An Appreciation: For Bullring Specialist Foley, Fun Was The Reason For Racing

Fred Foley, who died Oct. 15 at age 68 (obituary here), was not a big-name jockey during the time he came up through the ranks in New England in the 1970s and 80s. But in terms of being an affable, even-keeled racetracker and the type of guy you always wanted to stop and chat with if you ran into him on the backstretch, he was of Grade I caliber.

Known for an easy, welcoming smile that his distinctive handlebar moustache could never conceal and an ever-present glint in his eye, Foley worked for more than three decades as an in-demand exercise rider after his jockey career ended. He also took a job as a valet on the New England circuit, and parlayed that gig into various racing official positions in the Suffolk Downs jockeys' room that he held until the East Boston oval ran its final races in 2019.

The combination of being a local kid with a reputation for aggressively riding claimers of dubious soundness endeared him to the hardscrabble Suffolk railbirds.

Growing up in the nearby Day Square neighborhood only a couple of furlongs from the track, “Fast Freddie” graduated from East Boston High and landed a job as a construction laborer before getting a late start in the saddle in his mid-20s. He used to laugh when recounting how he grew up right down the street from the track, yet never once attended the races until some buddies in an amateur hockey league suggested his lithe, 5'4″ 115-pound frame would suit him better to horsebacking than body checking.

“I used to go past Suffolk all the time, and I never realized what it really is–a city within a city,” Foley said in a 1983 press profile. “But once I went, I knew this is what I wanted. Once racing gets in your blood, forget it.”

So Foley quit his job and took a forty dollars-a-week gig as a stablehand in the 1970s. Even though the backstretch meant a cut in salary, he looked at the opportunity as “going to school and getting paid for it.”

Four years later, he finally got a leg up as an apprentice rider. But Foley was so raw and unpolished that he couldn't secure an agent to book his mounts.

His “bugboy” allowance lasted an unusually long three years (an apprenticeship in Massachusetts expires one year after a jockey's fifth win). It  might have lasted longer had Foley  not resorted to drastic measures to kick-start the process.

Two years into his apprentice period, at age 27, Foley decided to launch a gung-ho assault on the dangerous Massachusetts county fairs circuit. He said his logic in going all-out on the perilous half-milers during the summer and fall meets at Marshfield, Northampton and Great Barrington fairs was to make trainers think, “If this kid can ride these sore, old horses, we'll put him on some at Suffolk.”

The plan worked–sort of. In 1982, Freddie won the Great Barrington riding title. But a Boston Globe write-up the following season serves as the only documentation of his most remarkable riding feat: After winning four races one day on the Marshfield half-miler, Foley got dropped on his head by a subsequent mount while careening through the hairpin turn.

The next day he was still groggy, but insisted on riding at Suffolk because he had a rare opportunity to pilot a “live”  horse named Royal Wedding. Then he had six more mounts at Marshfield that same afternoon. (This was an era of such abundant racing in New England that on some summer Fridays in the 80s, Suffolk ran in the mornings, Marshfield afternoons, and Rockingham Park at night. There are now no tracks operating in the region.)

“I got to the quarter pole on Royal Wedding, and my neck and shoulders were so sore from the Marshfield spill I couldn't move,” Foley told the Globe. “But the horse was still in contention, so I kept going.”

Royal Wedding won, igniting the tote board to the tune of $17.80. But it was Foley who paid the price. “I couldn't even pull the horse up, the outriders had to catch me. I couldn't even unsaddle. The stewards at Marshfield took me off my mounts there.”

Yet Foley concluded the interview in characteristically upbeat fashion: “I'll keep hustling,” he said, “because I don't know any rich people.”

Foley remained a long-shot specialist, good for 30 to 40 wins a year through the middle 80s. But injuries, illness and bad timing took their toll. In 1987, he flipped his car on a patch of ice and spent a week in an intensive care unit, where he was treated for a punctured lung and had his spleen removed. Shortly thereafter, Suffolk closed for two years. After the track reopened in 1992, open-heart surgery kept Foley off horses for longer than he liked.

Bowing to practicality, Foley traded his jockey license for a weekly paycheck. He settled in as a valet, and if he had any regrets about being forced into a less glamorous career switch, he didn't voice them publicly. Instead, he toned down his run-and-gun horsebacking style to better suit morning training, and was soon considered one of the most accomplished workout riders on the circuit because of his reliability, deft hands, patience with young horses, and level-headed demeanor.

Suffolk Downs | Chip Bott

I vividly recall a conversation I had with Foley in the spring of 2000. Then 45 years old, Foley was in better shape than most racetrackers half his age. In addition to being a sought-after exercise rider, he kept fit by skiing and playing ice hockey, and was content to relax while fishing from his home's front porch alongside a quiet little pond up in New Hampshire.

At that time, Foley had not ridden in a race for 11 years. But he had started allowing himself the luxury of dreaming about the adrenaline rush of winning. When I ran into him that morning in front of the Suffolk Downs backstretch kitchen 23 years ago, Freddie was zipping from one riding engagement to another, flak jacket swinging cavalierly from his sinewy frame, battle-scarred riding helmet in hand. He told me, with his characteristic big grin, that what he really wanted to do, more than anything else, was to be a jockey again–but only for one more race.

