term satisfaction for a long-term problem. It was not going to be the joy, peace, and contentment that I was seeking. But we got the title, and then in late January while vacationing with my family in Colorado, my brother and his wife and my wife and I all tied one on. We continued to mix it up pretty good, drinking beer, wine, and I don’t know what all. In the aftermath I got quite sick, so I didn’t drink anything. On January 27 I flew from Colorado to Miami, where I was scheduled to ride in a race on the twenty-eighth at Hialeah Race Track. I arrived in late evening. I was traveling by myself and checked into the hotel near the Miami International Airport.
When I got into the room, I turned on the TV set, as is a habit of mine,
oftentimes just for company or noise, and went about getting ready for bed. I went about hanging up my clothes, when I noticed that I had tuned into a televised crusade of Jimmy Swaggart, the evangelist. Because I felt that I was a Christian, I didn’t think what he had to offer was what I was looking for. I certainly wasn’t going to sit and listen to some Bible-thumper preacher. Really at that point in time, I thought that to be vocal about your faith was for women, children, and wimps! It was a sign of weakness in my opinion. You had to “be a man,” to have a go-it-alone kind of attitude.
So I flipped through the channels and nothing got my attention. I turned the TV set off and went to bed, and when my head hit the pillow, I went sound asleep. This was highly unusual—without several drinks as a sedative, it would ordinarily have been a difficult chore—because that evening I was probably as sober as I’d been in a long time. It was an incredibly deep sleep, and when I awoke, I felt I’d been sleeping all night. I woke to the distinct feeling that I wasn’t by myself in that hotel room, which initially was reason for concern. I sat up in bed and looked around. I couldn’t see anything, but I felt a definite presence there with me.