Page 29 - The Game January 2006
P. 29

28 The Game, January 2006 Your Thoroughbred Racing Community Newspaper
This is the story of two men and their devastating riding injuries: Actor Christopher Reeves and jockey Jack Lauzon.
Superman and Jocko
2005 Sovereign Award Winning Feature Article - by Peter Gross
Reeves was thrown from a horse during an equestrian event in Virginia on May 27th, 1995. The impact shattered two vertebrae and left Reeves totally paralyzed and dependent on a breathing machine.
Jack Lauzon was riding at the Macau racetrack on August 7, 1996. If anything, his accident was more horrific than Reeves'
"A horse just went by me, he came in a step; it's not like it hasn't happened a hundred times before" says Lauzon, telling the story without emotion as if it took place in another lifetime,
"I just clipped his heels and I went down. I guess I got thrown to the left; the horse behind me was tracking so close that he ran over my horse who landed on top of me, so I don't know if I broke my neck when I hit the ground or did the horse break it? At this point I couldn't tell."
In the fraction of a second it takes to tumble to the turf, Lauzon's life took a dreadful turn. He had fractured three vertebrae - c5, c6, and c7. His spinal cord was compressed and he was told he had come maybe three millimetres from severing the spinal cord completely.
Until that catastrophic moment, Jack 'Jocko' Lauzon had lived a life of almost uninterrupted thrills, success and satisfaction.
He was born in Welland in 1961, son of a man who loved his Sundays at the track. The first time little Jack tagged along, his future was inscribed.
"I got there and saw the horses and how fast they were going, the thrill of it all. When I was young I used to have motorcycles and snowmobiles and I loved speed and showing off, so I said, this would be perfect for me!"
And now we describe a life and career as near to perfect as you could imagine. Jocko rode twice at Fort Erie before his 18th birthday and more than 23 years later he remembers vividly his first win.
"It was 1981 and it was at Fort Erie," says Lauzon, "A horse called Lively Lisa, owned by Kinghaven Farms."
Jocko won 3 races in 1981, and 37 more in 1982. For the next 12 years he was as professional a jockey as you could find, averaging almost 100 wins a season, consistently coming in first with more than 10% of his mounts and, to the horseplayers' deepest concerns, hitting the board year in year out at close to 40%. If you wanted to express these numbers in baseball terms, you're talking about a guy homering thirty times and batting over .320 12 straight years.
But like baseball players who feel incomplete without a World Series ring, Lauzon wanted more than anything to win a Queen's Plate. In the summer of 1988, he reached that goal, guiding Regal Intention to the winner's circle in Canada's most important race. Actually that was one of
two terrific things that happened to Jocko that year. In November his wife Geraldine delivered their son Joshua.
The next year Lauzon considered carefully a most enticing offer. He was asked to ride at the track on the Chinese owned island of Macau. For taking his tack to the other side of the world, Lauzon would be guaranteed $100,000 a year plus standard riding fees and anything else he could earn riding for other stables when his owners didn't have a horse running. In Macau, they race just once or twice a week and perhaps the clincher was this - jockeys are allowed to carry more weight there than here.
"To be honest, I was starting to think about my weight," says Lauzon, "I could ride over there at 119 and on a few occasions I carried 145 or 147 pounds."
In late 1993, while local jockeys were dodging frozen clumps of dirt, Jack Lauzon was riding clockwise in Macau and the Chinese horse people, recognizing a skilled rider, asked him to stay indefinitely. But something inside was eat- ing at Jocko.
"I told my wife, I need to win the Queen's Plate one more time. It's just in me todoitsoIcamebackanddidit.Iwonit in '94 with a horse called Basqueian for Frank Stronach."
Lauzon, now in his 30's, began wondering just how much he had left.
"I didn't know how much longer I had to ride, so I figured get as much as I can and come back and train some horses."
So back he went to Macau, and for Jack and Geraldine and little Joshua, it was as good as it could get. Jocko had the light work-load, the guaranteed contract and not quite the life-and-death struggle with weight that many of his peers go through. And the bottom line looked good, even in Chinese.
"I did better there in three years than I did in 15 years here," he says, not so much bragging as just checking the math.
But on August 7th, his world and that of Geraldine and 7-year-old Joshua came crashing to the turf.
The doctor's first prognosis is everybody's worst nightmare.
You'll never walk again.
