Life on the Backside
A Look at Oaklawn From the Inside-Out
By Lisa Broadwater

HOT SPRINGS — Folded up neatly in Ronnie Hardin's pants pocket is a letter written in 1999. It's a thank you from a Thoroughbred trainer at Belmont Park in New York. Hardin received the note after saving seven horses that would have perished in a barn fire at the racetrack.
"It was so smoky, you couldn't see nothin'," Hardin recalls of that night, shaking his head. "One horse, when I went in and grabbed her halter, the flesh just come off in my hands. One filly had won three in a row; she died."
It's a brisk January morning, and Hardin is waiting for a horse to return from a workout on the track at Oaklawn. He's new here — he hitched a ride from the Fair Grounds at New Orleans three days ago — and has yet to find a place to stay. If he's lucky, the trainer he's working for will assign him a dorm room — one of the small, nondescript concrete-block rooms at the end of the barn (some of which are used to store tack). For now, he says, he stays "here and there."
"I'm just rubbin' one horse right now," Hardin explains, which in race lingo means he's a groom. "And I got one horse I'm helpin 'em walk," which means he's a hotwalker — i.,e., he walks a horse around the barn shedrow for 30 minutes after a morning training session to cool him down before he’s returned to his stall.
Hotwalking is how many folks get their start at a track. But Hardin is no newcomer to this life. Except for five years in Vietnam, he says, he's been a fixture since 1959.
"I galloped horses for about 16 years, until I got all broke up," he says, meaning he was an exercise rider, the person who puts the horses through their paces when they're in training [see page 2, for a closer look at an exercise rider]. "I've got screws in one hand, three discs out of my back, my ole leg's kind of bum. All that come from ridin' horses."
This morning, Hardin's horse was out early, he says, because he's working at his trainer's farm, helping with some painting.
"So you're multifunctional," a visitor remarks.
"You got to be," Hardin replies, "You can't just focus on one thing because if I did, when I got to where I couldn't gallop no more, I'd have been through."
Under the best of circumstances, life on the racetrack's backside (where the horses are stabled) isn't easy. The day starts early — as early as 4 a.m. for a groom, who's typically responsible for taking care of four to five horses (everything from feeding, watering grooming, saddling, bathing and applying bandages). Oaklawn’s track gates open at five, when the other workers start coming in and getting the horses ready for the track, which opens for training at daybreak.
"I think people would be surprised if they came out early in the morning and see what's going on," says Charlie Evans, security director for Oaklawn. "It's like a beehive — everybody's got their job and everybody's doin' it. Something's going all the time."
But then, as Evans points out, "The barn area is like a little city unto itself." Back here, during the training season (December and January) and race meet (Jan. 24-April 12), between two and three thousand people come and go each day. There are 40 barns, 1,200 horses, a track kitchen, post office and message center, security offices, receiving office, test barns and maintenance barns. Six hundred people live on the backside, 225 trainers stable horses here, approximately 20 vets and 20 ferriers make rounds here, and a security force (of 35 to 40 during peak hours) patrols the grounds 24 hours a day, along with a handful of off-duty firefighters and police officers.
Consequently, Evans says, "You get all these people together, and like with any town, you have some problems. We have our family disturbances, our fights, our petty thefts, traffic problems. At one time or another, we've caught a little bit of everything on the backside. We have some very, very bad people, and we have some very, very good people — just like if you walk downtown in Hot Springs you'll have some very, very bad people and some very, very good people.
"We catch people trying to climb the fence and get in pretty regularly. Some are illegal aliens hoping to get a job back here. And some people think if they can get into the backside, they'll get the answers to all the questions of who's gonna win what race."
To gain entry to the backside, you have to have an Arkansas Racing Commission license. To get a license, a prospective employee fills out an application with the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau (which Evans describes as "the FBI of the racetrack"). You can work at the track with a felony record, but you have to state it on your application. Because the TRPB is a national system, a person's past follows him from one track to the next; If you're not in good standing at the other NTRPB tracks, Oaklawn won't license you.
Not surprisingly, the barn area — with its inherent transient nature — attracts all walks of life.
"The backside is an easy place to hide if you've got problems because if you do your work and stay to yourself, nobody really notices you," Evans says. "It's the easiest place in the world to get a job — everybody's always hiring because there's high turnover. And if somebody gets fired, they might walk 30 yards to the next barn and get another job."
