The key to jockey Jeremy Rose’s rise was learning how to fall

BY DAVID JONES,
Of The Patriot-News

“I choked. That’s all there is to it.”

This is Preakness-winning jockey Jeremy Rose remembering one of the monumental meets of his career.

“I knew where I was, and I tried to do everything differently.”

Not a thoroughbred track. This was the 1998 PIAA wrestling championships. After compiling a 31-5 record in the 103-pound class his senior season at Bellefonte Area, Rose lost straight out of the gate. Against a wrestler who probably should not have beaten him.

When the meet is brought up two weeks later, Rose’s mother, Cindy Robinson, quickly agrees:

“He did choke there. And Mom rode his ass after it.”

Cindy, a lifetime stable junkie who grew up in Bellefonte, near State College, and raised young Jeremy there, is relaxing on the front porch of her 1860s farmhouse along Route 322 in Centre Hall. Hundreds of thousands of Penn State football fans pass by this slice of country nirvana every autumn. But they never quite see the simple beauty, the tranquillity, of a place like this from the highway.

Since meeting her second husband, Denny Robinson, a diesel fuel delivery driver, 22 years ago and marrying him soon after, Cindy has spent a good bit of her time on her only child.

Barely 5 feet tall, Cindy has a rollicking party voice that busts up the tranquillity on this perfect spring evening. She is funny, bright and immediately personable. And did we mention blunt?

“He wouldn’t be where he is if his mom had said…”

(Here she adopts the syrupy tone of a consoling soccer mom)

“… ‘Oh, it’s OK, honey. You did the best you could.'”

She quickly recovers her own tone which, if you close your eyes, sounds a lot like the comic Roseanne.

“Yeah, even though you wrestled [terribly].’ And he’ll tell ya that’s true!”

This is hardly the “tough love “it may seem.

“Oh, I tease him all the time. He’s a great kid. And he’s my only one! It’s my job to tease him!”

Anyway, calling the PIAAs a choke job, she only sees this as the truth. And Cindy Robinson does not varnish the truth.

Her only child seems to have acquired this trait. At the Wachovia Center studios of Philadelphia’s Comcast SportsNet, Rose is in the green room waiting to go on the “Daily News Live “talk show two days after his remarkable Preakness ride.

“I choked. It was just like the PIAAs.”

This is the former wrestler recalling the next two most momentous meets of his athletic career. Not wrestling. Horse races.

The venues:

The Champagne Stakes for 2-year-olds last Oct. 9 at Belmont Park in New York — the same track where Rose will ride Preakness winner Afleet Alex tomorrow in hopes of taking the third leg of the thoroughbred Triple Crown. The Breeders’ Cup juvenile for 2-year-olds, three weeks later at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas.
Rose entered these headline meets of the autumn calendar riding by far the best horse he had ever mounted. Afleet Alex, owned by a Philadelphia-based group and trained by Tim Ritchey, had raced four times and won four times.

But two miscalculations by his anxious young jockey resulted in a pair of lost trips.

At the Champagne, Rose found himself pinned inside too long and never found room to run until too late. Afleet Alex was beaten by half a length by Proud Accolade, a horse that has not won since.

At the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, the horse broke poorly and Rose found himself farther behind than expected in the first half-mile. Rather than let the horse ease himself through traffic, Rose busted Afleet Alex wide and commenced riding like a cavalry charge trying to pass horses. By the head of the stretch, Afleet Alex was out of gas and didn’t have enough to finish. He was passed by Wilko and lost by three-quarters of a length.

“I didn’t think clear enough, “Rose said. “I choked. I never rode those kinds of races, so I didn’t know what to do.

“What I ended up doing was, I overrode the horse. I tried to ride the perfect race. Like in a $10,000 claimer.

“But, these horses, all you have to do is give them running room. It’s like going from a Volkswagen bug to a Porsche.”