Jocko was paralyzed from the chest down. And he was devastated.
"Things go through your head. How am I going to play with my kid? What am I going to do in life now? I told everyone to leave and then I broke down crying," he recalls.
Little Joshua was flown back to Canada to shield him from his father's dire circumstance. Shortly afterwards, Lauzon received a package from his family.
"They sent me a great picture of Joshua in his first hockey game in all his hockey gear. Then I really lost it. And I said, 'This isn't going to do. Whatever it takes to get up and get out, I'll do it'. Two and half weeks after the fall I could feel my toes on
the bedsheets and the doctor said, 'You know what - you might have a chance.'"
A chance.
It's language a jockey understands. It's the tiniest of openings along the rail as the lead horse starts to falter. It's the finish line ahead and the field behind approaching at exactly the same speed.
A chance.
Christopher Reeves never
walked again. And though
Lauzon has enormous respect
for the actor who used his
own crippling injury to raise
awareness and funds for
spinal cord research, the
jockey had no intention of
spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
To stabilize Lauzon, doctors put a halo into his head. Jockeys can talk in an almost cavalier sense about their injuries, but Lauzon tightens up noticeably when he recalls the halo.
"The halo - that's something they screw into your skull. You basically learn to live with it. The only way to turn is to turn your body, you can't turn your head. You can feel the screws, you hear them just crunch into your skull."
Lauzon got to hate the halo on two occasions. His first installment lasted two and half months. And when he began to feel numbness in his hands, they rushed him back to hospital and screwed the damn thing back on again for two months.
But given the chance for a comeback, Lauzon dug in like a heavy favourite. After all he did have three millimetres on his side.
"I had to go to physiotherapy and when they said do five minutes, I did ten. When they said do ten, I did twenty. I was working on the parallel bars learning to walk again. I was trying so hard they had to put special socks on my feet because I was burning my feet and couldn't tell."
Even then, as feelings slowly returned to fingers and toes and legs and arms, Jocko didn't believe he would ever ride again.
"I started doing a lot of swimming. I started karate and thought, if I'm moving this good, why don't I try to be a jockey's agent. And that's what I did; I was an agent for Constant Montpellier."
Of course, that meant that Jocko was back at Fort Erie and Woodbine and it was impossible for him not to dream of riding again. Once the doctors gave him the ok, a return to the silks was inevitable. Lauzon seems to take certain pleasure describing the present state of his vertebrae,
"I got little round rings in between them. I have wire, like a twist tie, through three vertebrae, so there's a little bit of hardware in there, but the doctors said you'll never break your neck in that spot again," he
Jockey Jack Lauzon
on the backstretch at Woodbine
states confidently.
On April 9th, 1999, an incredible scene
took place at Woodbine, as a guy who had broken his neck jumped onto the back of a filly named Be Prosperous.
"I was quite emotional," says Lauzon,
"Everyone was in the paddock and they're all clapping - friends, and family and fans. I can't say I wasn't scared because I was but it didn't take me but a ride or two and I was right back into it."
He sure was. A month later he scored his first win in Canada in more than four years guiding Essa's Secret to the Woodbine winners' circle.
Since then, it's more or less business as usual for Jocko. He's won more than 250 races since his halo days and scored his 1500th career win this fall at Fort Erie on a horse named Bee Fly (Canadian totals do not include the 72 races he won at Macau). But something else has happened since the accident that Lauzon treasures much more than any thoroughbred conquest.
"Her name is Hailey Germaine. She was born February 21, 2003," beams Jocko. Not bad, you think, for a man once sentenced to a life of almost complete paralysis.
It's become pretty much a cliché for people who have suffered near-death experiences to claim that life has profoundly greater meaning, but Jack Lauzon isn't worried about being sentimental.
"I just cherish everything now. I take life in a different prospective. I've always liked winning races, now it's more emotional for me."
On October 10th, 2004 Superman died.
Ten days later, a 6-1 shot named Brassy Light won the first race at Woodbine. The rider was Jack Lauzon.
The horse won by over 6 lengths. That Jocko was aboard for the ride was a matter of three millimetres.


































































































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