Sunny Jim by Jimmy Breslin

Author:Jimmy Breslin [Breslin, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4531-6
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2012-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

7. Sweating It Out

THE TRAIN WAS THE Cincinnati Limited and the Pullman porter had been told to take extra good care of Mr. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, who was in Bedroom A and was a very important man because he was on his way to Churchill Downs to run Bold Ruler, the favorite in the 1957 Kentucky Derby.

It was right after dinner when the porter came around for the first time and stuck his head into the bedroom.

“Anythin’ I can do for you, Mist’ Fitzsimmons, you just leave me know,” he said.

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“We near Philadelphia now.”

“Oh, I know that. ’Cept when I was down around here before I didn’t have people askin me what I wanted. I was lucky to be gettin’ eats.”

“You need financin’ in those days, huh?”

“I wasn’t worried about money, son. I just wanted to get enough eats.”

By the time he arrived in Washington, getting the food was only part of the problem for Jimmy Fitz. The hardest part was making sure he wouldn’t eat it.

“Irisher,” an old man at Alexander Island told him one day, “Irishers, they grow late. Looks to me like you just startin’ to grow. Now you do one thing. Don’t you try and stop it.”

But he did. In the mornings, after working horses, he’d pull on extra sweaters and jog around the track. He stayed away from water, but the stable area became a torture for him because you always had a boy drinking water from a spigot or pouring it over a horse and just to look at this made Jimmy Fitz thirsty. At meals, he would sip black coffee and eat sparingly—he would eat lettuce only after Jennie had dried it out in the sun. The weight didn’t simply come on suddenly. It was something that had been happening to his body little by little. A half pound here, a few more ounces there. But it was coming to stay. From the time he was eighteen, Jimmy Fitz should have weighed 140 pounds, even if he were working on a construction job. Instead, he was riding horses who were assigned 113 pounds or 115 or 116 or 118 and only sometimes would there be a break and a horse in with 126 or 130 would be available. So he fought weight to make a living. Anybody who ever has had to do it knows it is one of the most terrible battles you can take on.

It is an awful way to live and not many people understand what a jockey who is gaining weight goes through. It is a primeval thing—man against his body. If you walk on any race track in any year and look at what it does to these little men you can see it. The faces tell you. The eyes are hollow and have black smudges under them. The cheeks sink in and the skin is dry and it looks gray. The meals are always the same. A little black coffee in the morning, a piece of meat, no gravy, some spinach and a little more coffee at night.

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