Mine That Bird No Upset Compared to Chris Antley in 1999

Mine That Bird should not have been in the Derby, flat-out had no business being there.

Shipped in from Sunland Park, a tiny B-circuit in New Mexico, after twice losing a race there. Twice.

I wrote last week on a forum, “If Bennie Woolley enters him in the Derby, he should lose his license! Permanently!”

The horse had no form, none whatsoever.

Heck, if the race was ran on the pages of the Daily Racing Form, Mine That Bird might still be out on the track, trying vainly to finish.

But, of course, it’s not, and Mine That Bird and Calvin Borel skidded the rail in the slop to a stunning, 6 and ¾ length victory, the largest winning margin in the Kentucky Derby since Texas-bred Assault in 1946.

Assault went on to win the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes, becoming the 7th Triple Crown winner in American thoroughbred racing.

And I’ve heard all sorts of comparisons since.

A guy who accidentally got placed in the first tier of the New York Marathon, and winning it; a boxer losing a bunch of fights to nobodies, then being brought into a fight with the world champion in a supposed walkover and winning; a Floridian winning the Iditarod while on vacation to Alaska.

Or, my personal favorite.

It’s like Charleston Southern going to the Swamp and beating the Florida Gators by four touchdowns.

And you know what, I don’t think any of those are too far from the truth. This horse had no business being in this field, at all.

Maybe I’m bitter because I lost a bit of money on my first trip to Churchill Downs; maybe it’s because of what I wrote last week about the trainer; maybe I’m just in denial, but I’m not going to write anymore about this race. I’m done with my trip to Louisville.

No, the rest of the turf media can write about that.

I want to talk about the human aspect of the sport, and there’s no better time to do that then now.

This year was the 10th anniversary of Charismatic’s 31-1 shocker in the 125th Kentucky Derby. Sure, it was not of the same calibre of “shocker” as this year, but it’s up there.

D. Wayne Lukas’s three-year old chestnut colt had not done much.

He had been entered in a claiming race just a few months before and needed to win the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland just 14 days before the Kentucky Derby in order to secure enough graded stakes earnings to even get a spot in the Derby field.

But none of that deals with the human aspect of the Kentucky Derby. That’s just an interesting sidenote.

Charismatic’s jockey, Chris Antley, is a story in and of himself. A lesson, a message. He’s everything a jockey wants to be, and nothing. He’s a tragedy and a hero, a martyr and a villain.

It doesn’t really matter which part of the story I start with. It really doesn’t. It’s still the same person. So I’ll start with 1999, but work in both directions.

There Antley was again, at the top of his game. Again, the key word.

In 1991, Antley piloted Strike the Gold to triumph in the Run for the Roses. It was just another in a string of big victories for the 25-year old jockey from South Florida.

He had previously won such Grade I stakes as the Manhattan Handicap, the Wood Memorial Stakes, and the Carter Handicap, dominating the New York scene.

Antley also left the state from time to time, winning major stakes at tracks like Ak-Sar-Ben in Nebraska, Monmouth in New Jersey, Keeneland in Kentucky, and Hawthorne in Illinois.

But by 1999, that was all in the past. Gone. Only 33, he was already washed up, scrambling for mounts, nobody’s top call jockey.

He had battled weight and drug problems. If he was sober enough to get to the track, he was hardly close enough to his weight to actually be a top rider.

The scant 108 pounds, the amount a jockey is expected to weigh, was a near-impossible challenge.

While he once won nine races on one card, now there were times he’d be lucky to win nine races in a month.

In 1985, the young apprentice won more races than any other jockey in the country. In 1997, he decided to retire.

“I didn’t like me,” Antley said in 1999 in retrospect of his early retirement. “I clung to my persona around the race track that I was always the bad boy.

“That was how I felt about myself.”

To say Antley was down and out would be an understatement. He was past either of those conditions.

Then, miraculously, Antley got things together. Miraculously indeed.

