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She Who Laughs Last . . . . . . laughs lustily, which is just what Julie Krone can do as she sits astride the horse racing worldBy Gary Smith
MONDAY, JAN. 8, 1979 -- Our cats got put to sleep today. They all had luceimea. I cried (all 7 of them), Rug Rat and Blue my two favorites dead. I can't believe it. I loved them so much (thats life). TUESDAY, FEB. 20, 1979 -- I could not even sleep last night. I'm reading The Lady Is a Jock. It's wild I can't even go to sleep. When I do I have dreams that wake me up (about racing). Sleep with my whip. I've got my alarm set for 4:00 so I can breeze my horse in the morning. Got all my close in the bathroom. I'm gonna get up, ride, take a bath, eat, then go to school and not miss the bus. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 21, 1979 -- Boy I felt lousy today. The kid I'm going with (Curt) doesn't think I like him no more but I do. Most girls when they're going with a guy dream about them. I keep dreaming of a horse race in slow motion over and over and every time I get to pick out what I did wrong. It was so nete I still can't sleep. It's t errible. (No it's not.) SUNDAY, MARCH 4, 1979 -- Mom told Doc Shaub that I was gonna be a jockey. He told her to go home and hit me on the head.
I don't need a education it's all just a bunch of coplacation It's an hour past midnight, when her mother comes home from bartending. Sometimes on nights like this, when it's late and Julie Krone is scared and alone and waiting at the window, she finds the shirt her mother wore during the day when they were outside together, working with the horses, and she puts it to her nose and smells it till she hears the wheels of the pickup crunching the gravel on the driveway. But no, not tonight, she's too excited for that. At sunup, they plan to leave for Churchill Downs. By sundown, if she's lucky, her career as a jockey will begin. She is 15 years old, 16 if you believe the birth certificate her mother faked so Julie could get work at the track. Just typed the word April, cut it out, laid it over the July on the certificate. Xeroxed it and, suddenly, Julie was legal. Neat, huh? Just remember that, kid: If you want to do something bad enough, there are no such things as fences. The door on the pickup slams and her mother walks into the house, smelling of cigarette smoke from the bar. They hug and pull back and look at each other -- yes, of course, the mother should tell the daughter to go to bed now and sleep so they can start the six-hour trip to Kentucky early -- and in no time they're on their horses riding up Oxbow Road, 1:30 in the morning. Julie's on her Arabian, Ralph, breathing in the blossoms on the apple trees and all the new leaves, smelling the land waking up the way it does in Michigan in the spring, feeling so sad and so happy all at once that she can't tear the two apart because who knows when she'll see Ralph or her dogs or her cats or her friends or even her mother again after tomorrow? It's you and me against the world, Julie -- that's what her mother has been telling her ever since the divorce last year. And now it's going to be just Julie. The moon is a sliver in the sky, and the night is quiet, just eight hooves on the road. Julie leans down and hugs Ralph so hard that he snorts. And then she hears her mother start to sing, real soft, the rhythm of the words the same as the beat of the hooves. Julie loves to memorize songs, she loves to write poetry. She listens to a couple of verses, then the two of them are singing together.
Oh, Give me land, lots of land They ride the horses back to the barn. Julie touches Ralph one more time between the eyes. It's almost 3 a.m. She looks at her mom, her mom looks at her. They throw some clothes in the pickup and head for Kentucky. Dreamers. Maybe that's all Judi Krone and her daughter ever were, dreamers. A mom and a little girl who could sit on the back of a horse and gaze at the moon till they lost their senses. Is there anything wrong with that? Maybe there is; Judi Krone's not even sure anymore. You shoppers who scolded her for letting her baby stand in the grocery cart and yank things off the shelves; you neighbors who complained that she let her little girl run wild; you parents who warn your children not to put all their eggs in one basket; you mothers of mediocrity and fathers of the 50th percentile, tell her, did she do it all wrong? Maybe she did. Maybe she should have taught her daughter about fences. Judi Krone is 48 now, and her hair has come back a different color than it was before the chemotherapy. Oh