ARCADIA, Calif. — Wednesday was yet another day of wonder for Mario Gutierrez.
He had already ridden to victory in the first two legs of the Triple Crown, and now he sat at a huge boardroom table at Santa Anita, surrounded by leather chairs, expensive paintings and bronze statues of horses, calmly answering questions via speakerphone from journalists all over the country.
In that room, multimillion-dollar decisions are made and the core of horse racing has been altered hundreds of times. Had Gutierrez even tried to get into that room three months ago, somebody would have called security.
His is a story for both racing lore and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
He is 25 and grew up riding quarter horses for his father, Mario Sr., in Mexico. The family — mother Paulina, brother Juan and sisters Mayte and Fidelina — were far from wealthy, but happy.
Little Mario loved everything about riding.
“I was a kid, learning from the big guys,” he says. “I fell off a lot. I even made one horse flip backward on top of me. That was a week in the hospital, but I didn’t break any bones.”
One day in 2006, a trainer from Mexico City went to Veracruz, scouting talent, and offered Gutierrez a chance to go to Hastings Racecourse in Vancouver, British Columbia, as an apprentice jockey. He was 19 and heading into the unknown.
“I didn’t know any English when I got [there],” he says. “I couldn’t communicate. There aren’t a lot of Spanish speakers there. It was hard. But I wanted to learn so bad. I watched 2,000 movies and listened to music. I’d get movies with subtitles. Now, when I’m in Vancouver, I only speak English.”
He was there to work for a trainer named Troy Taylor and an owner named Glen Todd. Taylor is 80, Todd 64. Soon, he moved into their house and still considers that home, despite a wave of success that certainly allows for his own place. “I love that big old house, and Troy and Glen are my family,” he says. Gutierrez talks of his Vancouver family with reverence. “They keep me straight,” he says. “I’m 25 and they know what I shouldn’t do. When I won the Kentucky Derby, we had lots of tears over the phone.”
Gutierrez returned to Vancouver for a few days after winning the Derby and still gets emotional about it.
“These are my friends, my family,” he says. “The people are wonderful there. And when I got to my room in the house and put my head on my own pillow, I was so happy.”
He got his shot at the big time last winter when Taylor and Todd took a few horses to race at Santa Anita. Gutierrez rode for them, and almost nobody else. Santa Anita’s riding colony is not exactly devoid of talent.
One race day, he rode a winner in an early race and J. Paul Reddam was watching. Reddam was impressed with Gutierrez’s coolness, asked his main trainer, Doug O’Neill, who that was, and O’Neill found out. Reddam owned and O’Neill trained a horse named I’ll Have Another. They were high on him as a Kentucky Derby prospect, but this was February, and every trainer in the country still has a Derby horse in heart or mind.
O’Neill asked Gutierrez to do a morning work on I’ll Have Another. It was love at first furlong.
“I’m a jockey,” he says. “We know a race car when we are driving one.”
He thought that ride was the end of it, and even while his agent, Ivan Puhich, was telling him he’d be left on the horse for the Grade II Lewis Stakes, he didn’t believe it. Even when he and I’ll Have Another won the Lewis, a key prep race for the Santa Anita Derby, he was certain that was it.
“I was happy. I said OK,” Gutierrez says. “I already won a Grade II at Santa Anita. That’s already a big deal.”
Reddam and O’Neill never wavered. Gutierrez and his horse took another at the Santa Anita Derby, then another at Churchill Downs, then another at Pimlico. Like Reddam’s cookie-eating habits, for which the horse was named, the jockey from nowhere has munched his way within one step of fame.
In three months, he has gone from yet another nameless little guy, hanging around the paddock at Santa Anita, to the toast of the racing world. But he clings tightly to his roots, which makes him even more appealing.
After the Derby, he said he and his dad cried on the phone.
“He told me next time not to make it so close,” Gutierrez says, “because I’m gonna give him a heart attack.”
Sports, Pages 22 on 05/25/2012