Laffit Pincay Jr. represents horse racing perfectly

Near that stretch, an inexperienced jockey moved out and into the path of Trampus Too, who clipped the back of the legs and sent Laffit Pincay flying. He landed on his neck, Trampus Too landed on top of him and a series of events would transpire that made Pincay's appearance in the winner's circle last Saturday yet another chapter in an ongoing miracle.

Pincay's second wife, Jeanine, was in attendance that March day in 2003. Not wanting to worry her, Pincay somehow got to his feet, told the ambulance personnel he was OK, other than a huge pain in his neck, and eventually got a medical official who was not an M.D., to let him go home. Diagnosis: Take some pain pills, rest and it'll be better in a day or so.

For four days, with no sleep, but with the usual jockey's testosterone battling reality, Pincay assured everybody he was all right. Despite the constant pain, he got on his wooden horse at home and worked out. He walked a lap around the Rose Bowl. He even set out on the third morning to work a horse, and would have done so had not the trainer called off the work because the horse didn't need it.

Finally, after getting a massage in his neck area and getting no relief and after running into fellow jockey Alex Solis and hearing how Solis just had a physical and the doctor had discovered, in an X-ray Solis had never bothered to have, a broken neck he'd had for years, Pincay decided to succumb to Jeanine's wishes and go to a doctor.

He knew something was horribly wrong when the doctor returned from the X-ray reading and told him not to move.

"He said I was the luckiest man alive," Pincay said.

He had suffered three broken bones in his neck. One of the breaks is called a "hangman's fracture," the bone that breaks when people die by hanging.

Immediately, they put a surgical halo on his head, which consists of screws drilled into his head and connected to rods that hold his neck in place. He was in that for about two months, and the only thing as painful as having it put on was having it taken off.

Eventually, doctors told him that he should, by all rights, be paralyzed; that the only reason he wasn't spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair was that the muscles in his neck were so strong they somehow held the bones in place and that, had he waited one more day to get to the hospital, the swelling that came with the injury, and also held the bones in place, would have gone down enough for any slight movement to cause paralysis.

Then, they told him he should never ride again, a recommendation he rejected until family and friends, and a phone call from Bill Shoemaker, convinced Pincay of the reality.

Now, it is six years later and he has become one of his sport's best ambassadors. He is to horse racing what Wayne Gretzky is to hockey, Bart Starr is to football, Bill Russell is to basketball. He has a book out called "Anatomy of a Winner," which would have been more aptly named "Profiles in Courage" if that Kennedy fellow hadn't already taken that title.

As horse racing continues to struggle, partly because it sends all its equine stars to the breeding barn too early, it ought to consider that it has a star of the human variety perfectly qualified to carry a baton.

Meet Laffit Pincay Jr., who could be horse racing's walking, talking billboard.

Thank God.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com