yeah, sure, the bellyful of cancer that was supposed to kill her three years ago seems to be in remission (it's been a year since she has screwed up the courage to go back to the doctor and find out), but sometimes when she looks up these days, all she sees around her are fences. Maybe she should have made her daughter wear shoes and shirts, maybe she should have told her she couldn't ride her horse a half-mile, alone -- at age three. You tell her; she's not sure. All those bitter times her family has been through because they didn't believe in fences . . . and all those sweet times when she's watched that little bit of a girl bring a 1,200-pound animal down the stretch, whipping it through a hole that's barely a hole, shooting black sparks of mud back into the eyes of all the men and horses pursuing her. All those nights when Judi Krone sat in her camper in central Florida and heard people like David Letterman and Johnny Carson say, ". . . the first woman ever to win five races in one day at a New York track, the first woman ever to win a riding title at a major track, one of three American jockeys ever to win six races on one card, the fourth-leading jockey in the country in 1988, the best female rider in history, with $20 million in purses won and more than 1,200 trips to the winner's circle, all by the age of 25. . . . Here she is, Julie Krone!" Mom -- Oh mom it must be 2:30 3:00 in the morning. I want to call you again but I know some one would get up and say what are you doing. I'd say talking to my mom. They'd say oh man you can't do that, your gonna wake someone up. I feel so awful I can't think of anything happy but you. Right now I would be home I would hug you and I wouldn't be sad any more. Oh mom I feel so terrible. . . . Mom I feel so alone right now. Everyone is so nice and loves me so but it stops at a certain point. Like I would want to go upstairs right now and crawl in Donna's arms but she would think I was being childish. I mean she wouldn't tell me but that low opion would be there. Oh god I want to be home! P.S. I need to buy some winter close. I need pimple stuff from doctor Wilson. I need my pillow. I need my red coat. And I need you! Oh mommie I miss you everyone and home. But I don't want to come home. I'm so confused. Julie "Oh, yes, it was worth it," says her father, Don Krone. Of course, Don is a dreamer too. "All the hurt and everything that happened when she was growing up, all that Julie must have gone through to make it, alone, in that world, all of it was worth it for what it created. Look at her -- I can't do it without smiling. Watching her ride a racehorse is about the most exhilarating thing in the world." It has only been a little more than 20 years since men let women ride racehorses. So kind of them, eh? They made Kathy Kusner go to court before they begrudged her a jockey's license at Laurel racetrack in Maryland in 1968. They boycotted Penny Ann Early when she tried to get a mount at Churchill Downs that same year. They stoned Barbara Jo Rubin's trailer in '69, at Tropical Park in Miami. Still want to ride, ladies? A few of them did. Some, like Robyn Smith and Diane Crump, caught the public's eye for a while, and then they were gone. Others became regulars at small racetracks and made a decent living, far from the big boys and the big purses. And then came Julie Krone. At last, people said. The trailblazer. Yes, women are strong enough physically to keep a half-ton of tired horseflesh in rhythm down the stretch. Women are calloused enough emotionally to survive this sport full of Latin machismo, this business full of eyes and hearts as hard as hooves. And then they looked behind her. There was no one in Krone's wake. "She has cut a path through the deepest, darkest jungle," says Linda McBurney, an exercise rider who abandoned her career as a jockey after 20 races. "She cut it so fast and so clean that it closed off behind her. She's not a trailblazer for female jockeys. She's a freak of nature." One day last summer at Monmouth Park in New Jersey, after her horse had broken both front legs at the quarter-pole and sent her crashing to the track, her boyfriend, a commercial photographer named Jerry Casciano, raced to the first-aid station to find her. He was told she had headed toward the jockeys' swimming pool. He rushed onto the pool deck and saw her lying on a bench, the track doctor standing over her. "Julie," he cried, "are you O.K.?" She looked up at him for a moment. Then she sprang off the bench, did a cartwheel into a backwards handspring and went flying -- arms up to accept applause -- into the pool.
