Bond Runs Deep Between Tough Stevens Siblings

There is no getting around it. Without Scott Stevens there would be no Gary Stevens, or at least no Gary Stevens as he is known today, as the teenage prodigy who reached the Hall of Fame before his 35th birthday and retired with 5,187 winners, battered and bruised, but never broken.

"There isn't a lot separating us," Gary said. "Scott is the reason I am the way I am. Only he's a lot tougher than me."

This is hard to believe, but more on that later. For now, it is enough to point out that on the morning of March 4, Gary arose early at home near Santa Anita Park, hopped in his car, and drove the 350 miles to Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Ariz., just in case that would be the day Scott got the two winners he needed to reach the 5,000 mark.

"I didn't tell him I was coming," Gary said. "I walked in the jocks room, and he's playing cards wearing a face mask and rubber gloves. He looked at me like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar."

The ensuing exchange went something like this:

Gary: "Take that (predictable expletive) mask off."

Scott: "What the hell are you doing here?"

Gary: "I wanted to see how you perform under pressure."

Scott: "No way I'm taking it off. This place is filthy. I've got to take all the precautions I can."

Gary asked the guys in the room how long his brother had been wearing the mask. The answer was, "The whole meet," which dates back to October.

There will be a short pause here for those who would like to savor the irony of a jockey wearing a surgical mask in the room and then going out to perform in one of the most dangerous games on earth. Scott managed one win that afternoon, and Gary went home. Three days later Scott hit the ground hard and banged up his ribs when his mount, a nice old horse named Stratton, broke down in an allowance race on the Turf Paradise grass.

"That would have been 5,000 right there, the poor guy," Scott said. "I'd just put my nose in front, and we had about 50 yards to go. It was a pretty nasty spill. I got lucky."

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been amazed at the resilience of either Stevens brother to note that Scott rode one more horse that day and three the next before finally winning number 5,000 March 9.

"There's a lot more important things going on right now, but it was pretty cool," Scott said.

The horse who got him there was a 7-year-old Arizona-bred gelding named Royal Privacy, in a $3,000 claimer for a purse of $7,000. Sandi Gann, who won 1,206 races during her jockey career, was the winning trainer.

"He was sitting on 4,999 for a few days, and I really wanted him to win on mine," Gann said. "I knew I had one that almost couldn't lose."

Royal Privacy won by 6 1/4 lengths, a nice ride for a guy with sore ribs.

"I've seen a lot of jocks go down, but when Scott hit the ground that day for some reason it really got to me," Gann said. "When he got up and said, 'Yes, I'm OK to ride,' I thought, 'No! No you aren't.' He's the toughest guy around."

Not long after Scott won with Royal Privacy, the plug was pulled on the Turf Paradise meet. The time off gave the rider a chance to get an X-ray.

"Turns out I did break a rib," he said. "It's possible that rib might have been broken before, but this was a fresh break."

Two riders in the same family at the 5,000-win level is not just unprecedented. It's nuts. There must have been some kind of laboratory experiment going on in the basement of Ron and Barbara Stevens that spit out these Boys from Boise, perfectly suited physically and psychologically to withstand all manner of abuse and sustain long, productive careers.

Let's get the numbers out of the way. At 10,187 after Scott's milestone accomplishment, the Stevens brothers have been out in front of any other jockey family for a while now, ever since they passed the combined 9,544 winners posted by the McCarrons, Chris (7,141) and Gregg (2,403). Mrs. Maple's boys, Eddie (4,398) and Sam (2,578), were right there, and who knows how high the Ortiz brothers will fly before they are through, given that Irad has won 2,508 and Jose has 1,988, and their combined ages doesn't even reach Gary's freshly turned 57.

Scott will be 60 in October. His career began in Idaho in May of 1976, when he was just this side of his 16th birthday. His folks got in dutch for doctoring his birth certificate, but by the time officials figured out his true birth date, Scott was already a four-time champion of the local meet at Les Bois Park.

