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That night there was a council of war in the Arcaro home. Ma was willing to let Eddie give horse racing a try; Pa was dead against it. Ma won. Eddie began to gallop horses for Tom McCaffery, who paid him $15 a week and swore he'd never make a jockey. Eddie used to cry over the belittling he got. At 15 he was in Agua Caliente, broke and homesick, when he finally won his first race, on a four-year-old maiden named Eagle Bird. Then he drove up to Tanforan, Calif., to take a job with Clarence Davison, a "gypsy" horseman who taught him the ABCs of being a jockey.
The Year Brokers Tip Won. It was a bard school. In morning workouts (young Eddie had the man-sized chore of galloping 15 horses every morning), Davison would never tell him simply to "breeze this horse a half mile with a nice snug hold." Instead, he would tell him to work the half in 50 seconds—and he meant neither one second more nor one second less. Eddie learned to have a clock in his head." In New Orleans in 1933—the year Brokers Tip won the Derby—a "bug boy"* named Arcaro began to get into print. He was top rider at the meeting, with 43 wins.
After a race, Davison would take Eddie aside to diagram his mistakes. He showed Arcaro how he lost distance by swinging wide to go around two horses on a turn; low he risked being run into the rail by trying to squeeze through on the inside of a front rider. He formulated it into a rule that Eddie still works by: "Never go outside of two or inside of one." Davison was insistent about never losing ground; it cost Arcaro one spill after another, trying to squeeze through between horses. The first bad tumble he had was from a plater named Gunfire at Chicago in 1933. "Don't let anybody tell you that a spill like that doesn't leave a rider jittery," says Arcaro. "I was gun shy for a long time."
Davison also taught Eddie a wrong thing or two: he believed in laying plenty of whip to a horse. Eddie now believes that too many riders lean too heavily on the whip. The trick, he says, is to use the least possible at the right time. Arcaro often just waves the stick before a horse's eye ("it kind of scares them").
His closest competitor today, thin-faced Ted Atkinson, 31, is known as The Slasher because of the way he flails the whip. Arcaro's only other serious rival is the West Coast's favorite Johnny Longden, who is 38. They all have slightly different styles. Longden, for example, is famed as a "whoop-te-do" rider: a jockey who likes to get out front and stay there. Atkinson rides with his stirrups even; Arcaro uses what is called the "ace deuce" technique, in which the right stirrup is about two inches higher than the left. Says Arcaro: "I don't agree with the idea of it myself, but it seems to suit me." About 75% of present-day jockeys ride that way.