Mother, your daughter is crying, out in the night and cold You see, Julie's mother didn't stop to think. She had the palomino at an indoor riding ring and she was talking a mile a minute, trying to convince a woman that the horse was a steal for 800 bucks. Look how sweet he is, she was saying, look how gentle, how perfect for teaching your kids to ride. And with a swoop of her arms, she put two-year-old Julie on a horse's back for the first time, and the horse trotted off with the baby. "There," Judi Krone said to the woman, "you see?" The palomino cantered off to the wall and stopped. The two-year-old girl reached down, grabbed the reins and tugged them to one side, as if she knew that was what the moment called for. The horse turned and trotted back. The mother looked at the horse and at the baby in diapers and slowly realized what she was seeing. It didn't really surprise her. That baby was riding before she was even born, to tell the truth, bouncing in the womb of a woman whose life seemed to make sense only when she was touching or smelling a horse. Dangerous? Miscarriage? Don't fence me in. The mother had grown up reading every horse book she could get her little fingers on -- Misty of Chincoteague, Billy and Blaze, The Black Stallion. Had grown up with a horse book tucked inside a school book so her parents and teachers wouldn't know. Kids rode horses in those books. Kids didn't fall in those books. Kids didn't take a hoof in the skull. Judi, you're living in a dream world, people would tell her, but every time she looked out and saw her baby girl gliding bareback across the field, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, holding nothing but a handful of mane, she would feel tears filling her eyes. Tears of love, tears of jealousy. Her little girl's childhood was the childhood she had read about in all those books, the childhood she should have had, she would have had, if only she hadn't been a girl in a three-story apartment house in Chicago, a girl whose ears were filled with don'ts, whose horizons were full of fences, whose parents were the strictest of Baptists. If only she hadn't been who she was. You just wait and watch, Judi Krone told herself. Her children wouldn't have to sneak off to riding stables. Her children wouldn't have to hide their Billy and Blaze books. Her children wouldn't be corralled by Scriptures or fences. She married a man and they bought a farmhouse in Eau Claire, Mich. Horses, horses, horses -- even today Judi Krone closes her fists and her eyes and throws all of her throat into that word. Even today, all these years and horses later, the passion has not been dampened. The Krone home was a houseful of dreams and people lost in them; there was no one with a wristwatch or a list of chores to stop you from getting drunk on watching the moon. Don Krone would come home from teaching art or photography courses at Lake Michigan College and disappear into his darkroom, spending six hours developing and redeveloping a single image he had captured with his camera, or he would forget himself for an entire weekend while stripping and lacquering an antique chair or bed. The mother dreamed of training a stallion to do everything but fly, of joining a troupe that crossed the country and put on exhibitions, perhaps even the Lippizaners of Austria! She would let dishes pile up in the sink, leftover mashed potatoes turn to mortar, clothes spill out of the hamper. She would go dawn to dusk teaching a horse to shake its head or cross its front legs when it cantered. She would wake up in the middle of the night on fire with a new way to make a horse change its lead leg on the run. The son, Donnie, three years older than Julie, dreamed of driving race cars; by age 10, he had built a quarter-mile dirt track behind the house and was careening between and over and through an obstacle course of barrels and poles and ramps in a beat-up black Pontiac his father had given him. And Julie, all she wanted to do was ride and race horses. She wore bare spots on her pony's hide, went trick-or-treating on horseback. Where, people wondered, was the center of gravity in a home like that? God, how the neighbors gawked. One day they might look out the window and $ see two-year-old Julie kneeling next to a horse and two dogs, all eating from the same pan of dog food; Julie, at five, leading her horse into the house, into the dining room, so her mother could saddle it; Julie, at nine, on a sled harnessed to a Great Dane, shrieking through the snow; Julie, at 11, clutching the bumper of the school bus and sliding along behind it, howling down the icy country roads; Julie, at 13, standing on the back of a galloping horse, wearing nothing but a deerskin wrapped around her loins, a blonde Sioux on an equine surfboard letting the wind take her, heading hell-bent for the barn, certain to get decapitated -- and then doing a split at the very last second, collapsing onto the horse just under the doorway. "Every day was a missile launch," says her father. "Yes, there was always that element of possible disaster, but it was just like a missile -- if it goes, god, there's going to be that moment of glory. You can't tell a kid to go for it, to be whatever they want to be, and also tell them to be careful. If we all ride the safe road, who will we look up to? Who will be on the high road? No, we didn't worry about the little things." There was love in a house like that, but sometimes you had to cock your head a different way to see it. No dinners together around a table, no Easter baskets. Her father didn't spend a half-hour reading books to Julie at bedtime, but he would hold his head and cry, "Wow! Wait! Can you do that again?" and go running for his Nikon when she had done a backflip dismount off a horse's rump. Her mother didn't make Julie's school lunch in the morning, but she would be in the pasture with her daughter watching her ride while she waited for the bus, correcting the tilt of her wrist, the curve of her spine, finding flaws in her horsemanship that only Judi Krone, former Michigan state equestrian champion, could see. Her little girl would run to her clutching a blue ribbon -- Julie won the Berrien County Youth Fair horse show, 21-and-under division, at age five -- and Judi would snap at the girl for letting her elbows bounce during the ride, then wait until she was gone and say to Julie's friend, Lori Skinner, "Wasn't she great?" And then, on the long drives home from the 20 or 30 horse shows they would enter a year, the daughter would lie across the front seat of the pickup truck and her mother would stroke the child's thin blonde hair and sing. What was it with this little girl? She wouldn't cry. Sometimes when she and her brother would get into a fight while their mother was lost in a dream about a horse, Judi would take whatever was closest at hand -- a horsewhip, a wooden spoon -- and thrash some reality into both of them. Donnie would scream bloody murder, but Julie would turn her chin away, tuck it into her shoulder and shudder in silence. Sometimes she would go into her room and write a poem. Sometimes she would go into the barn and rant, venting to the goats and horses all her anger at people. Animals could be trusted. Animals didn't stroke you one minute, whip you the next. If Julie wasn't playing with her real animals, she was bent in the dirt over her 148 plastic ones, constructing a village for them out of clay and sticks and grass, creating disasters -- flash floods, cyclones -- and then swooping in to save them. Did Brown Pony or Piggy ever look right past her the way kids at school did, scoffing at her tiny body or her chipmunk voice? Even when she grew up, she would make sure to keep her childhood photographs separated in two boxes, one for pictures of animals, one for human beings.
