Page 12 - January 2007 The Game

12 The Game, January 2007 Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper
Baze is Best...and He’s One of Ours!
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Photo Left:
Jockey Russell Baze winning career race 9531 aboard Butterfly Belle
Photo Below Russell Baze with family and friends
On December 1, 2006, 48 year old Russell Baze rode into the history books by steering Butterfly Belle to victory at Bay Meadows Racetrack in Northern California. With the win, Baze passed the legendary Laffit Pincay as thoroughbred racing’s all-time leading rider with 9,531 victories. Wow, not bad we thought. Guess the guy’s good. Then we saw something in his bio that surprised us even more:
Born: August 7, 1958, Vancouver, British Columbia
How did we miss that? The most successful jockey of all time is Canadian!
“I was just born there,” says Baze over the phone, almost apologetically, “My father was training horses at Exhibition Park at the time I was born.”
Both of Baze’s parents are American. His dad, Joe, used to ride for Jack Diamond who owned Exhibition Park.
Baze races almost exclusively in Northern California at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields and maybe that’s how he slipped under our radar. In this column, we’ll try and atone, because this guy, this Canadian jockey, is a machine on a horse.
Check out his stats. He’s in his 34th year of riding. He has won 36 riding titles at Bay Meadows and 29 at Golden Gate. Seven times he has won over 400 races in a single year. Eight times (1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, and 2005) he has led North America in wins.
In 1995, the National Turf Writers created the Isaac Murphy Award, given annually to the jockey with the best winning percentage. Baze has won that award 10 of the past 11 years. Make that 11 of 12; in late December, with 359 wins on 1,250 mounts, his 29% win figure was, once again, leading the continent.
This guy’s not just a jockey, he’s an assembly line.
Because he has chosen not to ride in New York or on the tough Santa Anita/Del Mar/Hollywood circuit, Baze’s career accomplishments have been down-sized
by some who feel he isn’t necessarily riding against the best. Baze does point out that a three-year tenure against the best wasn’t exactly a failure.
“I was in southern California from 1989 to 1991,” he says, “I was second in the standings a couple of times and never out of the top ten. I was among the toughest jockey colony in North America. There was Gary Stevens, Chris McCarron, Eddie Delahoussy, Laffit Pincay, even Willie Shoemaker was riding there when I first went down.”
Baze has obviously found a great comfort level in Northern California.
“I like the Bay area and I get a lot of support from the horsemen here.”
Baze also likes to consider his family in the mix – wife Teri, three daughters Trinity, Brandi and Cassie and son Gable. Being close to them and living in a safe environment is a critical priority.
As for chasing the record, Baze was a little concerned that wins weren’t coming as frequently as he was used to as he got closer to Pincay’s total of 9530.
“As I got close to the record, it took a while to get the last four or five out of the way,” he says, “I had Laffit here and my parents were here from out of town and I won just one a day for the last three. The only pressure I felt was to win so that those people could get back on with their lives.”
The historic win finally came in a five-furlong turf race and in dramatic fashion, Baze had to summon up much of his considerable riding skills to get Butterfly
Belle to the wire first.
“She’s a come-from-behind sprinter and, as
expected, she was sitting behind, “says Baze, clearly relishing the retelling, “Turning for home, there was a wall of horses in front of me. I tried to work my way to the outside when I saw a hole developing along the rail. I switched her back to the fence and she came running through and she won going away.”
Laffit Pincay, the previous record holder, was apparently the embodiment of class as Baze threatened to wipe him off the history books.
“He’s a great guy,” says Baze, his voice deep with sin- cerity, “For a long time, he’d come up to me and say, ‘Keep going. I know you can do it.’”
Like most jockeys who have been working for more than three decades, Baze has suffered through a hospital’s encyclopedia of injuries.
“I broke a vertebrae in my back in 2003,” he says casually with no more emotion than if he were compiling a grocery list, “I’ve had five compression fractures in my back, broke a bone in my neck, broke my pelvis, three collarbone fractures, broke several ribs, tore a disc in my lower back, tore the arches in my left foot when a horse dumped me.”
At 5’4’ and 113 pounds, Baze doesn’t go through the agony of many jockeys trying to make weight.
“I do have to watch what I eat and, on most days, I might have to pull a pound in the sauna.”
He’s ridden some of the great horses of recent vintage. He mentions Hawkster...
“I won the Oak Tree Invitational on him at Santa Anita in 1989. He set a world record for a mile and a half on the turf.”
And Simply Majestic...
“I set a world record at a mile and an 8th on the dirt with him at Golden Gate in 1988.”
Then there was Lost in the Fog. Baze won the Swale Stakes (2005), the Carry Back Stakes (2006), the King’s Bishop Stakes (2006) and the Aristides Breeders’ Cup Handicap (2006) but the horse’s losing effort in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint in 2005 was a crushing blow.
“It was disappointing because of the fact that we went in with pretty high hopes for him,” Baze says seriously, “Before the race, Greg Gilchrist the trainer, told me, ‘This horse isn’t acting right.’”
Lost in the Fog raced a few more times after the Breeders’ Cup loss, but within six months, he had been diagnosed with cancer and was euthanized shortly after- wards.
Baze makes the odd foray into his native land, riding occasionally at Hastings Park in Vancouver and he does recall a few visits to Woodbine.
“I’ve come up there periodically to ride in Stakes races,” he says, “I rode a horse for K.K. Sangara once.”
Baze figures he has four or five good years of riding left. At the rate he’s going, in about 15 months he will become the first jockey to crack the 10,000 win mark.
As for the issue of his Canadian blood?
“Go ahead, claim me if you like,” he laughs over the phone.
Of course he’s Canadian. He’s nice.
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