Seems like the Stevens brothers always were ahead of the curve. Gary was galloping his father's horses when he was an underage 14, with a little help from Scott's wardrobe, as he related in his autobiography "The Perfect Ride," written with Mervyn Kaufman:

"Scott and I were about the same size and looked a lot alike... I used to take his cap and pull it down on top of my helmet, and also put on all the other gear he would wear on his morning rides... Scott would wear something else, so everyone thought I was Scott... I got away with doing that for about a month and a half."

"We were best friends growing up," Scott said. "We shared a room until we left home—bunkbeds. We did everything together with our dad's horses, feeding them, cleaning the stalls. I really think we were close because we were trying to keep up with our older brother."

Craig Stevens, two years older than Scott, was an accomplished high school athlete who still lives in Boise, near their parents.

"He motivated us," Scott aid, "and I'm sure we were a pain in the ass to him."

When he was 6, Gary was diagnosed with Legg-Calve-Parthes disease, which compromised the ball joint of the hip and shortened his right leg. He was fitted with a full leg brace and built-up shoe to take the pressure off the joint, and told it might take two or three years to heal, no guarantees.

"My brothers didn't treat me any different," Gary said. "They made me tough. If other kids made fun of me—they'd call me Ironside, different things—my big brothers would stand up for me, but they also told me to stand up for myself."

And they kept their little brother in the game.

"They taught me how to ride a bike with one leg," Gary said. "I tried playing football with them. The playfield at school had irrigation humps that would freeze over with icy paths. They'd stack tires, then get on each side of me. I'd stick my brace out straight and squat down on my left leg, and they'd pull me by that built-up boot, then turn me loose to see how many tires I could clear."

After just 18 months, Gary's doctor removed the brace and boot.

"We got to go on a great vacation down to Disneyland," Gary said. "Life went on."

He went on to play drums in the marching band and win championships on the high school wrestling team. Eventually, though, it was all about the racetrack.

Their careers in the saddle diverged while Scott was running the table in the Northwest and Gary tried Southern California as a teenage apprentice. He lived alone in a seedy motel on Century Boulevard, near Hollywood Park.

"He was so homesick," Scott recalled. "He didn't know anybody. We talked every night on the phone."

The connection has never wavered. Scott was Gary's sounding board all through his recuperation from hip replacement surgery in 2016, just as Gary gave Scott the daily support and comfort he needed while recovering from a horrible accident at Canterbury Downs in July 2010 when he fractured both clavicles, broke his sternum and several ribs, and suffered a torn spleen. The severity of Scott's injuries echoed Gary's grisly fall in the 2003 Arlington Million (G1T), when he was thrown from Storming Home in the shadow of the wire and trampled by trailing horses. Still, Gary defers to big brother.

"That wreck he had at Canterbury was double what I had," Gary said. "He got helicoptered out of there, and he had both lungs collapse. I only had one."

Jockeys like Scott Stevens approaching 60 are rare. The clock is always ticking.

"It would be just fine with me if Scott called it a day right now," Gary said. "But he says, 'What else am I gonna do?' It's almost like a bad drug. You can't explain the high from winning a race, and the work you put in to do it. When Scott didn't quit after what happened to him at Canterbury Downs, I don't know what it's going to take. I hate to think about it. In my case it took me breaking my neck to say I can't do it anymore."

Scott ended the shortened Turf Paradise meet second only to Alex Cruz in winners and far ahead of the competition in money won by his mounts.

"To me, he looks better on a horse right now than he did when he was 22," Gary said. "And he rides as smart a race as anybody, and smarter than most. He has fun helping the young riders, and they listen to him everywhere he goes. He's like a professor in that jocks room, an Einstein. He can be stern, and still be nice."

With racing halted at the majority of tracks across the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott's opportunities will depend on where live racing is taking place and where his Turf Paradise horses might roam. In the meantime, he does not mind savoring his new status alongside his brother in the 5,000-win club.

"I'm still having fun, enjoying going out there every day," Scott said. "I'm not going to put a time on when I'll quit. Heck, I'm only 35 wins behind Alex Solis. He's next.

"Maybe I'll ride long enough to be one behind Gary," Scott added, "then quit."