My heart burns hard and fast She became a teenager, though she still looked as if she were in third grade. Her body didn't bud and sprout the way other girls' did; her thin hair drooped no matter what she tried. When she put on makeup, she looked like a little girl who had broken into her mother's cosmetics, playing pretend. No, it was hopeless; she couldn't win in the arena of batted eyelashes and clinging sweaters, so she burrowed deeper and deeper into her own world. She read about horses, rode them, dreamed them, poeticized and painted them. She tied reins to her bed, slapped a saddle over an old trunk and used a flyswatter to whip it down the stretch. She was going to be a jockey, she was going to be rich, you would see her horse wearing a blanket of red roses at the Derby one day. Yeah, right, Julie, the kids at high school would say, laughing and holding her head at arm's length when she started throwing punches. How could anyone take her seriously? She was this 90-pound gnat who wouldn't go away, the kid sister you couldn't ditch on a Friday night. And for the life of her, she wasn't going to let anyone see how badly she wanted to belong, how inferior she felt every day but show day, when her horse's nostrils gleamed with baby oil, his hair with blue-tinted shampoo, his hooves with black polish, and she was sitting high on his back, looking down at them all. Finally, for a few months, she found a boyfriend. He was three years younger than she. It got worse at home. Her parents were cutting apart their marriage with a dull knife. (Julie wrote: Talkin and talkin going right through my head/So many things going wrong I wish I was dead.) At 15, she nearly joined a circus, having astonished the owner with the stunts she could perform on a horse, but she changed her mind because the guy gave her the creeps. Her father moved out after the divorce, and her brother went with him. Her grades got worse. She started growing funny-looking plants in her bedroom, started coming home with funny-looking eyes. She started writing checks on an account she had opened with money she won riding horses at the Michigan fairgrounds the previous summer . . . and writing them and writing them. "What?" this pip-squeak would look up and trill, "You can't write as many checks as the bank gives you?" And people would shake their heads and let it slide. Why, look at her -- she's just a little girl. Was there anyone more spontaneous than Julie Krone? Was there anyone more free? She could hang out with anyone she pleased, come home and leave the house as she pleased, skip her homework or a day of school. Wasn't the job of a parent, her mother reasoned, to make a child grow into an independent human being? And the freer the girl became, the tighter she squeezed her pillow at night, the wilder became a longing inside her that she couldn't put into words: A fence, oh god, please give me a fence! And the wider and wider the starry skies grew above her, the more her gaze narrowed to that far-off crescent moon. She didn't need an education (it's all just a bunch of coplacation), she didn't need a bra, she didn't need anyone. All of you, watch: Julie Krone is going to be a jockey. She remembers almost none of this today. She can recall the crick in the leg of a $5,000 claimer she rode five years ago at Laurel, but a stab in her own heart two days ago . . . where did it go? What happened to it? "No one in history has ever had the talent that I do for blocking out painful things," Julie Krone says. "It's strange. It's like none of it ever happened to me." She was young and on fire and memory was like a fast thoroughbred's flanks -- reach back and give it one good sting with the whip, and off you shot into tomorrow. She got a job at Churchill Downs as a groom and an exercise rider in 1979, the spring before she turned 16. She lived with trainer Clarence Picou and his wife, Donna, but returned home after three months, when her relationship with Donna went wrong. In the middle of her senior year, she dropped out of high school and flew to Tampa. She would live with her grandparents, she decided, and make her stand at Tampa Bay Downs. The guards wouldn't let her through the entrance gate. There she stood, in boots and jeans and freckles, a 4 ft. 8 1/2 in. little girl who must have swiped her daddy's helmet. There it stood -- a fence. She walked alongside it for a little ways. Oh, you teachers who scolded, you neighbors who cringed -- what would your children do now? Judi and Don Krone's daughter looked up, tightened her grip on her resume -- a manila envelope full of pictures of her on horses, a few clippings saying she had won some fairgrounds races -- dug the toe of her boot into the wire mesh, climbed the fence and headed toward the barns. A woman riding by in a car stopped. She thought she had found a little girl who was lost. She picked the girl up and took her to see Jerry Pace, a trainer who happened to be the woman's boyfriend. "So," said Pace, "I'm told you want to be a jockey." "No," said the girl. "I'm gonna be a jockey." Pace concealed a grin, took her out to