One reason for such high turnover: "It's a hard job," Evans says. “Those horses have got to be walked, got to be fed, got to be exercised, period. And that's in all kinds of weather. Plus, you're never clean — when it's dry, you're dusty. When it's wet, you're muddy."
Yes, it's a seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year commitment. And for the groom, the day may not end until 5 or 6 at night (although there's about a four-hour break between training and the afternoon feeding). The pay isn't great — about $400 a week for a groom who has four horses, about $225-$275 for a hotwalker with five or six. Weather conditions can be miserable. And depending on the trainer, you may have to pick up and move every few months.
So why do folks like Ronnie Hardin do it?
"I LOVE IT," he says, grinning broadly. "I love it. You get sour every once in a while, but you keep at it because you love the horses. It's like working on a house: You can't get me to work on a new house because I might mess it up. But if you get me to work on a bad horse, anything I do is an improvement. I like to get him right. If he's got puffiness in his ankles, I like to draw 'em down tight. If his feet are sore, I like to fix that. Then the rest of the performance is on him."
As for moving from track to track, he says, "When you've done it as long as I have, you dread goin' to another track. But the horses get in the blood. If you're not involved because of the horses, I wouldn't recommend you even mess with it. Because you ain't gonna give 'em your best attention, and you can't help the horse."
These days, Hardin is in the minority — and not just because he's black. (In fact, although Hardin has spent much of his life on racetracks in Chicago and New York, he spent four seasons in the early '60s at Oaklawn: "Back then," he remembers, "they had the segregation wall in the kitchen. It was a four-foot wall, and me and you would walk right past a sign talkin', we'd get the same food and you'd sit over here and I'd sit over there.")
There was a time when most of the people working on the backside were African-American. Now, however, it's getting tougher and tougher to find Americans — black or white — willing to do this work, especially ones who are here because of their love of horses.
Consequently, the majority of backside employees at Oaklawn are now Hispanic — between 65 and 70 percent, Charles Evans says. Many are like 33-year-old Antonio Sanchez, who first came to the States in 1994. After working various jobs — as cook, dishwasher, construction worker — he ended up at Remington Park in Oklahoma City, where he connected with an uncle working at the track. At first, he says, he didn't know much about horses. Now he loves them. This is his third year working as a groom at Oaklawn.
Every couple of weeks he sends money to his mother, sisters and brothers in Mexico. The rest of his money has been invested in a racehorse he bought for $3,000. Right now, the horse is in Oklahoma recovering from an injury, but Sanchez hopes to race him later this year. (In fact, many grooms end up owning their own racehorses.)
Yes, Sanchez admits, this is a difficult, sometimes lonely life.
"If you have family at the track, it's better," he says. "But when you don't have family, you wake up, go to work, that's it."
When Sanchez leaves Hot Springs in April, he'll travel to two race meets in Iowa and then one in Indiana. He may or may not be able to find work when he gets there. Even so, he plans to remain on the backside indefinitely. Why?
"Mexicans don't have a lot of options," he says. "Americans don't want to do this job. But even working seven days a week, this is better than what I can do in Mexico. Here, you can make money for your family and yourself; in Mexico, you can make money only for yourself. You can't help your family."
Trainer Morris Nicks, who's been racing at Oaklawn since 1971, says most of his current grooms are Hispanic.
"They're our best grooms now," he adds. "Without them, we'd be in trouble. The American people don't want to do this. You've got some good ones — don't get me wrong. But without the Hispanics, we'd be out of business."
He isn't hyperbolizing. On a racetrack, the groom is a critical component.
"A good groom can make a real difference in the performance of the horse," Nicks explains. "One of my Hispanic grooms had five horses and won four races in four weeks — that's pretty good. The same groom did the same thing last year: He won four races with four horses in the same meet."
What sets apart good grooms, he says: "They want to do more for their horses. They care about them; they don't just go through the motions. It's like with two guys sweeping the floor: One sweeps it clean, and the other one just moves dust around. The more time they spend with those horses, the better those horses perform."
And, like Americans, good grooms are getting harder to come by on the backside.
