In an extensive interview, Ohio’s longserving jockey – sixth on the all-time list with 7,300-plus victories and nearly 53,000 rides – talks to Ken Snyder about his extraordinary 50-year career
USA: According to medical experts from the famed Mayo Clinic, someone in their 60s can expect hardening of the arteries, weakening of bones, bladder issues, memory lapses, teeth issues, thinning of skin, and weight gain.
What jockey Perry Ouzts can expect in 2023 is to continue to ride six to eight mounts a day at Belterra Park in Cincinnati – just as he did all summer long, at the age of (drum roll, please) … 68.
‘Iron Man’, as he is called, should perhaps be changed to ‘Titanium Man’. Iron, after all, rusts, whereas Ouzts keeps on going – and not as a novelty or hanger-on. “I was the second-leading rider at Belterra this summer and won 90 races,” he reports.
“There are a lot of jockeys that are older that still kept riding, but most of them that I see that age, they are riding one or two a week,” adds the veteran jockey, who turns 69 on July 7 next year. “They are riding just to say they are a jockey, I think.”
Still hitting at about a 20% strike-rate, Ouzts is prouder of his longevity – 50 years on the racetrack come 2023 – than a list if impressive statistics.
Ultimate goal is number five
Mind you, they are pretty impressive: Ouzts stands second all-time in career mounts with 52,724, behind only that retired win machine Russell Baze (53,578), the continent’s winningmost rider. Ouzts is sixth in career wins in North America with 7,336 (compared to record holder Baze with 12,842).
“My ultimate goal is to get to number five on the all-time win list and that’ll put me in front of David Gall,” he explains. (Gall retired in 2000 with 7,396 wins, with Pat Day next up the ladder on 8,803). “I’m behind Pat Day and that’s about as far as I can get but I think I can get past Gall next year. I’m only 60 behind him.”
Ouzts is tenth worldwide, where Brazilian legend Jorge Ricardo leads the way with 13,232 career victories.
Ouzts’s career earnings also surpass $50 million, an enviable total but more remarkable because he has never ridden a horse with career earnings of more than $100,000. “I like winning races more than I like making a whole bunch of money,” he says.
‘I’ve been to the big tracks’
“I’ve been to the big tracks before and I’ve won races there, but not in bunches. That’s why I’ve always stayed around here because I got a lot of business. I like being at home, I like sleeping in my own bed every night, and, again, I like to win a lot of races.”
A typical eight-race day on October 11 at Belterra – formerly known as River Downs – was classic Ouzts. He was the only jockey who had mounts in all eight races and he won three of them, coming within a neck of claiming a fourth.
Ouzts says that being in the right place at the right time has been a factor in his riding prolific career, starting out in his hometown of Riverdale, Arkansas. “My cousins always had horses,” he says.
Those nearby cousins just happened to be future Hall of Fame jockey Earlie Fires and Jackie Fires, also a jockey whose career was cut short by injury. Both tutored him Ouzts on his riding but, even more important, they guided him in his career, especially when Earlie Fires was riding at Arlington Park.
“I’d just graduated from high school in Arkansas and they called me up and asked, ‘Did I want to come to Chicago?” he recalls. “They’d teach me how to gallop and how to be a jockey. I was 17 at the time – Earlie got me a ride up there about a week after I graduated and I’ve been in horse racing ever since.
“I left Arlington Park and I went over to Sportsman Park for a little bit, and then we went down to Hot Springs [Oaklawn Park]. I was still galloping down there and the Fires told me that a guy up in Ohio really liked a bug rider [apprentice], he had a lot of horses and won a lot of races.
“They thought that would be a good move for me, to go up there and maybe spend the summer and come back to Chicago.”
A good move, indeed, that began with trainer W.J. Danner at now-closed Beulah Park in Grove City, Ohio. Ouzts would spend the next 49 years primarily on Ohio racetracks and those in neighboring Kentucky and Indiana; he makes his home in Florence, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
‘Stewards wouldn’t let me ride ’em’
“I was named on nine horses the first day I rode and the stewards wouldn’t let me ride ’em’,” he says. “They said to pick out the best two that you like and if you do ok, then we’ll let you ride the next day.
“I think I was third and fourth on both of those, and the next day I rode nine and won two – and I ended up leading rider at that first meet.”
Beyond valuable family connections, there is every indication that Ouzts was born with natural ability. “But I wasn’t really ready to start riding,” he says of his first foray into jockeying at Beulah Park. “I started way before I should have, but the Fires thought I was ready so they sent me on my way.