the training track and put her on a horse. Five weeks later, in February 1980, she was sitting on a gelding named Lord Farckle in the winner's circle at Tampa Bay Downs, trying to get a nonchalant look screwed on her face. Her first 48 mounts: nine wins, four seconds, 10 thirds. She caught the eye of Julie Snellings, a former jockey who had gone to work in the racing secretary's office at the track after both her legs were paralyzed in an accident at Delaware Park 2 1/2 years earlier. Snellings persuaded her former agent, Chick Lang, to let the 17-year-old runt fly up to Baltimore and take a shot at Pimlico. Julie got off the plane carrying her clothes in cardboard boxes tied with string. Chick and Jean Lang took her out to dinner. The waitress handed her a kiddie menu. She balled it up and flung it away. Slowly, she began to realize just how many fences remained to be climbed. "You've got to understand," says trainer John Forbes. "Nobody took girl riders seriously -- they were a joke. Nobody thought a girl was strong enough. The jockeys didn't ride harder against them; if anything, they rode a little easier, because nobody wanted to be the one to get a girl hurt, and nobody worried that a girl might beat him. It ate Julie up, to be considered a girl jockey. I introduced her to someone as a 'jockette.' She kicked me in the shins." Trying to convince them that a girl could ride racehorses seemed hopeless. So she tried to convince them that she wasn't a girl. No jewelry, no makeup, no nail polish. No dresses, no perfume or ponytails. No smiles for the winner's circle photos, no riding room for a jock inside her on the rail. She walked and talked like a boy, spit like one, blew her nose with an index finger and a snort. She wandered through the barns each morning as if in a fever, passing out carrots to the horses, doughnuts to the human beings, pleading with trainers to let her ride their horses or at least to glance up from their newspaper and look at her. She learned tricks. She shook the hands of owners and trainers hard enough to make them wince -- see how strong she was? She bit the inside of her lip each time they said things that made her want to cry, bit it so hard she made a sob come out sounding like an expletive. "How tall are you, anyway?" a few of them would ask. "Four-foot-10-and-a-half, 102 pounds," she would say and rock up on her toes, "same as Shoemaker." Or she would go the other way. When she lost with a favorite and fans screamed, "Go wash dishes, Julie! Go make babies!" she would put out her lower lip and hang her head, use her little-girl looks to turn their rage to pity. She would chase down every horse that bolted during its morning gallop, find out who trained it, walk it back to its barn and squeal, "Hey, Joe, got your horse for you! How 'bout letting me ride it?" God, that voice, it cut through concrete. Like sonar, it went the length of the shedrow and came back again. "How'd he go this morning?" a groom might ask her after she had galloped a horse. "Around," she might say. "How'd he feel?" "Didn't ask him." And sometimes she and the groom would end up rolling in the dirt, trying to kill each other. Well, that's how a girl had to be at a racetrack, wasn't it? "I didn't know how to act," she says. "I didn't have anyone to copy. I thought if I showed any feelings, they would be taken for weakness." "The first time I ever saw her," recalls Linda McBurney, "I was galloping a horse, and I heard someone talking incessantly on the track, jabbering away in this incredible high-pitched voice about how good she was. Instantly, I hated her. I remember thinking, Don't be such a hotshot; shut up and do your job, bitch." A year or two later, Linda and Julie were best friends. She ran from one identity to the other, from bitch to Bambi, waif to wiseass, from the cute little squirt who didn't know which shoe went on which foot to the spitfire who knew everything. She was a teenager on her own, starved for two things she couldn't seem to find on one plate: love and four winners a day. When Chick Lang, who became her agent, and Jean took her into their home, she scrawled "I love you," a weather report and a smiling sun on a napkin for Jean every morning before leaving the house at dawn to go to the stables. She made people love her, she made people hate her, she made people do both at the same time. Nothing in life happened fast enough for her. She seized the back of Snellings's wheelchair one day at Timonium racetrack, in Maryland, and started racing her down the shedrow, faster and faster and faster. "Slow down, Julie," Snellings pleaded. "What for?" "Slow down!" Bam! The wheelchair hit a pothole. Snellings went flying, Krone grabbed her hair and yanked her back just before she struck the ground. Snellings turned and punched her. "What's that for?" gasped Krone. On Aug. 25, 1981, four years to the day after the accident that had paralyzed her, Snellings looked up and saw Krone striding through the paddock, committing the taboo of taboos in a sport rife with superstition -- wearing the boots and pants her friend had worn on the