On a grey day at Jamaica last week, Jockey Gordon Glisson booted home his 249th winner of the year. No other U.S. jockey was close to him in the race to ride the most winners of 1949.* Half an hour later, while Glisson was trying for No. 250, he got in a jam on the far turn and his mount stumbled. He was pitched out of the saddle and lay still in the dirt until the ambulance arrived.
It was Glisson's first spill since four horses piled up in the stretch at Belmont Park last June. That day, with one jockey hurt and two others stunned, he walked calmly back to the jockeys' room where an excited doctor exclaimed: "That was a pretty bad spill." Glisson, dirty and dusty, stared at the doc with cold, blue eyes and said matter-of-factly: "I've seen worse." At 18, he has the kind of unshakable coolness that makes him a standout among the hard-boiled little men he rides against.
As a kid in Winnsboro, S.C., he had been the 75-lb. runt of an amateur boxing team. Sometimes, on trips with the team, he had to serve as mascot and second when there was no boxer on the other squad small enough, i.e., under 100 Ibs., for him to fight. After he moved to Seattle with his mother in 1945, Glisson filled in one night for a dishwasher in a short-order restaurant. He made so much noise that a customer, Horse Trainer Ralph King from nearby Longacres, asked the waitress who he was. Said the waitress: "He ought to be a jockey. He's got the build. And those hands." King gave him a job.
Last year, he rode (and lost) his first race at Ak-Sar-Ben track near Omaha. He struck his stride last winter at Santa Anita, where Oldtimer Eddie Arcaro decided during a race one day that the kid needed taking down a notch. Said Arcaro later: "I rode up even with him and looked him in the eye. He looked right back at me, cold as you please—and first thing I knew I'd been beaten." Glisson won the $100,000-added Santa Anita Derby on Old Rockport, became the long-shot darling of the California bettors, then moved on to Kentucky and eventually New York.
After last week's spill, many a U.S. horse player who bet on nothing but Glisson's mounts had to find a new system temporarily. Their blue-eyed boy, who was earning around $50,000 a year before he was old enough to shave regularly, was out of business for a few weeks with a broken collarbone.
*Second that day last week: Jockey Steve Brooks, with 203.