In 1962's Santa Anita Handicap, jockey Donald Pierce was part of a three-horse entry that included Bill Shoemaker and Alex Maese. Pierce was on a horse named Physician, Shoemaker rode Prove It and Maese was on Olden Times.
Maese and Shoemaker were on horses that stood a good chance of winning the race. Pierce says his horse "would have been 100-1" if he had not been coupled with the other two.
There was a common practice among jockeys who were part of entries to split their share of the purse before the race. So if any one of their horses won, the other jockeys would get a share of prize money. But because Pierce was on such a longshot, Shoemaker and Maese cut him out of the deal figuring he had no chance so why share the winnings with him. That meant more money in their pockets. Being the low-key, easy going guy Pierce was, he went with the flow and just focused on running his race.
So they pop the gates and right away Pierce and Physician get pinched back at the break, leaving him last of 13 horses as they went through the first turn and onto the backstretch. Meanwhile, Olden Times and Maese set the pace while Shoemaker and Prove It sat in third place.
When they got to the far turn, Pierce began making a move. He was ninth after a mile and picking off horses on the turn. One of those horses was Prove It and as Pierce blew by, Shoemaker yelled out, "You're in, Don. You're in."
Pierce eventually ran down Olden Times and Maese in the final strides to win the race and pocket 'all' of the jockey's share of the purse money.
"I miss the little 'Shoe'," Pierce said of Shoemaker as we enjoyed lunch together at the Brigantine restaurant just above the track with Del Mar CEO Joe Harper and Del Mar's director of media Mac McBride. It was a roundtable any horse player would pay money to be a part of, the three swapping stories of racing days gone by.
"I would exercise Charlie Whittingham's horses right over there," Pierce said, pointing south, out of the window to the Pacific Ocean where they would walk the horses in the cool ocean water. "He would have us stand them in that water a long time."
Donald Pierce, now 87-years old, will be celebrated with a ceremony in the winner's circle after Race 3 Friday afternoon at Del Mar. Fellow riders are expected to gather in the winners circle after the race named in his honor. He was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2010 and won 3,546 races during his career yet Dan Smith, racing historian who oversaw Del Mar's media during Pierce's days at the seaside oval, believes the jockey from Oklahoma is often overlooked.
"He was a very underrated rider," Smith notes. "He won all of the big races."
Pierce's list of races won and the multiple times he won them stands alone as great achievements. But when you then consider who he was riding against in those races, his resume becomes truly remarkable.
There was Shoemaker, Eddie Arcaro and Johnny Longden. Later came Laffit Pincay, Jr., Chris McCarron, Eddie Delahoussaye, Fernando Toro and Daryl McHargue. Names that are stamped in the folklore of California racing from the sixties and seventies. Names that are immortalized in the Hall of Fame.
There was Ralph Neves up in Northern California. He was the Hall of Fame rider who was pronounced dead after a nasty fall at Bay Meadows in 1936. Doctors couldn't find any vital signs so they rolled him into the morgue and threw a sheet over him. But the sheet began moving a short time later much to the shock of those in attendance.
"He would shut the Pope off," Pierce remembers of Neves, "but he never shut me off. I never did figure out why."
Pierce won the Del Mar Debutante four times, the Del Mar Derby three times, the Hollywood Derby three times, the 'Big Cap' four times, the Santa Anita Oaks five times and he set a record by winning five consecutive runnings of the Los Angeles Handicap.
He went back east and won the Acorn, the Hopeful and the Marlboro Cup along with a riding title at Belmont Park.
He rode in the 1973 Marlboro Cup that included a coupled entry of Secretariat and Riva Ridge, the 1972 Kentucky Derby winner. Pierce rode Kennedy Road, Canada's Horse of the Year in 1973. Cougar II, the horse who today's feature is named after, was also in the race with Pierce's buddy, Shoemaker, riding. Secretariat won the race in a record time.
When Pierce rode in New York, he would hang out with Shoemaker and Arcaro.
"Those two took me everywhere they went," Pierce says. "We were going someplace and they picked me up in a limousine. They were smoking cigars and I could hardly breathe when I got out of there."
Back on the west coast, Pierce rode up north and won the Bay Meadows Handicap and even further north he won the Longacres Mile. He won on such greats as Ack Ack, Flying Paster, Silky Sullivan and Triple Bend. But his favorite horse was the Cal-bred Hill Rise.
"He was the best horse I ever rode," Pierce remembers, "and I rode a lot of good ones. I won everything on him."
Hill Rise won the 'Big Cap' and the Santa Anita Derby. He won the Man o' War at Aqueduct and then went across the pond, without Pierce, and ran at Royal Ascot where he won the 1966 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, becoming the first California-bred horse to win in the United Kingdom since 1908.
Pierce eventually won every major race in California during his 30-year run. The Kentucky Derby remains that one elusive prize and the Breeders' Cup was in its infancy when Pierce retired from racing in 1985.
Pierce doesn't play golf much anymore, but spent much of his time on the links after retiring.
"Shoemaker was still riding after I retired," Pierce says. "He would call me when he had to ride someplace and we'd go play golf wherever he would go. All over the country. He would call me, 'C'mon Pierce, we're going here.'"
Pierce was well liked by the other jockeys and anybody who had the opportunity to hang out with him. He won the prestigious George Woolf Award in 1967 for excellence on-and-off the racetrack, voted on by his fellow riders. You can see Pierce's Hall of Fame plaque and his George Woolf Trophy on the wall just inside the Horsemen's Lounge on the third floor of Del Mar's Stretch Run.
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