day of her fall. All the grooms and jockeys stared at Snellings's name, stitched right across the back. "It terrified me," says Snellings. "I was sure she was going to go down too." Krone scoffed, climbed into the saddle, and for the first time in her life, won three races in one day. "God, how I wished I was her," says Snellings. "She was exactly the kind of person I needed around me in those first few years after my accident, so tough, so determined not to let anything in the world get in her way." There was no choice, no turning back; her past kept sealing up behind her, like a zipper closing. The people she met at each track scattered every three or four months, at the end of a meet, like gypsies. Her brother moved to Maryland, her mother to Florida. She had an argument with her mom; for 17 months they didn't talk. The farm she grew up on was sold; her horse Ralph was sold. Her best friend from her school days was killed on a motorcycle. She had no high school diploma. She had staked everything on a single premise, a solitary moon, and all she could do was keep her eye on the sky and keep running, keep riding. Every time a meet finished, she packed her suitcase, her three teddy bears and the cat's litter box into the trunk of her car, wedged her bike into the back seat, put the cat, Skaggs, in the passenger seat and headed for the next track. Again and again and again. The problem she had with her life became the same as the problem she had with her car -- the further down she pushed the accelerator, the lower she sank in her seat, the less she could see over the dashboard. Her phone number? She listed it in the directory, so she could dial 411 and ask the operator for it when she needed it. Her address? She made sure she carried around a piece of mail sent to her at each new apartment, so she could read her street number off the envelope. She unscrewed the horses off the trophies she won, kept them and threw out the bases and metal plates underneath. Another mount, another track, another bag of carrots and another box of crullers. Get her five mounts a day or she couldn't sleep at night. Get her five in the afternoon in Philly and five at night at Atlantic City, and she was living. Once or twice, with one or two special people, she let the tears sting her eyes and run down her face. How could they hand the reins to men with half her skill? How could they ignore her? She would go home to her apartment and hate herself for a few hours, eat everything in the refrigerator and then hate herself a little more. She would show up at the barns the next morning at 6:30 instead of 7:00, go to a gym for three hours at night and burn off all the spit and vinegar they hadn't let her use up that day at the track, then grab a take-out salad and eat it, alone, stroking her cat. One day, Bud Delp, trainer of Spectacular Bid and a fleet of other Cadillacs, looked up from his newspaper. Then John Forbes, one of the East Coast's top trainers, did too. Horsemen secure enough to stand their ground when owners grumbled, "I don't want any damn -- -- on my horse," or when the jackals at the rail barked, "What're you doing, John, sleepin' with her?" You see, they couldn't dismiss her. She rode in this tight little ball that $ a horse hardly seemed to notice on its back, and she had hands that cabled a message through the reins down to a horse's mouth, through its neck, to its heart. It's O.K. to be nervous, it's all right to tremble and snort, the message said. I won't fight you. I trust you more than them. I'm with you; it's you and me against the world. Other riders had to yank back on a colt that was chomping to run too soon in a race; she barely had to move her hands. Other riders had to slash the whip 15 times down the stretch; she might get the same acceleration with two. She bucked and strained and scrapped with human beings; she was sure and easy with horses. But there was so much still to learn, so many little flaws, so much ground to make up. She didn't want to be the best girl jockey of her time -- didn't they see? -- she wanted to be the best jockey of all time. "Every little incident that made her think she wasn't there yet, she became fixated on it," says Forbes. " If she was working on the technique of coming around the turn and drifting out just enough to make the horse outside her go off at an angle, she'd do it no matter what the situation in the race. Hell, I remember seeing her taking this one jockey two thirds of the way across the track. One day she got Laffit Pincay and Pat Day trapped behind two horses that stopped running halfway through the race, kept them pinned there the whole race and won by a neck. There they were, two of the greatest riders in the sport, screaming at her to let them the hell out, and she wouldn't budge. 'What kind of riding is that?' Day screams at her after the race. 'Race riding, Pat,' she says to him. 