The game was called “Rescue.”
After sitting under the horse track rails playing in the dirt and watching his father exercise horses, DeShawn Parker, 4 or 5 years old at the time, would stand beside a towering horse. His father, Daryl, would yell, “Rescue!” then lean over, scoop up the young boy and plop him onto the horse.
DeShawn Parker went from jumping into his father’s arms at the Latonia, Ky., track to mounting horses, exercising them and finally compiling the most wins for an African-American jockey in the history of horse racing.
His father didn’t expect his son to make horse-racing history.
“I always took DeShawn to the race track with me,” Daryl Parker, 59, said from his home in Cincinnati, Ohio. “That was his treat. If he was good, he could go hang out with me at the track. He’s accomplished a lot more than I ever imagined. I thought he might make a nice living exercising horses and go on to play baseball. But his love for riding took over and he could not wait to get back to horses.”
Daryl Parker has his own page in horse racing’s history. In 1986, he was named the sport’s first African-American steward. Stewards enforce the rules at racetracks and review alleged violations. When he became a steward, he made an agreement with his son, who was 16 at the time: Promise to graduate from high school and you can try your hand at being a jockey.
Deshawn Parker is the most successful black horse jockey in today’s modern derbies with over 4,000 victories. In a sport that is now dominated by Latinos, Parker is the 54th highest-ranking jockey in racing history. Today, only 30 of the approximate 750 members of the national Jockey’s Guild are African American. According to recent stats, 42-year-old Parker has estimated earnings of over $47 million dollars. In 2010, Deshawn Parker became the first black jockey to win the most North American races since James “Soup” Perkins in 1895. Parker credits his success to the pioneering black jockeys of history like Isaac Murphy, who was the first black sports millionaire in 1884.
For Parker, riding a large animal at top speeds is a natural fit, even though he’s 5 feet 10 — really tall for a jockey. He said he eats once a day to maintain his 115 pounds.
“I wanted to play baseball but I never got the weight,” he said with a laugh.
The Apprentice
NEW ORLEANS − The kid comes rolling up to the Fair Grounds front side in a gleaming, cherry-red pickup with expensive custom rims, head barely visible above the dashboard. He bounces from the reserved parking area up to the grandstand, through the west paddock gate and into the jock’s room, smiling all the way. Miguel Mena is the only other rider in the quiet room at 9 a.m. on a race day. The kid tosses a verbal barb toward Mena, at 25, eight years his senior. Mena grins ruefully as the kid sets his backpack down in his cubby, squeezed near the spaces used by Robby Albarado, Jamie Theriot, and Shaun Bridgmohan, “Millionaire’s Row,” some of the other jocks call it.
C.J. McMahon feels right at home in that little spot – already. McMahon just turned 17. He became a jockey barely seven months ago. Until Nov. 24, he had ridden only at minor Louisiana tracks: Evangeline Downs, Delta Downs, a couple of weeks at Louisiana Downs. But McMahon won nine races during the first eight racing days at Fair Grounds, placing him third in the early standings. He has youth, radiant confidence, a five-pound apprentice weight allowance, and the same agent, Tony Martin, who guided Joe Talamo to the 2006-2007 Fair Grounds riding title that paved his path to Southern California success.
Read the rest of CJ’s store here. His family history in horse racing is fascinating!