But Rose keeps learning. Keeps having fun doing it. And that’s why the 26-year-old is where he is — heading to the marathon 11/2-mile Belmont with a good chance to take two legs in his first run through the Triple Crown races.

By now, everyone has seen the dramatic finish to the Preakness Stakes 20 days ago in Baltimore. Scrappy T is ready to be gobbled up by wide-charging Afleet Alex at the top of the stretch when his jockey, Ramon Dominguez, goes to the whip with his left hand. Scrappy T’s heel clicks with Afleet Alex’s foreleg, throwing the Philly horse to his knees and sending Rose down his neck and into his mane.

Somehow, the former wrestler mustered the quick strength to stay aboard while the horse amazingly righted himself, accelerated and won by 41/2 lengths.

Not a choke.

Every jockey must know how to fall should such a situation arise. Jeremy had a split second to consider such a contingency:

“If we’d fallen, it would have been a domino effect, “Rose said at Comcast. “Someone was going to get me.

“You try to go limp if you know you’re going down, but you know the ground’s going to hurt. I was thinking just to stay as close to ‘Alex’ as possible.”

Credit is certainly due Afleet Alex, an athletic marvel who stayed on his feet through a slamming of the brakes at 40 mph.

But an assist goes to a lesser known mount.

Miss Peggy was Rose’s childhood buddy, his first ride at age 5 at Eastwood Farms.

“She was an ornery pony, “Cindy Robinson remembered with a laugh. “Jeremy stayed on because of his Miss Peggy.”

Miss Peggy? It turns out Jeremy Rose learned how to fall very early.

For decades, Robinson has trained jumpers for horse shows. She now has 14 horses and the 150-year-old farmhouse, and she is building a 72-by-156-foot show arena next door.

When Jeremy was barely a kindergartner, she would hoist him up on the dapple-gray Miss Peggy and show him how to get in the basic jumping positions.

Peggy had other ideas.

“She would trot as fast as she could, wide open, then stop and drop her head down. Jeremy would slide face-first down her neck. At a high rate of speed. It was very much like Afleet Alex’s head when he almost went down.”

Young Jeremy found all sorts of methods to test his tiny little body. There was karate.

“He was a third of the size of the other kids, and he’d kick their butts, “Robinson laughed.

That was fun until the sparring in a major event got a little too violent. Jeremy decided he’d rather try something new.

There were always chicken fights. On bicycles.

Never one to back off a challenge, the 30-pound 6-year-old ran his bike full-tilt toward the neighbor’s kid, 110-pound Billy Flynn.

Jeremy ended up in the emergency room with a broken hand.

Baseball. Jeremy dove into the game at age 9 — one of his teammates was current major-leaguer Eric Milton — but found his diminutive size made his head a magnet for usually waist-high fastballs.

“I got hit so many times, “Jeremy recalled. “It was ridiculous. But I couldn’t help it. I was only like 3-feet-8.”

“He said he’d finish out the year, “Robinson said. “But he didn’t want to bat anymore. Which made me happy. I didn’t fit in with those Little League mothers anyway.”

He found wrestling and immediately loved it.

“His problem was always when he was on the bottom [starting position], “Robinson said. “I’d always get on him afterward: ‘Why don’t you wrestle the same on the bottom as on top?’

“One day he didn’t even say anything. He just grabbed me and tied me up in a hold on the floor and wouldn’t let me go. He’s grinning and saying, ‘It’s not so easy, is it, Mom? I’m yelling at him, ‘Jeremy, let me up!’ I was laughing at first, but he wouldn’t let me go!

“Anyway, I would never allow him to make excuses for something he could control.”

According to friends, Jeremy largely was sheltered from a messy split between Robinson and birth father Bob Rose, who now lives in State College. He grew up happy with plenty of friends, caring for the animals in his rural life. There to help was Robinson’s father, Dickie Breadon, who died in 1999.

Show riding and wrestling occupied much of Jeremy’s non-school time all the way through secondary grades until he graduated from high school.