'I used you.' She became a diabolical rider." Horses pitched her, galloped over her, knocked her unconscious, but she sprang back up and asked for more. At night in her bed she twitched and lurched, felt herself being heaved off a horse in a race just as she was falling off to sleep; by day she charged through holes others wouldn't dream of trying. "Ballsy little bitch," the men at the track started to grunt; but then, maybe they were wrong. Maybe it had nothing to do with courage or testosterone, maybe it had to do only with who, in that quiet moment at the starting gate, needed it the most. "You're nothing if you don't win," she would snarl at herself. "This is all you have in the world, nothing else." She began wearing a white headband with a red sun on the front when she rode; like some crazed kamikaze pilot, she would run and ricochet down the tunnel to the paddock. In 1982, at 19, she won the riding title at Atlantic City; beat every man on the grounds. Now they knew what she was after. Now they started taking her seriously. Yves Turcotte smacked her horse across the head with his whip -- accidentally, he said later -- as they battled down the stretch one day at Pimlico; a few minutes later, her shove sent him flying off the weigh-in scales. Jake Nied grappled with her in the jocks' room after she'd sawed him off at Keystone; bystanders had to tear them apart. Miguel Rujano slashed her ear with his whip after she'd ridden in on him at Monmouth; she punched him in the face, he tackled her into the jockeys' swimming pool, she hit him with a lounge chair. No man, by god, would intimidate her. One day, on her return to the paddock after a race at Keystone, a jockey named Maryann Alligood threatened to punch her lights out the moment they got back to the jocks' room. A woman? Julie Krone dashed up the tunnel, ducked into the first-aid station and hid. Mom --
New York is unbeliveable. Me, Debi, Larry and Chuck got chaufered
to the city by Fox. We saw wierdos ate good food and I got drunk. Ha
Ha. I'm having a good time and even working harder. Cordero tells me
how to ride all the time. You would have to see what I was doing to
belive it.
Good feeling They found the marijuana in her car at Bowie on Feb. 18, 1983. It could have been worse. They could have found cocaine. There was something about the way she lived -- wringing everything out of herself and pouring it into a funnel -- that made every hour away from the funnel seem empty, that made her look for ways to feel as alive when she went home at night as she had felt bringing a 30-1 shot home in the afternoon. She began to learn the dreamer's hardest lesson, the one about consequences, the one about 4 ft. 10 1/2 in. jockeys with chipmunk voices -- yes, even them -- having to give up being little girls and become women. She received a 60- day suspension and was ordered to attend a drug rehabilitation class and urinate into a jar once a week for a year. She stood and stared through the wire mesh at Pimlico, horseless for the first time since she was two -- fenced out. It scared her so badly that it made her go clean. And it made her think about her brother, Donnie, who had given up his dream of racing cars to become an exercise rider in Maryland and who would be suspended from the track twice for drug use. And it made her sit still for a minute and write:
In the quiet of the evening Her first day back from the suspension, she had two races at Pimlico. She won both. She went on to win the Atlantic City riding title again in '83, but broke her back and missed four months of racing when she came off a horse during a workout at Laurel. Her career was like her driving -- bursts of speed and sudden stops. "I never let anything bother me," she would tell people. Her stomach began to burn, the beginnings of an ulcer. She found love at the racetrack, assistant trainer Steve Brown, the first man she had a real relationship with. But when he asked her to stop riding at two tracks a day so he could see her now and then, she couldn't bring herself to do it. Love -- yes, she craved it -- but emotional intimacy? Whoa, boy, wait a minute, who said anything about that? He walked away. She flirted with him again, became the little girl whispering cute little things in his ear, but she couldn't get him back. Consequences, consequences. . . . She was 21. Suddenly she realized how alone she was, how much she ached for a center of gravity in her adult life, just as she had in her childhood. She went to Brown's apartment when he was gone one day, sat on the floor, picked up an X-Acto knife and studied her wrists. That would teach him. That would teach them all. Then it hit her. Death would put her out of the running for the best jock of all time. She put down the blade, went into an 0-for-80 slump, screamed "I quit! I quit!" coming down the backstretch one day. And yet, there was something so irrepressible, so unsinkable about her. She would go into her room after a grim day, replay everything she had done wrong in her entire life, but rather than cry she would pummel one of her teddy bears for half an hour, tell herself over and over, "This can't go on. I won't allow it to go on," then come out of the room, grab a kitchen knife and order her current agent, Larry (Snake) Cooper, to get her better horses -- now.