“There was probably a lot of stuff I really should have learned before I started riding. I’d only galloped horses for nine months when I started riding races. Most of the time, you usually have to gallop two or three years.”
With characteristic modesty in his soft Arkansas accent, he adds: “I didn’t know nothin’. I was just fresh out of high school and I was just following my cousins’ advice. Whatever they told me to do, that’s pretty much what I did.”
While most people talk about career changes in years, Ouzts, with an almost comical lack of self-consciousness, talks about changes over decades.
‘Bootin’ and scootin’
“The first 30 years or so, I was just mostly ‘run and gun’,” he says. “When the gates opened, I was driving hard.” Maybe that’s hoe he earned the ‘Bootin’ and Scootin’ Outz’.
“As I got older, I started sitting still longer instead of forcing the horses so hard,” he goes on. “I think it made me a better rider the longer I rode, like the last ten or 15 years.”
The Beulah Park title was the first of an amazing number of meet triumphs for Ouzts. “I was leading rider at Belterra 35 times,” he says – and he also added 12 more titles at Beulah Park.
So what changes has Ouzts’s body has gone through over his almost 50 years of riding “Aches and pains – and a lot of ’em,” he says. “Too many times, hitting the ground,” he adds with a sigh, estimating he has broken close on 40 bones.
The alternative to enduring the aches and pains, according to Ouzts, is counter to what you would expect by doctors’ orders. “The doctors told me a long time ago I could never sit still because I’d broken so many bones that it would ‘get’ me really, really fast,” referring to that weakening of bones and also, in Ouzts’ case, potential joint stiffness he prevents by being astride racehorses.
‘It’ll get ugly and get ugly quick’
“They’ve told me even when I stop riding races, I need to keep very, very busy,” he explains. “They said, ‘if you try sitting on the couch for a year or two it’ll get ugly and get ugly quick.’”
The worst of his injuries as a jockey was in 2006 when he missed most of the year. “I was out with a broken arm and a broken back,” he says.
However, Ouzts most famous riding injury was not on a horse but on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. A car that came onto an interstate highway outside Cincinnati wiped out Ouzts and his bike in 2012; the collision, at 65mph, sent Ouzts and his bike skidding across two lanes of traffic. Remarkably, other than scrapes and swelling on one foot, which he said he had seen many times after hitting the side of the starting gate, he was fine.
“I called my agent after the wreck – the wrecker came and picked up my motorcycle and my agent picked me up and took me home,” he recalls, adding with a grin: “I jumped in my car and went back to the track. I rode nine horses that day and won the first two races!” At the time of the accident, by the way, Ouzts was 57.
Obviously, motorcycle wrecks or old age haven’t stopped Ouzts or diminished his popularity and preference with trainers. “I’d say the people that really know me, they pretty much still ride me because they think as long as I can produce winners, it doesn’t matter how old I am,” he says. Indeed, he led jockeys with starts with 408 at Belterra this year, 60 races more than the next most active jockey in the colony.
‘Horses keep me in shape’
“I’m 68 years old trying to get mounts with 22-year-old guys, you know,” he smiles “Horses keep me in shape.”
Ouzts typically works four or five horses each morning wherever he is riding in addition to races in the afternoon, while another key to fitness and longevity is a discipline with eating, a battle that has felled many jockeys.
“I’ve weighed 110 pounds for almost 50 years within one or two pounds,” he says. “I get on the scales every morning as soon as I get up to see how much I weigh. If I’m a little light that day, I’ll eat a little more. If I’m heavy, I’ll eat a little less.
“It’s a lifestyle that I’ve had for 50 years that I eat about the same amount of food every day – doesn’t matter if I’m riding, if I’m rehabbing, if I’m hurt, whatever.”
The only thing that has changed for Ouzts has been the number of mounts each year. This year he is on pace to ride more than 500 horses, down from an average of roughly 950 mounts annually from 2013 to 2018. The reduction is not, however, a concession to age.
“Every racetrack has really cut back on the number of racing days they have and the number of races a day. If it was up to me, I’d still ride a thousand a year.” He’s done that 29 times since 1976.
It is time for the obvious question. So, Iron Man, when will you retire? He hedges his bets, saying:“It won't be probably much more than next year or another year after that … maybe. My standard response is: ‘I’m going to retire one day but not today!’”
Not today, indeed; not when there’s eight rides a day and fifth place on the all-time list to chase.
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