LOUISVILLE, Ky. — They are night and day at Churchill Downs, trainer Dale Romans at 6 feet 3 and Tammy Fox at 4 feet 6. One of Romans' assistants didn't really give Fox a leg up on his filly, Enjoythe Afternoon, for Thursday's first race, he virtually tossed her into the saddle.
"If I owned all my horses, I'd ride Tammy on every one of them," Romans said.
Romans is biased, of course. He and Fox have been together for 14 years, and they're the parents of a 14-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy.
A jockey boycott at Churchill, with some of the top riders refusing to ride and then being banned by track management, has given Romans and other trainers the chance to use the 94-pound Fox and other replacement jockeys. Robert A. "Cowboy" Jones, who'll be 60 next month, even got a mount.
Fox rode seven horses Wednesday, the first day of the boycott, and out-finished the legendary Pat Day to run third with one of them, a 40-1 shot. She didn't do as well with a Romans-trained colt, finishing sixth.
Then in rain and slop Thursday, she brought Enjoythe Afternoon from last place for a nifty maiden win. Enjoythe Afternoon, bred and owned by Brereton Jones, a former Kentucky governor, went off at 13-1 in her debut. This was Fox's third win of the year, in only her 19th race.
"Tammy's a good rider," the 38-year-old Romans said. "She deserves a chance. She's 39 now, and came along a little ahead of her time. She broke in before Julie Krone came along, won all those races and opened some doors for female riders."
Romans, the trainer of Roses In May and Kitten's Joy, who both finished second in Breeders' Cup races at Lone Star Park on Oct. 30, had better say nice things about the mother of his children. She might look like a runt, but Fox is nobody to mess with. She plays halfback in a professional women's football league, which uses NFL rules.
Last year, the Churchill stewards suspended her for 14 days after she took a punch, while they were both on horseback, at a trainer's wife. The other woman had made fun of Fox's size.
Fox won't brook any pressure from the regular jockeys she's replacing.
"If Shane Sellers ever gets in my face, I'd hit him," she said. "And he knows it."
Sellers, who has won more than 4,000 races, hasn't ridden since Oct. 2, when he quit because of high accident-insurance costs, but he has been at the forefront of the dissident jockeys' protests here.
