Veteran Jockey Clark at Ease With Retirement

Having ridden over 3,000 winners during a long career, Kerwin "Boo Boo" Clark is content and ready to leave his tack behind.

The 61-year-old, whose retirement was announced May 29 on Facebook by agent Charles Ashy, has no regrets. Why would he? Beginning in 1975, racing took him all across the country, from Louisiana to Illinois to Delaware, even halfway across the world to Saudi Arabia for four years. He reached heights only a select number of riders get to experience, including a mount in the 2011 Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (G1) at Churchill Downs, where he rode longshot Decisive Moment to finish 14th for trainer Juan Arias.

Yet it was another race at Churchill Downs four years later for which the jockey is remembered, guiding Lovely Maria to victory in the Longines Kentucky Oaks (G1) for trainer Larry Jones and former Kentucky Gov. Brereton Jones, her owner and breeder. The rider's most important victory came at age 56, surpassing a win aboard the Majesticperfection filly in the Central Bank Ashland Stakes (G1) a month earlier at Keeneland.

"To be honest, every jockey's unbelievable dream is to win the Derby. That's just No. 1," he said in a telephone interview from his home in New Orleans. "But to be able to ride in it, experience that, and then to come back years later and win the Oaks in front of a hundred thousand people. … to have all those people screaming down the stretch and at the sixteenth pole you know you're absolutely going to win. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

"People months later were saying, 'How come you were crying?' Really? You're going to ask me that. I've been doing this for 44 years and I win one of the biggest races in the country. What an accomplishment. That's 40-something years of struggle and fight coming out at one time. It was one heck of a day."

Still, he does not call the Oaks his proudest moment. Rather, it is for a contribution that he hopes will benefit the safety of other riders now that his career in the saddle has passed.

Clark was disappointed by the amount of time it took for him to be transported to a New Orleans hospital after breaking ribs, his jaw, and suffering a collapsed lung in a multiple-horse spill at Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots on March 15, 2018. He said he worked for six months with track officials and the Louisiana State Racing Commission that ultimately led to Fair Grounds, Delta Downs, and Evangeline Downs adding two ambulances for racing, allowing emergency staff to immediately transfer a rider to a hospital and not have to wait for a back-up ambulance to arrive.

"When I got hurt here in New Orleans, University (Medical Center) was only two miles away, and it took them an hour to get two miles," he said. "I always figured because the ambulance follows you around, that if, god forbid, you get hurt really bad, they'll scoop me right up and get me to the hospital. That just didn't happen."

Although Larry Jones did not have a horse involved in the spill, he visited Clark in the hospital after the incident to check on him. The two remain close, almost like brothers.

"I was even talking to him about retirement at that time," Jones recalled. "And he told me, 'Larry, I don't want to think I have to do any more than I've already done. I just want to go out on my own terms. I don't want it to be because a horse went down and I never rode again. I want to call it quits on my terms.' And he got to."

That time finally came this spring following the urging of Clark's wife, Toni, and other family members, who wanted to see him leave his profession healthy. He last rode March 19 at Fair Grounds, guiding Lady Hopper to a 10th-place finish, ending a career in which he won 3,152 races and more than $56 million in North America.

He is uncertain what he will do next, whether it comes in racing or another field. He enjoys working with heavy machinery. 

Clark received a call this week from retired Hall of Fame jockey Pat Day, who wished him well.

"He said, 'If you can walk away in one piece and on your own terms, that's just the way to go,'" Clark said. "And that's what I've done."