Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard
Link copied to clipboard

Jockey, 61, wants one last victory

Tony Black is looking for one more win in the saddle before calling it quits. With 5,199 first-place finishes in the books, the jockey, at age 61, believes it's time to get out of the bone-crushing part of the thoroughbred racing business.

Jockey Tony Black atop Anonymous Donor during an easy workout at Parx Race Track, Bensalem, February 18, 2013.  ( DAVID M WARREN / Staff Photographer )
Jockey Tony Black atop Anonymous Donor during an easy workout at Parx Race Track, Bensalem, February 18, 2013. ( DAVID M WARREN / Staff Photographer )Read more

Tony Black is looking for one more win in the saddle before calling it quits.

With 5,199 first-place finishes in the books, the jockey, at age 61, believes it's time to get out of the bone-crushing part of the thoroughbred racing business.

Recovering from surgery to put a plate in a twice-broken collar bone, the longtime Haddon Township resident is waiting for medical clearance before racing again.

"It's a kid's game, being a jockey," Black said. "I've ridden the wave long enough. I'm sure anyone would get to the point where they don't want to go to a job where an ambulance follows them around."

Even while waiting for the go-ahead to race, Black was at Parx Racing in Bensalem early Monday, as he is most days during the week, exercising horses and checking on son Anthony's filly, Smart Tori. With temperatures in the low 20s and strong winds, Black said, it was a day when "every broken bone hurts."

In his case, it would require an anatomy lesson to list all of them — "not including toes, fingers, and ribs, because they don't count."

"In the wintertime, you earn your money back here," Black said of the riders and stable hands working as the sun came up on the backstretch. "But I think the horses like it."

Craig Donnelly, a former Inquirer turf writer and a handicapper who is now also a horse owner, called Black "a tremendous rider."

"He is still a strong, confident rider at 61, and that's pretty amazing," Donnelly said. He said Black, once out in front, "has always been a tough rider to catch."

It has been quite a ride for Black, who missed his graduation from Haddon Township High School in 1970 because he was scheduled to ride his first mount at Liberty Bell Park.

The 52-1 longshot, named Stand by Me, got scratched, but Black rode him a few days later, making the young jockey a winner in his maiden race.

Now the winningest rider in the history of Parx, formerly Keystone and PhiladelphiaPark, Black has had 33,874 starts, including 4,517 seconds and 4,371 thirds.

His earnings amount to more than $63.1 million, making him 81st in all-time leaders, according to Equibase, the thoroughbred racing industry's official information site.

His size (4-foot-11) and a family connection recommended Black to racing. His maternal uncle, Samuel Boulmetis, was a successful jockey during the sport's glamour years in the 1950s and '60s.

"Growing up, he was my idol," Black said.

In high school, Black worked as a stable hand and exercise rider at Garden State Park in Cherry Hill and Liberty Bell, now the site of Franklin Mills Mall.

He also wrestled for Haddon Township High, winning championships in the 98-pound weight class in 1969 and 1970.

All these years later, he credits wrestling and his laid-back coach, Miller Preston, with preparing him physically and mentally for the rigors of being a jockey.
"I didn't realize it until a few years into riding that [Preston's] lessons were more about being a good athlete than a good wrestler," he said. "A good athlete learns to utilize his energy effectively and efficiently. All that psyched-up, let's-go, bang-bang, we're-going-to-win — that doesn't do it."

In the years that followed, Black would race around the country, but primarily at Parx. Like many jockeys, he also would encounter the occupational hazards of booze and drugs, but he said he has been sober since 1990.

He has raced in the Preakness and two Kentucky Derbies, coming in fourth on Classic Go Go in the 1981 Run for the Roses.

He was there on April 14, 1977, when Garden State went up in flames, winning what was to be the penultimate race at the old track and watching it burn down, while still in his jockey silks, from the Holiday Inn across Route 70.

Black escaped with other riders, all climbing out a window in the third-floor jockeys' room and making their way to the ground by hopping down a descending series of rooftops.

In 1993, he tied a record set in 1930 by winning nine consecutive races over two days at PhiladelphiaPark and Atlantic City Race Course.

His all-time favorite mount was "a little filly, nothing much to look at," named My Juliet.

In 1976, the Philadelphia-based horse with Black on top won the Vosburgh Stakes at Belmont Park, beating Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner Bold Forbes.

My Juliet won the prestigious Eclipse Award as the top sprinter of 1976 and, though she died in 2001, her name lives on at Parx in a stakes race held every May and on a cafe in the picnic grove.

"I still carry her thought around with me," Black said.

The father of two sons in their 30s, Anthony and Mike, from his first marriage, Black and his wife, Kiely, a manager at Parx, have a daughter, Madison, 7, and a son, Pete, 5.

Madison, who is severely mentally disabled, is a student at St. John of God School in Westville, and Black said those who work with her and the little girl herself are newfound inspirations to him.

"She has a way of showing you a new, different aspect of life, something you took for granted," he said.

Black also has not forgotten where he came from.

He lives five doors from where he and brother Nick grew up and where their 88-year-old mother, Marge, still lives.

"I can't get out of here," said Black, smiling.

He is known in town for contributions to his alma mater, including donating two new scoreboards for the gym when he saw the old boards were not working in sync, said Nelson Epley, the school's acting athletic director.

"He has always been so giving," Epley said. "He is a really gracious person when it comes to us and has never forgotten some of the impacts Haddon Township High School had on him."

The way Black figures it, he'll ride his last race in March, perhaps on Smart Tori.

"You can't plan to win your first one but it happened for me, and now I'd like to make it look like bookends," Black said.

But while Tony Black may not be riding down the backstretch much longer, it's even money you'll still find him at the track, maybe in the winner's circle, as a trainer.