COLM GREAVES: Horsemanship and heavy drinking - Garrett Gomez excelled at both
Zenyatta, one of the finest mares to ever grace a racetrack, was about to contest her 20th and final race. Her owner had sportingly campaigned her all the way through to the age of six, foregoing a couple of lucrative breeding cycles in a quest for immortality and their gamble had paid off.
Nineteen wins, no defeats, Horse of the Year, visually memorable victories. Whatever happened in tonight’s bid for a second Breeders Cup Classic didn’t really matter that much, as her place in the hall of fame was already assured.
Zenyatta’s relationship to a horse race had always been a bit like that of an old boot to a wedding car. For about the first three-quarters of her contests she would weave along behind the rest of the pack, as though being towed on a rope from a bumper.
When all looked lost her jockey, usually Mike Smith, would ease her into the middle of the track, apply the jet burners and she would sprint past the rest of the field as if they were a collection of lazy beach donkeys.
Not this time.
This time it was to be different, this time Garrett Gomez was ready for her. Riding the four-year-old colt, Blame, he bided his time on the inside, delivered a challenge two furlongs out that left him four lengths clear of the now motoring Zenyatta as they got to the furlong pole.
The winning post and the sound of Zenyatta’s final whoosh came to Gomez at almost precisely the same time. He wasn’t quite sure of the outcome. “When we got to the wire, I thought I won,” he said. “Then I looked across and I thought, ‘Man, I think I might have won’. So I just waited and then I heard the commentator in the background saying ‘and second was Zenyatta’. I finally got a chance to get excited.”
He had prevailed by a very short head and had very perceptively sucked the joy from the expectant Los Angeles crowd, many of whom had come only to cheer the last coronation lap of a legend.
This was the 13th, the greatest and the last of Breeders Cup victories for Gomez, the highest point in a career already loaded with achievement and glory. Four seasons as America’s top earning jockey, twice Eclipse award winner as Rider of the Year.
Four thousand winners, the record for most stakes winners in a single season with 76 in 2007. Over $200 million in career winnings of which he kept a handy 10% for himself. For Garrett Gomez this was as good as it had ever been. As good as it was ever going to get.
Gomez is found lying unconscious on the floor of a casino guest room on an Indian gambling reservation near Tucson and is pronounced dead at the scene.
A drug overdose is suspected and nobody in his family or his profession is surprised by the news.
There had long been a cold inevitability this is how he would end his days.
Born on New Year’s Day in 1972, it was a notable birthdate shared with every thoroughbred foaled that year, technically making him a birthday buddy of the likes of Grundy, Ruffian and Silver Buck.
His father, Louie, came from a very hard working farming family and at the time his son was born he was scratching a living as a jockey, mainly on the minor tracks of the US south-west.
His mother’s family were less well structured. Migrants to the warmth of Arizona from the north, eight kids in the care of feckless and abusive parents, the father, Ronnie, drunkenly lumbering his young family from one unpaid rent eviction to the next.
Seven of the eight kids including his mother, Sandy, were to suffer tragically from addiction later in life and the disease hungrily cascaded down a generation.
Garrett was drinking beer and smoking marijuana before he was 10. He reached pony club level with few of his contemporaries having any time for him, describing him even by then as a “mean and violent drunk”.
By his mid-teens the twin tracks of his story were already written — horsemanship and heavy drinking. He excelled at both.
His early upward career trajectory was stalled in 1991 when he suffered bad injuries in a fall at Arlington, Chicago, and he ended up spending a lot of time alone in bed recuperating.
He organised (terrorised) his then fiancé, Beth, into delivering vast quantities of beer and bourbon to him and immersed in this comfortable solitude proceeded to drink himself senseless.
His father had drilled into him that a jockey never shows a weakness, ever, but no one could see him here.
He emerged 20 days later describing himself as a “full-blown alcoholic and loser”.
The next dozen years were spent it a haze of winners, bourbon, prison, cocaine, marriage, psychiatric wards, divorce, methamphetamines, children, rehab and relapse.
His second wife, Pam, painfully recalled the terror of those times. “I remember looking into his eyes during one of our arguments when he was using,” she said, “and I swear I saw the devil himself.”
She added: “His eyes were sunken and they were pitch black. I remember thinking, who is this person? I want my husband back.”
Then suddenly, in 2003, after serving a prison sentence for drug possession, Gomez straightened himself up. He had at last become tired of digging and put his shovel down, and left it down for 10 years.
These were the harvest years, the years when he showed the world exactly how good he could be, when he won many of those races, most of that money, all those awards and adulation.
Then, equally as suddenly, his demons came calling again.
In the summer of 2013, Gomez didn’t turn up for a full book of rides at Del Mar. At the subsequent disciplinary hearing he confessed to racing officials he was again seeking treatment for alcoholism. He rode his last race at Keeneland in October 2013 and formally retired a couple of years later.
His friend and biographer Rudolph Alvarado speculated on what might have happened next. “He probably went back to Arizona searching for peace, trying to escape, trying to find a place where he could find quiet.
"I think that that’s where he always went to find his peace, by himself, in a darkened room with the curtains drawn, just drinking or doing whatever drugs he’s doing, the TV set probably on a horse racing channel.”
It would be nice to think there was a Breeders Cup retrospective on the channel in the last hours.
Maybe even the one from 2010 at Santa Anita, the one where Zenyatta and the winning post arrive at almost the same time as Blame and Garrett Gomez.
Almost.
