LITTLE ROCK — “Resurrecting a Jockey’s Career, The Sequel,” opens Friday at Oaklawn Park.
Jay Fedor is back as the jockey agent with a plethora of contacts; Channing Hill replaces Corey Nakatani as the rider who has moved to Hot Springs in search of a new start.
The original script was a smash.
With Fedor booking his business, Nakatani wound up second in the 2010 Oaklawn jockey standings with 49 winners, winning with almost 24 percent of his mounts while leading rider Terry Thompson was at 19 percent.
Although Fedor and Nakatani have parted ways, the jockey hasn’t looked back. The winner of three straight Breeders’ Cup sprint races in the 1990s, Nakatani did not have a single mount in the Breeders’ Cup from 2006 until last year. In November, he won two races on the biggest weekend in thoroughbred racing.
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Seventeen years younger than Nakatani, Hill’s once promising career has stalled. The leading apprentice in New York in 2005, Hill has been up against it at the major tracks in the Northeast where the fields are small and a handful of jockeys control all the business.
Hill and others compete for the leftovers.
The son of a jockey, Hill grew up in Nebraska. Father Alan gave him a gentle nudge toward the racetrack, but Hill says he always wanted to be a jockey, that he remembers saying that when he was 5 or 6.
“You never caught me without a whip in my hand,” he said. “Kids, you leave them alone on a bench too long, and they’ll be riding that thing.”
Hill was barely old enough to get a driver’s license when he got a leg up on the fast track. Shaun Bridgmohan was in Nebraska to ride in the Cornhusker Handicap and encouraged his agent, Matt Muzikar, to watch the up-and-comer Hill.
“I rode some nice horses that night,” Hill said. “They kind of drug me around there and made me look better than I am.”
Muzikar saw something more and asked if Hill wanted to ride in New York that winter. “What 17-year-old can say no to that,” Hill said.
Hill’s father stayed with him for about a month before returning to Nebraska, leaving the teen-ager with a car and a $900 per month apartment that did not encourage guests.
“If you can make yourself a bowl of cereal, you can survive,” he said.
He won 135 races in 2005, 103 in 2007, and 129 in 2008, but missed three months with a broken ankle in 2011 and rode only 54 winners. His fitness suffered, Hill said, and getting on only one or two horses a day doesn’t help.
Along the way, he admits to some bad decisions.
“I was acting like a kid in a grown-up sport,” he said. “I made silly mistakes. Instead of sticking it out in New York, I decided to go to California. That didn’t work out and I had to start back at zero when I went back to New York. It’s tough to get any business when you don’t have any business.”
Hill arrived in Hot Springs before Christmas and has been getting on horses every morning. It helps that many trainers crossed paths with Hill while racing in Iowa and that Fedor has spread the word.
Hill has three mounts on Friday.
“I think in any meet, you want to get off to a good start so people see you for what you are,” he said. “… Everybody wants to use a winner.”
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Harry King is sports columnist for Stephens Media’s Arkansas News Bureau. His e-mail address is hking@arkansasnews.com.