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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brutally honest autobiography, November 1, 2005
Now that Breeders' Cup 2005 is in the books, 48-year-old jockey Jerry Bailey can claim 15 Breeders' Cup wins, which are the most ever for a single rider. Yet he has been talking very seriously about retiring, possibly within a few weeks.
So far, Bailey has come through this very dangerous business with relatively 'minor' injuries (broken jaw, broken collarbone, smashed ribs, etc.) He has also won over $22 million in purse money, has won every big American race there is to win, not to mention four editions of the Dubai World Cup Classic. He is in the Hall of Fame and is widely recognized as the greatest jockey of the last two decades. It is a joy to watch him ride. He is one of the few jockeys that I can recognize in a race by his classy, quiet, straight-backed crouch, the tip of his boots barely connecting to his stirrups, his horse positioned exactly where it has to be in order to win. And win he does---an incredible 25% of his races.
Maybe it 'is' time to get out while he can still walk, can still enjoy life.
Now that I've read "Against the Odds," I have to worry about what this thinking-man's jockey is going to do with himself after he retires. Much of his autobiography is about his fight against alcoholism. He can count the years and days since his last drink. But what is going to happen when he no longer needs his extraordinary reflexes and his ability to guide a thousand pounds of thundering horse past, around, and sometimes through its hard-galloping rivals? What happens when the euphoria of winning is replaced by a less adrenaline-soaked lifestyle?
I wanted to read "Against the Odds" as a celebration, and instead I ended up worrying about the author's future. This book is about Jerry and his struggle against alcoholism, his struggle to keep his marriage together, his struggle to conceive children. Only about a third of the text concerns his brilliance on the race track.
I was expecting a slightly different story--something a bit more prettified, with more about the great horses that he has guided into the winner's circle.
Cigar is the only Thoroughbred Jerry admits to falling in love with, and what a ride they had together! He was aboard for 15 of the 16 races that tied Cigar with Citation for the greatest number of consecutive wins.
I'll only read Jerry's brutally honest story once, but I'll never forget it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Seems oversimplified, at the least., August 19, 2008
This review is from: Against the Odds: Riding for My Life (Paperback)
Jerry Bailey and Tom Pedulla, Against the Odds: Riding for My Life (Berkley, 2005)
I started this at the same time I started Annie Duke's memoir, and reading the two in tandem (briefly; this one took a great deal longer) highlighted the deficiencies in Bailey's volume. Well, either that or he just chose an inferior co-writer.
No one who is even remotely involved with Thoroughbred racing could possibly be unfamiliar with Jerry Bailey, one of the most successful jockeys by money earned in history. This is the story of Jerry Bailey's rise to power and the rocky road he encountered on the way. This, interestingly, is one of the book's failings; the rocky road disappears, seemingly, the second Bailey joins AA, and from there on it's clear sailing and a recounting of top-quality races in which Bailey rode. I'm all for that-- one can never have enough descriptions from various points of view of the 1995 Breeders' Cup Classic, for example-- but it makes for a dichotomy in the book, and it seems oversimplified. Now, I've never been an alcoholic and have never gone through recovery, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it really is night and day, but it's hard to believe that there were no good times when alcohol was involved and no bad times afterwards. (After all, Bailey did get mounts before 1989; there has to have been something there. One doesn't survive in such a cutthroat world without both talent and results. Ask the thousands of ex-jockeys who never managed to win a stakes race.)
But more to the point, since I'm still thinking about Annie Duke's book, is the dichotomy between the alcohol and the racing. It's as if Part One of this book is about the alcohol, with a little racing involved, and Part Two is about the racing, with interjections about how getting off the bottle made Bailey into the great rider he was until his retirement. A little more mixing up of those things, instead of just giving the story chronologically, might have helped spice things up a bit. It probably wouldn't have done anything to help Bailey's writing style, however, which suffers from what seems an almost pathological lack of embellishment much of the time; the "just the facts, ma'am" approach makes the book drier than one would think a book like this would normally be.
Must reading for Bailey fans; others might want to check it out of the library first and see if they cotton to the style in which the book is written. ***
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A true champion, August 9, 2006
Bailey tells the story of his sometimes rocky rise through the ranks of the jockey colony to become the premier rider in the world. He doesn't hold back any in discussing his battle with alcoholism and how it nearly ruined him and his family. It's an honest self appraisal by a man with an enormous talent for his craft, yet glaring weaknesses that almost denied racing fans the opportunity to watch his genius at work.
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