Delaware Park hosted a memorial picnic for John Spivey Wednesday. I read about it, made a mental note that I should go to it, lost that mental note and then watched a celebration in the winner’s circle after Mackman won an allowance race going a mile.
Spivey galloped horses for my dad at Delaware Park. Way back in the mid 1980s. I was in my last summer of riding pony races and my first summer trying to gallop horses. I walked hots ($2.50/horse) until about the fifth set and then I’d slip on a pair of too-big paddock boots, a Caliente with a pair of Steve Pagano’s goggles and walk down the long shedrow of Henry Clark’s old barn. Thing A Thong stood ready every morning. She was the only horse I could gallop.
Dad told me she was well bred. I looked her up today, by Sharpen Up, out of the Northern Dancer mare, Lauries Dancer. She was as quiet as a cup of black tea, didn’t pull, didn’t shy, didn’t breath well either (maybe that’s why I could gallop her). Red Raven ripping up the hill along Bell Road, that was easy. A real-sized race horse on a mile oval, that was the Belt Parkway at rush hour. Thing A Thong was the perfect tonic for an overmatched kid trying to learn how to gallop a race horse.
So was Spivey. We never called him John.
Spivey taught me how to take a half cross, a full cross, tighten my girth with one hand, stash and grab a whip from my back pocket and adjust my stirrups without kicking my feet out. “Sean, push down with your foot and pull up with your hand…” He could do it at the gallop. On the last set of seven or eight a day, in the heat of the summer, Spivey never lost patience with his 15-year-old apprentice. I hung on his every word, did what he did. Well, almost.
Every day, he would tell me to jack up my right stirrup and lower my left one. They call it ace-duece. It looked cool and I wanted to try it. Man, did I want to try it…to look like Spivey, long hold, horse’s head bowed to their chest, cockeyed but cocksure.
But every day, Dad and I would make the long drive home to Pennsylvania and Dad would let go. “…they’re using too much iodine in the bath water…they short-changing the grazing…less alfalfa…the fans need to be on low…nobody can muck a good stall that fast…Spivey always riding ace-deuce…”
My hands hovered over those leathers every morning, Spivey in one ear and Dad in the other. I tried it a few times when Dad wasn’t looking.
When I started riding jumpers, Spivey, a longtime valet at my old stomping grounds, had a corner set out for me. Towel, shower shoes, soap, shampoo and my name in black marker. I thought I had made it. When I won my first race at Delaware, he made sure he was in the photo.
I’d run into him over the years at Delaware. Always the same Spivey. A smile and a wave, a chat and a kind word for Dad, Joe and the rest of my family.
Spivey died Jan 5, 2023. A racetracker to the core, a patch of the crazy quilt, a makeshift mentor one summer in Stanton.
Spivey’s daughter, Catlyn, worked for The Special in 2013. She etched her name in the Hall of Fame intern list of The Special. Delivering, writing, proofing – rinse and repeat – for seven crazy weeks. I hope we were as gentle to her as her dad was to me.
