Ministers take on troubled territory: ‘Backstretches’ at horse racetracks
ELMONT, N.Y. — In his years as a chaplain to grooms, hot walkers, exercise riders and the rest of the workers at three racetracks in New York state, the Rev. Humberto Chavez had made countless hospital visits and seen more than enough fractured skulls and shattered legs. Nothing, however, prepared him for the sight of a jockey named Andrew Lakeman in a Long Island medical center one night in May 2007.
Tendrils of tubing protruded from Lakeman’s head. His body was encased in a sort of inflatable cocoon, meant to keep him in an induced coma. Several hours earlier, a tangle of legs between two horses at Belmont Park had hurled Lakeman to the ground. Stomped by a trailing thoroughbred, he had been paralyzed with a severed spine and left near death with a punctured lung.
Chavez had gone through so much with Lakeman. A few years earlier, when the jockey had lost his racing license to drug and alcohol addiction, he had sought the minister’s help in going into recovery and regaining his credentials. Now this: an inert body, barely alive, and a request from the hospital that the chaplain try to reach Lakeman’s family.
After the jockey came out of his coma and began six months of arduous rehabilitation, it fell to Chavez to speak words that were both rigid and tender.
“If you don’t turn the page and start a new chapter, it is not going to go well,” the chaplain recalled having said. “This can be a new beginning, a new path.”
As Chavez walked the grounds of Belmont a few days ago, doing the morning rounds of his de facto parish, he spotted a van pulling up to a barn. Out of the vehicle rolled Lakeman in his wheelchair, starting his own day’s work as a trainer, the new chapter of life that Chavez had urged upon him. The stall that Lakeman uses for an office features photographs of his winners and a painting of Jesus.
Lakeman, 40, said of the chaplain: “He was easygoing, easy to talk to, more like a friend than a minister. He comforted me, and he gave me strength.”
If the parable is one of religion’s primary teaching tools, then the relationship between the chaplain and the jockey offers a parable for the larger role that Chavez and clergy members like him play for the racing community nationwide. Chavez is one of 26 ministers affiliated with the Race Track Chaplaincy of America, which serves 30 tracks in 18 states. He covers the Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga tracks.
The chaplaincy was conceived in 1969 by an exercise rider in Florida and was incorporated in 1972. It came to New York in 1986. Then as now, the ministry meant to bring not only God’s word, but also concrete forms of assistance to the people of the “backside” or “backstretch,” as the largely unseen community of racetrack workers is known.
For all the glamour and wealth associated with horse racing, the backside is often a place of physical danger and psychological struggle.
“Every sin that you can imagine that’s out in the community is here,” Chavez, 38, said. “Addiction, loneliness, financial trouble. The language and culture are a big learning curve because most of the people are immigrants. Life here is difficult, even if you’re from Kentucky.”
“I’ll get a tip about someone who’s not doing well. ‘Hey, he didn’t show up for work,’” he said. “A trainer might call me and say, ‘We haven’t seen him for two days. Can you check?’ Or a family member from overseas tells me, ‘We haven’t heard from him in a month. He hasn’t been sending us money.’”
Summer is especially busy and demanding. The Belmont Stakes on Saturday will draw international attention and nearly 100,000 fans, and the Saratoga racing season starts July 24. Each track, as a result, will have about 1,000 workers living on the backside, and even more will reside in neighborhoods nearby.
What they need from Chavez varies widely, and the range could be seen as he walked the Belmont grounds early on Memorial Day. It was a racing day, and at 8:30 a.m. the horses were returned to barns to rest between sunrise workouts and the afternoon’s card. The air sounded of bird songs, clopping hooves and the accordion strains of a Mexican corrido playing from a radio.
At one barn, a foreman named Antonio Amezcua explained that one of his children had just turned 16 and could start working; Chavez promised to help fill out the application for a job as a parking-lot attendant. At another point, the minister hailed an exercise rider, Fernando Contreras, who has three children, to remind him about a backpack giveaway June 21. In another barn, an assistant trainer asked Chavez to help her with the paperwork to extend her visa.
In more than a decade as a chaplain, Chavez has performed weddings in the grandstand, offered prayers to competing horses, distributed Thanksgiving turkeys, chaperoned children on outings to the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park and, of course, led innumerable worship services. In deference to the racing calendar, which bustles on the weekend, Monday night often substitutes for Sunday morning as church time.
While Chavez has never worked in the racing industry, he shares a fair amount of personal history with his flock. He was born in Mexico and came fatherless to Long Island at age 9. His mother supported the family by cleaning houses and selling Amway products, and Chavez went into the rugged existence of aconstructionlaborer, ultimately becoming a carpenter and a general contractor.
The call to ministry sounded after his mother recovered from thyroid cancer. That call became stronger when Chavez went on a mission trip to El Salvador, encountering poverty that made his own blue-collar existence seem unconscionably privileged.
After seminary study and ordination as a nondenominational Protestant, Chavez began volunteering at his brother-inlaw’s church, which was right across the street from Belmont Park. He then started assisting the Belmont chaplain, the Rev. James Watson, and after he retired in 2003, Chavez took on the job with the Race Track Chaplaincy. (The New York State branch has an annual budget of $350,000, raised from donations, as well as foundation grants.)
It is often said a successful jockey has “good hands” with a horse. Not coincidentally, a painting on the side of Chavez’s van shows two supernatural hands cupping a jockey on his mount.
“On the backstretch,” the chaplain put it, “we are God’s hands.”