SOBRIETY GIVES JOCKEY NEW LIFE AND OUTLOOK
Arapahoe Park jockey Tracy Hebert determined to stay clean
OK, Tracy, you’re free to go.
It was last New Year’s Eve in Martinsburg, W.Va.
Tracy Hebert, once one of the top jockeys in horse racing-crazy Kentucky, was released from jail after serving four months of a six-month sentence for driving under the influence. It was only the latest misadventure in a life pocked with battles with alcohol, with track stewards, with horrific injuries … and, mostly, with himself. This all comes after a shooting accident cost him one eye when he was 13 years old.
By necessity, he had been without a drink since entering the jail in early September.
“I’ll never forget it,” Hebert said in Arapahoe Park’s Barn 2 the other day. “I said, ‘Man, I’m going to go across the street and I’m getting a 24.’ I don’t know what happened. I walked out that front door and it was clarity, a moment of clarity.”
Wiseguy handicappers might consider him a longshot to stay clean. But at age 53, the Cajun native of Erath, La., is determined to finally pull it off.
“I went into jail sober, I came out sober and I’ve been sober ever since,” he said.
Going into Arapahoe Park’s Saturday races on the second weekend of the 2016 meeting, Hebert’s career numbers scream out: What’s this guy doing here? According to Equibase, he had 3,816 wins and his mounts had earned $50.9 million. He is No. 78 in alltime wins for jockeys, and 33rd among those still active. His ride earnings have him at No. 137 all time.
On Arapahoe Park’s opening weekend, he had six wins. He’s doing his primary work for trainer Joy Marlin, who mostly trains for owners Donna and Dwain Eaton of Lamar. So what is this guy doing here? Marlin, who had horses running at Charles Town, W.Va., visited him in prison. Joy had been married to Hebert’s second cousin, jockey Brian Theriot, for 17 years. They talked about Hebert possibly riding for Marlin after he got out. If he was clean, of course. Marlin and Theriot had split up, both personally and professionally.
“I went into jail sober, I came out sober and I’ve been sober ever since.” Arapahoe Park jockey Tracy Hebert
“Tracy was looking for a way to kind of reinvent himself,” Marlin said.
“It was really a business proposition,” Hebert said. “She needed a rider.”
After his release, Hebert didn’t have a place to live.
“She said, ‘Look, you pay half the rent, you can stay here,’ ” Hebert said. “One thing led to another, and the relationship got really strong after that.”
“God gave me talent”
They have been a couple since January, as Hebert got back into racing at Charles Town early this year. Then he accompanied Marlin to Arapahoe Park, which has a three-month meeting and is part of a circuit that includes New Mexico racing.
“I presented this to him where he can kind of feel good about himself again and go down to the southwest circuit and make some decent money down in New Mexico,” said Marlin, a native Floridian who has a degree in biochemistry from the University of Miami.
Said Hebert: “The places I’ve been, it’s like I was dead everywhere I went. I’m just happy that I’m riding. It’s in my blood. I lost something along the way, but God gave me talent.”
In Cajun country, he began riding at age 10 and was looking ahead to trying to be a jockey when a buddy had a new 12-gauge shotgun and they were out in a sugar cane field, trying it out. The friend was fooling around with it when the gun went off.
“One BB hit me directly in the pupil,” Hebert said. “I thought it was just dirt and I was rubbing it and they said it got infected.”
Doctors removed the eye, and as Hebert learned the jockey craft, he was doing it with sight in only one eye.
“I had to adjust to it,” he said. “I couldn’t glance and see something with that eye. I had my senses and my hearing, and I use that for my eyesight there.”
He broke in at “bush,” or unrecognized, tracks in Louisiana. His mother, who had split from his father and remarried, tried to discourage him. “She said it was the devil’s money,” he said. “She didn’t like it because it was gambling and it was my love.”
He moved in with his father and began his career on recognized tracks in 1979, as a 16-year-old apprentice. Through the 1980s he was successful on the Louisiana circuit, winning riding titles at Jefferson Downs and Delta Downs, but his problems also started early.
“I was in a lot of trouble, drinking and going into rehabs and all that stuff,” Hebert said.
He ended up at Thistledown, near Cleveland, and was one of the leading riders for several seasons in the early 1990s.
“Somebody said, ‘You need to go to Kentucky, man, you don’t belong here,’ ” Hebert said. “Being handicapped and with my low self-esteem, I was like, ‘Man, I can’t mess with those boys.’ But I went to Kentucky.”
Nowhere to ride
On the Kentucky circuit he was as high as third in the jockey standings at the marquee track, Churchill Downs, and won riding titles at Ellis Park and Turfway Park.
In 2000, with a DUI charge pending against him, he was allowed to keep riding only after agreeing to daily testing. Then Churchill Downs suspended him indefinitely in November, saying he had failed alcohol screenings in the state three times. Racing officials said he hadn’t been suspended after the first two failed screenings because blood tests taken in conjunction with the screenings came back negative. Hebert is adamant that he didn’t fail any blood tests and that a state racing official was determined to get him off Kentucky tracks after several runins. “I knew he was messing with me, but the young punk that I was, instead of shutting up, my pride got in the way and I fought back,” Hebert said.
But he doesn’t deny that he was troubled.
“I can sit here and say a lot of things,” Hebert said. “But I’m going to keep it simple. I opened up my arms and let them put in that punch. A lot of good people tried to help me, tried to talk to me, but I wasn’t ready.”
Such suspensions are universally recognized, so he had nowhere to ride. He spent the next three years working on farms, exercising horses. He was back on the track in Louisiana in 2004 and won a riding championship at Delta Downs, then made an unsuccessful return to Kentucky and since has bounced around to tracks in Louisiana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and West Virginia with varied success.
In 2011, when the horse he was on at Louisiana’s Evangeline Downs broke down and fell, Hebert was stepped on by a trailing horse and suffered two punctured lungs, a broken sternum, a broken nose and broken ribs. But he came back to the track. “It’s not that I’m nuts,” he said. “But you know when you have the love for something?”
Then he hit rock bottom last year, heading to jail for the DUI charge that came when he was riding at Charles Town.
He said he lost count of how many times he went through alcohol treatment.
“A lot,” he said. “And all the times I’ve been through treatment, it’s never helped me. All the good people that talked to me never helped me. It was that when I walked out of jail, that was it.”