But, when college wrestling decided to abolish its 118-pound class just as Rose was about to pick a school, he found his athletic career at a crossroads. No way he could bulk to 126, the lowest college weight class.

That was when he began to think about being a jockey. He never even seriously considered it until age 19.

His agent Kidd Breeden is still amazed every time he considers how fast his client has risen to the top of the racing game:

“Seven years is really unbelievable for him to be where he is now.”

Cindy had plenty of contacts in the equine world from 30 years of shows. She consulted old friend Ben Guanciale, a longtime trainer of jumpers and hunters based in Clarksburg, Md.

“Cindy said to me when Jeremy graduated from high school, ‘He doesn’t know what he wants to do.’ I said, ‘Hey, he’s built to be a jockey. If he wants to do it, he has a feel for it.”

Guanciale liked the fact that Jeremy had the perfect jock’s body, a tiny dynamo naturally built for 115 pounds who wouldn’t have to starve himself to keep weight.

He suggested a year’s training at Hacienda Siesta Alegre (Napping Horse Farm), a spectacular hilltop training stable in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, owned by his friends Greg and Linda Jackson. It specializes in the breaking of yearling runners. At any time during the winter, 90 horses and 15 jocks may be at work.

It was the perfect place for a novice jockey.

“I told Cindy, ‘He won’t make much money, but he’ll learn there.'”

Again, Jeremy took his licks.

After a couple of weeks, he called his mother from Puerto Rico:

“Well, I figured out I’m making $1.02 an hour.”

This, to rise at 4 a.m., eat breakfast and begin attempting to ride “babies, “as Greg Jackson calls them, 5 a.m. to just before noon:

“These are a bunch of little kids you’re riding. Whatever little thing happens — a leaf falls, somebody drives by — is a good excuse to bolt right out from underneath the rider or stop dead or jump to the side.”

Jeremy rode from 10 to 16 horses every day.

“The first few weeks, he’d fall off nine times a day, “Jackson said. “Then one day he came up to me halfway through the day and he was ecstatic, ‘Greg! Greg! I haven’t fallen down yet!’ He fell off the very next horse.”

But Rose learned how to ride.

Said Guanciale: “Instead of wrestling the horse around, he learned how to follow the horse, to read what they were going to do, how they would move, like following in a slow dance.

“A lot of jockeys muscle them around. It’s an ego thing. Jeremy really loves the animals and treats each horse individually.”

Not long after the young rider graduated from his year in Puerto Rico, Ritchey picked him up. Then Rose learned how to race.

At 26, Rose’s life is already a rich tapestry of competitions and friends that has molded him and helped him along. He does not forget.

“He got us seats right up front for the Preakness, “Guanciale said. “It’s surreal for my wife and me to see that little kid we watched grow up — Dana was changing his diapers when he was 2 — and here he is. He’s humble as can be.

“After the race, all we cared to do was briefly say congratulations. Jeremy came out and greeted us and then said, ‘Let’s go back and look at the horse.’ We got back there and he said, ‘Don’t you think he could be a jumping horse, Ben?’ I said, ‘Jeremy, I could never afford that horse.’

“And then he reached over and fed ‘Alex’ a peppermint.

“You won’t see many jockeys care about a horse like that. Few and far between.”

Said Greg Jackson: “How great is he for the sport? I mean what happened in the Preakness is just beyond comprehension.”

Breeden, the agent, is fielding endorsement offers from all comers while marveling at his client’s cool and alacrity before the cameras:

“He’s a movie star!”

And Cindy Robinson laughs a lot.

“Jeremy was telling me about all these endorsement offers and all the interviews. I said, ‘Now is your time to shine.’ He said, ‘Mom, all I want to do is ride my race.’

“He’s grounded. He could stop riding tomorrow and I couldn’t be prouder of him. Just for the way he’s handled this whole rolly-coaster ride.”

It’s easy when you know how to fall.