Father, son jockeys reflect on life in horse racing
EDITOR’S NOTE: It takes hundreds of workers each live race meet to ensure race days run smoothly. This is the final installment in a series of articles highlighting occupations surrounding the sport of thoroughbred racing, and how they work together to make each meet a success.
As a child, Alex Birzer was fascinated by photographs of his father’s wins as a jockey, and that ultimately influenced him to get into the saddle.
“Dad didn’t ride for very long, but I can remember as a kid looking through my dad’s old win pictures and just thinking that’s got to be the world’s greatest job, and that’s where it all started for me,” Birzer said. “My dad got away from the horse racing right after I was born, said it was no life for a family shipping around, moving around all the time. I was probably about 12 when he got the itch and got back into the game and just went to training then.
“But still, even five or six years ago, me and my son sat down and went through dad’s old win pictures. He rode quite a bit in the bush tracks around
Kansas, and county fairs and stuff. So you didn’t have silks. The majority of his win pictures are in bluejeans and a T-shirt. It’s come a long way since.”
Birzer, who earned his 3,000th career win at Oaklawn Park in 2017, said he started riding in Ohio at Beulah Park where he rode for “maybe four or five years,” and though his family traveled around quite a bit, he graduated from high school in Columbus.
“Then I crossed the Mississippi over here,” he said. “All my family’s out of Kansas so I came over this way trying to get closer to family, then I wound up meeting a girl from Kansas and that’s just how it all got started.”
It takes a lot of hard work to become a jockey, Birzer said, and in his experience — and now his son, Brett Birzer’s experience — it all started with working in the barns.
“It’s just a lot of hard work when you start off, it’s just one step at a time,” he said. “Being young like I did and like my son did, when you first start off you’re working in the barn as soon as you’re old enough to work in the barn. My son was no different. I was no different. My wife, my father-in-law trained so my wife was raised around horses from the time she was born.
“So Brett grew up in that atmosphere. By the time we’re old enough to get our exercise license, I had been galloping out at farms and my son did the same thing, galloped quite a bit for his grandpa at his place. It’s just a transition and it’s a lot easier for us that grow up in that.”
Brett Birzer, 17, said he was born on the race track, and watching his dad and grandfather work with the horses is what piqued his interest.
“I was actually born in Des Moines, Iowa, and just ever since I can remember we were always on the race track,” he said. “Every summer we’d go up to Des Moines when school got over with and spend the summer with Dad up there. My grandpa, he was a trainer, so he always had horses, too, so I was just kind of born into it.
“Just watching Dad from a little kid, you know, I always loved watching him ride and everything else. If it was go to a buddy’s house or stay home and watch Dad ride, it was stay home and watch Dad ride. Just something I always took interest in.”
Alex Birzer serves on two track committees, for Oaklawn and Prairie Meadows in Iowa, which include trainers, management and the track superintendents from each track.
“When I go there, they explain different things and they talk about how the track was the week before, and I always put in my opinion on how it feels underneath us,” he said. “We get a better perspective of the track surface and the big thing is just safety for everybody.”
The sport, he said, has always taken a team effort.
“It’s not a ‘me sport,’” he said. “I’ll refer to ‘we’ a lot. People ask me questions and I’ll say ‘we do this,’ or ‘we do that.’ My family has given up a lot and I understand that. So it’s not just I’ve done it, it’s we.
“And my agent and I have been together for going on 18 or 19 years we’ve been together. And then the people I ride for, I have several outfits I ride for, that I’ve rode for 10-plus years. So it’s not an individual sport.”
The team effort it takes to get horses ready to race is something both Alex and Brett Birzer said would amaze people.
“I think really just all the time that’s put into the horses just to get them to the races, not how much money you spend on them,” Brett Birzer said. “Just to get them there, how much work is put in from the people that take care of the mare to when she’s in foal, the whole breaking process at the farms. There’s so many different stages and levels that it takes to get the horses to the races.”
Alex Birzer said that teamwork has offered him many learning opportunities throughout his life, starting with his father.
“My dad ran a pretty small stable — he usually had anywhere from three to seven so he wouldn’t hire out a lot of outside help, and in the summertime he could take on more horses because he had more help, my mom, and my little brother and me,” he said. “My father-in-law kind of rolled the same way except he had more daughters. He would never take on more than 20 or 25 in the summertime. I have been so blessed through the years where, where my dad left off on everything I learned from him, I met my wife and I think I learned just as much from my father-in-law.
“Then through the years I’ve been blessed to be able to ride for a lot of different outfits, and then within the last couple of years I met up with Jack Van Berg, and you just never quit learning in this game. When you’re done learning, you’re done. That’s when they put you in the ground. You just act like a sponge because there is just so much you can learn in this game, it’s unreal. That’s the thing about the game, it’s just always revolving and revolving, so you just never quit learning.”