Laffit Pincay Jr. was in the winner's circle at Hollywood Park again last weekend. Lord knows how many times he has been there before.
The dress code for him is different these days; it has been since he retired as a jockey in 2003. The coat and tie is still not his uniform of choice in that arena.
Pincay is 62. He won 9,530 races and horses he rode won $237.4 million. That he is in the Hall of Fame is a given. When he was inducted in 1975, he hadn't even begun to approach the greatness that came later.
His appearance Saturday, before the seventh race and about half an hour before the running of the 70th Hollywood Gold Cup -- which he won a record nine times -- was to present an award in his name to former jockey Merlin Volzke, who is 83.
"He never had many big horses to ride," Pincay said a few days before the presentation. "But my wife, Linda, used to bet on him all the time and do pretty well. She called him Merlin the Magician."
The ceremony, nicely handled by the participants, was lost on most of the 10,091 who attended on a day in horse racing that once drew six or seven times that many.
There was another race going on from somewhere else, and voices echoed down the hallways, rooting home some $15,000 claimer from Pleasanton on TV monitors and momentarily drowning out what was taking place in front of the grandstand. Apparently, no ceremony is worth paying attention to when your 2-6-3 trifecta is alive.
Racing shot itself in the foot years ago, when it got greedy and started allowing anybody to bet on anything from anywhere. Once, going to Hollywood Park was a special event, a self-contained occasion. Now, even on the bigger days, it is more like a place to find a bigger TV set and a handy betting window.
The wound is not healing and the bulldozers hover nearby, awaiting a better economic climate so the investors from the north can make Hollywood Park into condos and larger profits.
Lost in all this is a history and tradition that the sport could draw on, that the likes of Pincay represent. His is a story that could have the prominence of DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, the allure of Ali-Frazier. Horse racing fans know it and have kind of forgotten. General sports fans may be surprised to hear it.
On March 1, 2003, Santa Anita Handicap Day, the most famous jockey in the world was aboard a horse named Trampus Too in the fifth race, a dash down the hill on Santa Anita's famed turf course that turns right before it turns left and then crosses a stretch of dirt on the way home.