"I see a lot of young guys just here for the dollar," Hardin says, "and they don't treat the horses right; they're in and out of there too quick; they don't put no time in with the horse. But they'll last as long as they don't miss a day. That's the main thing on a racetrack: If you show up for work, you've got a job."
For Hardin, though, just showing up isn't enough.
"If you want to get some results, you've got to put some time into the horse. And you've got to work with the trainer and the exercise rider. The exercise rider can tell you anything that's wrong with that horse. And if you're any kind of groom, you're going to work on it. Then that horse will start performin' better — that's when you start winning races, as long as the trainer puts 'em where they fit. Otherwise, you ain't gonna get nothin' nowhere. It's like runnin' Frances the talkin' mule in the Derby."

Addressing Everyday Needs
Trying to keep good help has always been an issue at the racetrack. For the past 20 years or so, most major tracks have employed a chaplain (through the Racetrack Chaplaincy of America) to help fill both the social and spiritual void.
Gary Stinson has been the chaplain at Oaklawn for the past 13 years. Although he holds a church service each Tuesday night (when no races are held) and a 20-minute Sunday service for the Simulcast employees, his daily duties extend much further. He also organizes GED classes and AA meetings; he takes track employees to the grocery store or the dentist's office (many people here don't have cars or insurance); he conducts weddings and funerals. He provides employees with food, mattresses and clothing.
"I've even had a tax man come in and do tax returns — anything that we can come with and can afford to try to help people," Stinson explains. "We've done funerals at the receiving barn [where new horses are stabled]; we've had weddings on the track, in the dorm, in the shedrow.
"Racetrackers, if they're anything at all, they're open to creativity," he adds with a smile. "When you think you've seen and heard it all, just hang around and you'll see and hear something else you've never seen or heard before. They're just a really neat group of people. There's not a lot of pretense. What you see is what you get. I can deal with that a lot better than I can people who tend to be a little phony."
Until last year, Stinson was based for several seasons in the receiving barn and then in one of the older dormitories. He conducted church services in the track kitchen. Now he's based in the Chaplaincy Life Center, a new 4,500-square-foot building that serves as both church and gathering place for track employees.
It may be the only such facility in the country (a lot of racetracks have a game room set up in the barn area or the track kitchen). During the race meet, it's open to backside employees each day from about 11:30 a.m. until 8 or 9 p.m. Its large game room (which also serves as a sanctuary) features a large-screen TV, several smaller TVs and two pool tables. A nearby classroom/library is set aside each Monday and Tuesday morning for a free clinic that Dr. Kyle Roper offers (through the Horseman's Benevolence Protective Association). One afternoon a week, the room is set aside for English-as-a-second-language classes.
There's also an office for the center's substance abuse counselor, Jeff Smith (a staff member at Quapaw House, a private nonprofit drug and alcohol treatment center), who's available Thursday and Saturday nights. Smith spent many years in his youth on a track and believes the facility is a real plus for the track workers.
"When I was a young person working on the track, there wasn't a place to go when you had free time," he says. "If you had an apartment or lived in a tack room, there wasn't much to do and there wasn't much of a social gathering place beyond the kitchen — which, most of the time would close early. So there was a lot of opportunity to get into mischief.
"It's neat that folks have this facility to hang out in, where they know somebody cares about them. Because it's a lonely life."
It's also a stressful one.
"People are away from their families, away from their support systems, and many don't have the ability to maintain much social contact outside the boundaries of the racetrack," Smith says. "I remember every three or four months loading everything in the back of a pickup and going to the next racetrack. That makes it hard to develop roots anywhere, to develop close personal ties, to develop a support system.
"A chaplain on racetrack 20 years ago wasn't something you saw," he adds. "A drug counselor wasn't something you saw. It's good to have those. They didn't used to look at the problems that are caused by alcohol and drugs and mandate that somebody get help and have somebody monitoring that to make sure it's taking place. Now, they do drug-testing on the backside."
Building the $270,000 Center was definitely a group effort.
"My chaplaincy board and I have always recognized we needed a facility we could use to minister to the needs that the people have back here," Stinson says. "An owner named Gus Blass had approached me about raising funds for the chaplaincy, which was a blessing in itself. As we talked about it, he got wind that we wanted to have our own building. So he started calling people, and other horse owners caught the ball; and before you know it, we had enough money to start building. We probably had at least 50 or 60 people who donated something. Oaklawn donated $100,000 and leases us the property; and we [the chaplaincy, through the owners] put in about $170,000.