He entered drug rehab in Nov., 1997, and possibly he would be able to get his life together after all.

By late 1998, Antley was more than seven years removed from the top of his sport. However, he decided to return.

He started galloping horses out at Hollywood Park in California at the beginning of July. Once he got his weight down, he decided to ride again.

And luckily, at least for both of them, Lukas gave Antley a shot on Charismatic, and it paid off big-time.

After his win in the Derby, Antley guided Charismatic to another long-shot win in the Preakness Stakes, putting him one win away from capping his great comeback with a Triple Crown triumph.

No horse had won all three legs of the Triple Crown since Affirmed became the 11th in 1978; 21 years later, here was Chris Antley.

And everything was going brilliantly in the Belmont. The world seemed poised for a Triple Crown winner as Dave Johnson bellowed on ABC “And down the stretch they come!”

But the fragility of a horse, whether a champion like Charismatic or a nobody like, well, Charismatic just a couple months before, can never be underestimated. Never.

Charismatic turned for home with a great chance to take the win. At the eighth poll, he even surged to the lead.

Then, Antley felt something different. Charismatic’s gallop was not the same. There was something wrong with his left front hoof.

Antley eased Charismatic and slowed him down as quick as he could, finally getting the horse to be slow enough that he could jump off right past the wire and keep control of Charismatic so he did not run off and injure it anymore.

He lifted the hoof off the ground and held it until medical attention could be found.

Antley, instead of winning the Triple Crown, became even more of a hero than anyone could have ever dreamed. While we will never know the alternative, it is possible that Antley saved Charismatic’s life.

But every hero has to fall at some point.

The thing about Antley is, just like after he won the Derby in 1991, the fall would be sudden. Unlike before, however, this time it would be permanent.

In March 2000, Antley would again walk away from his sport, this time to deal with renovating his house. A few months later, his wife became pregnant with the couple’s first child.

Then, on July 26, Antley was arrested for drunk driving. He was sentenced to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but he never once went.

This was only the beginning.

On September 28, his wife, who was in New York working for NBC, called police fearing something was wrong because she could not get in touch with her husband at their home in Pasadena, Calif.

The police went to Antley’s house and found him and a friend with methamphetamine and marijuana. He was arrested, but no charges were filed because it was deemed an inadmissible search and seizure.

16 months after returning to the pinnacle of his sport, this time as a jovial, happy-go-lucky, lively jockey, Antley was teetering with self-destruction for the second time in three years.

Everyone around him realized that something was wrong as he continued to spin into a depression that required him to drink almost 24-7.

His wife scheduled a couple interventions, and even fellow jockey Gary Stevens came out to try and help Antley out of it at the beginning of November.

“He was very quiet, very sad, and very paranoid,” Stevens said later. “For whatever reason, he was living in a 24-hour-a-day nightmare that he couldn’t wake up from.”

Nobody around could disagree.

“When I left, Chris was crying and I was crying.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see Chris again.”

And Stevens was right.

Antley died less than a month later, on Dec. 2, 2000 in his California home. He was only 34.

Police originally investigated into it being a homicide, but ruled on Jan. 11, 2001 that the former jockey had died as a result of an overdose.

Just a few hours after the ruling, Antley’s wife gave birth to Violet Grace Antley, Antley’s first daughter.

Take whatever lesson you want out of that story; there are so many. There’s no need for me to preach because I don’t know which part touches you the most.

But I’d be wrong not to tell you which touches me.

It has been 10 years since Chris Antley won the Kentucky Derby and eight and a half since he died, but it’s the 10 that speaks to me.

No matter how down I become, no matter how far I fall from my pinnacle, glory can always be just a few months away. Antley rose almost overnight to recapture his glory.

If you think Mine That Bird was a shocking upset, then you are forgetting 1999. That might have been the biggest upset of them all.

Not Charismatic, but Chris Antley.

That’s an underdog I’m not ashamed to remember.