"Julie, I'm trying, I'm trying," Cooper would plead. "Try harder!" she would growl, half-grinning, half-serious, swishing the knife closer and closer. "Sit, Snake!" she would cry. Snake sat. "Dance, Snake!" she would cry. Snake danced. Then she would toss aside the knife, tackle him and wrestle on the floor until he said uncle, get up, gloat, jump into her car, crank up the radio, stomp on the wooden block she needed to reach the gas pedal, and fly. Sixty . . . seventy . . . eighty. . . . That was the speed at which a cop in Maryland clocked her while she was riding in her Mustang convertible with the steering wheel between her knees, both her arms straight up in the air catching the rain, both her eyes lost on the rainbow above. The cop pulled her over. "Do you know I had the flashers on for five minutes?" he said. "No," she said. The cop let her go. The world let her go. Hell, you couldn't even issue a warning for exuberance like that.
You say you should have when I was a baby And then one day in 1986, her mother called. A doctor had opened up Judi Krone, taken a look at the cancer inside her, given her two years to live with treatment, three months without it. The woman Julie felt so close to that they used to get stomachaches together. The woman she felt so far from that they could go a year and a half without talking. The woman who had infected her with that beautiful torture, the dream. What could she do to help her mother through the pain and delirium of chemotherapy and radiation, through the slow, inevitable death? Win, said Judi Krone. Win. The daughter stopped needing to win just so she wouldn't hate herself. The daughter started needing to win to help her mother live. The timing was right. She was 23, reaching maturity as a rider. The wins started coming steadily, and then, like firecrackers, four some days, five, even six! "Call my mom and tell her," she would holler to anyone who had access to a telephone between races on a day like that. The long droughts stopped. She started mailing videotapes of her victories to her mother, who would pop them into a VCR at a lodge for cancer victims and grin as all the other patients gathered around her. Trainers and owners started offering Julie Krone so many mounts that she could take her pick of two or three horses a race. She became the leading winner in 1987 at both Monmouth and the Meadowlands, repeated at both New Jersey tracks in 1988, then led in the jockey standings for much of the recent winter meet at Aqueduct before finishing second. She became the first woman to ride in the Breeders' Cup (finishing fourth in last year's Classic on Forty Niner), beat Bill Shoemaker in a match race at Arlington Park (leaned on his horse for an eighth of a mile, of course), started earning more than half a million dollars a year. She was invited to appear on Carson and Letterman and even at the White House right after George Bush's inauguration, and her spunk and her grin made everyone around her grin, too. She found a boyfriend who didn't make a living off horses, who would rather talk about Cairo, Nepal and Easter Island than the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont. She even put on nail polish. And her mother, a year past the time she was supposed to die, started training horses again, started feeling good enough to wonder if maybe it wasn't too late to start running after her own dream, the one about going on tour with an exquisitely trained stallion, the dream she had never quite chased down. Jockeys lost the urge to slash their whip across Krone's ear. More people started asking, "Do you know that little girl, Krone?" the way they used to ask, "Do you know that kid, Cauthen?" Not because she was as good as Cauthen yet, but because she made people who didn't know a gelding from a gerund sit up and take notice of horse racing, and that was good for all of them. Lavish compliments began to come her way, like the one from the great Cordero, who went so far as to grunt, "She don't ride like no girl rider." Even Krone started to trust the idea a little bit, the idea that maybe she finally belonged. And now that she wasn't a female jockey anymore, she could be a female. She could wear dresses and talk now and then about retiring in 10 years, having a baby or maybe adopting one, settling down on a farm in Colorado. She still told herself she was nothing if she lost -- but now she did it only in the starting gate instead of all the time. She still ate baby food from the jar and sugar out of the packet, still used kiddie toothpaste, still did headstands on horses, still was afraid of the dark, still was so damned hyperkinetic that she would leap up to grab the bars that ran the length of a Hertz bus and astonish the businessmen by swinging from the back to the front, scratching under her arms and screeching like a monkey . . . but then, something had changed. The guys in the barn at Belmont were kicking it around just a few months ago. "You know what it is?" said George Michalowski, an assistant trainer. "Julie Krone's turning into someone you'd want to bring home to your mother." And then one day a writer came to see her. "Was all of it worth it?" he asked. "To live for a dream, all the pain along the way?" She looked at him. "The pain?" she said. "I swear, I can barely remember any of it." And then she went into her closet, pushed aside the two boxes of photographs -- one of animals, one of human beings -- and pulled out a box full of poems and diaries and letters. . . . Issue date: May 22, 1989
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