"The crux of our activity and attendance is right after feeding time; about 4:00, they'll start coming in. We provide coffee and cold drinks and popcorn. We'll have between 20 and 30 people here at night, shooting pool and playing cards or dominoes or checkers, watching TV."
Each Thursday night, Dr. Dale Kincheloe (a retired orthopedic surgeon) and his wife, Bridget (a nurse) provide dinner for backside employees. Longtime Thoroughbred breeders and members of the local chaplaincy board, the Kincheloes started the tradition last year, to give Stinson a night off. Asked why they do it, Dale says, "Maybe it's our nurturing side." But the couple considers themselves lucky to have the opportunity.
"This is a fun place to be," Dale says. "The people who don't ever go to the backside are missing the best 95 percent of racing — the people. I'm out at the track 'most every morning. I hotwalk or hang around the kitchen. I go from barn to barn to barn.
"There's a little shack where the outriders stand in the morning; I spend a lot of time in there, especially when it's cold, just hanging around. Even when I was [a practicing surgeon], I went by every day to see the horses. I got out before the racetrackers did."

Cultural Differences
Most of the center's visitors are male Hispanics — not that Kincheloe pays much attention to demographics.
"People on the backside aren't overly impressed with social rank or money. And you don't really pay much attention to race — someone's a groom or a hotwalker or an exercise rider. They're not Mexican or black or white. When we first started doing this last year, people warned us, 'There'll be fights, and this and that.' I have yet to hear a cross word."
Stinson is equally impressed with the Hispanic workers who frequent the center.
"Hispanics, if you're around their culture, we could learn so much from them," he says. "They work hard. And they're very grateful for this facility. When we put food out, they don't go over there and just start piling up. They'll get just enough and not try to hoard the food. If someone comes in and we've run out of food, they'll take some off their plate and give it to them. As a culture, they take care of each other and watch out for each other.
"We have a clothes closet [of items donated by the chaplaincy]. I can open it up and let all of them walk in there at once and say, 'Take as much as you want.' And they'll come out of there and they may have one or two items, and that's all.
"And they take care of this place. They're real easy to deal with. I don't know that they've really been Americanized yet, some of them."
The difference, he says, is that "a lot of Americans that end up on a racetrack come from difficult beginnings, unstable families, bad relationships or they've been tossed around from one home to another. And they've had to learn to try to survive. But in the Hispanic culture, I think the family is more united. And whether they grew up in poverty or not, the family stayed together."
Kincheloe agrees.
"The Mexican people are friendly and hard working," he says. "If they're taking the majority of the jobs on the backside, it's because of that. They're very happy with very little. And the majority of them will send half their paycheck home.
"There was a guy from England here recently," he adds by way of comparison. "He ate with us a few times, but he didn't last because he was condescending to the other workers; he acted like he was a little better than them. He didn't stay but a week."
That no-nonsense attitude extends to the track. There, "Your status in life isn't based on whether or not you have a lot of money. It's based on your horsemanship," says veterinarian Dr. David Jolly.
And, as far as many longtime track frequenters are concerned, the track life is the only life.
"It's the best life in the world," says Don McKinney, who at age 87 has been training longer than anyone at Oaklawn. "I love it because I love the horses; I love the people."
Granted, life at the track is changing. In the old days, McKinney says, "It was kind of like a big family. Everybody knew everybody in the business, and everybody loved horses. Now, it's much more about the money. We've still got good people in the business, but there's not enough of 'em to go around."
Folks like 75-year-old George "Red" Henry, who got his start in the '40s as an exercise rider and has worked as a groom for trainer Jinx Fires for the past 30-odd years.
"There's a lot of worse places you could be," Henry says of the backside. "I like getting a horse to do well — when he won't eat or something, ya know? I try to work to get it better. You can do a lot of little things to help 'em. But you gotta have a feel for it. If you don't like what you're doin', you ain't gonna make much of yourself. You're not gonna be no help to the horse or the man you work for or anybody."
And the secret to a good race?
"You can't beat takin' care of 'em," he says, referring to his horses. "An old man told me years ago, 'The best ain't good enough.' So you do a little better."