Foley had been working out a maiden who had drawn rave reviews from clockers as a well-meant runner who would score first time off a layoff. Foley had previously schooled the colt's brother, a stakes winner. “I've been working him like this,” he enthused, jamming his fists together and pulling them close to his chest, the universal symbol for a horse hard held. “He's going to win. And I want to ride him.”

Foley didn't have grand, unrealistic aspirations. He fully intended to ride just once, on that one horse, for that one race. Foley had actually won the last race he rode back in 1989. But one more time, he wanted to go out a winner. The trainer told Foley she was all for it, and would even pay his license fee and vouch for him in front of the stewards.

When I next saw Foley a week later, I was shocked to hear his request for a jockey license had been flat-out denied. Apparently, the stewards nixed the idea for the one-time comeback because of his history of heart trouble. Their stated reason was that they feared being responsible if he suffered cardiac complications during the few minutes he'd be out on the racetrack.

Foley pointed out that his heart doctor had long ago cleared him to participate in any activity he wanted; that he was one of the fastest skaters on the Suffolk pickup hockey team, and that he already possessed a license–issued by those very same stewards–to exercise horses during morning training.

“They asked me for a reason, and I said because I thought it would be fun, that I wanted to ride one more time in my life,” Foley told me.

“Then the stewards told me that racing wasn't supposed to be 'fun,'” Foley added, a touch incredulously.

“'Fun,' they said, 'isn't the reason we're all here.'”

Although crestfallen, Foley not only hid his disappointment, but refused to bad-mouth the stewards or criticize their decision, taking the high road.

Yet he proved those officials wrong in the long run: Yes, racing is all about fun.

Fun–or at least the tantalizing possibility of it–is the very reason we're all here.

f you were lucky enough to hang around Freddie Foley on the backstretch or in the jockeys' room, there was no denying it.

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From Maine to California, These Tracks Are Gone, But Not Forgotten

Do you remember Bowie? The Marshfield Fair? Or, how about Liberty Bell? I do. I’ve been to them all.

Someone sent me a link the other day to a list of all the defunct racetracks in the country and it got me thinking how sad it was that I had been to so many that have disappeared into the ether. That and whether or not I hold some sort of unofficial record of having attended more former racetracks than anyone else. I have been to 28 North American tracks that no longer operate Thoroughbred racing.

I started compiling the list when I was just a small child and my father would take me to the local tracks near Philadelphia and along on a lot of his business trips so that we could visit a new track in a new town. It grew when I attended college and picked up the Massachusetts fairs, Suffolk Downs and Rockingham, all of them now gone. My early years as a racing writer took me to places like Hialeah and Hollywood Park. One is a casino, the other a football stadium. There are so many that were unable to make it in an era where outside competition for the gambling dollar, real estate values and racing’s struggles to expand its fan base have made staying in business hard to do.

In a few days, I will be able to look back on the 48th anniversary of the first time I saw Secretariat run in person. It was Nov. 18, 1972 and I lived in the Center City section of Philadelphia and, of course, our family was not going to miss the opportunity to see Secretariat run in person in the Garden State Stakes. He was on the verge of superstardom and his appearance at the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, track drew a crowd of 25,175. The great horse did not disappoint, winning by 3 ½ lengths in his final start as a 2-year-old, cementing his first of two Horse of the Year titles.

The track burned to the ground in 1977, but was resurrected in 1985 by Bob Brennan. The new Garden State was supposed to be “the track of the 21st century” but come the early 2000s, its days were numbered. Unable to compete with the Atlantic City casinos and with too many racetracks in the Mid-Atlantic region for horseplayers to choose from, it limped to the finish line and never ran again after a short meet that ended in May of 2001.

Today, over the hallowed ground over which Secretariat, Bold Ruler, Kelso, Dr. Fager, Citation galloped down the stretch you can find a Cheesecake Factory. Very depressing.

Through the seventies and eighties I made many a trip, as well, to Atlantic City Race Course. My brother worked for Philly’s afternoon paper, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and, after his workday was done, we’d make the short trip down the Atlantic City Expressway to catch the last half of the card. Like Suffolk, Atlantic City limped along for years with short meets that allowed them to maintain their license, but ceased racing after 2014. The track still sits there, its owners trying to figure out what to do with the property.

The tracks I really miss are the ones in New England that were such a huge part of my life while I majored in Suffolk Downs and minored in economics while a student at Tufts University. There was a time when there were tracks in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Maine. They are all gone, leaving an entire region of the country that once embraced racing without a single track.

I made it to the old Rockingham once, early on in my freshman year, before it, too, burned down, in 1980. It was rebuilt and reopened four years later, but the new Rockingham was one of those places where there was no there there. It ran its last Thoroughbred race in 2002.

My favorite track, maybe of all time, was Suffolk Downs. I had an affinity for a hardscrabble, blue-collar, unpretentious track nestled between oil tanks where much of the racing was conducted during the harsh New England winter. For those who prefer Saratoga, Del Mar, Santa Anita, I don’t expect you to understand.

Suffolk Downs held on as long as it could, holding five or six-day meets to keep its license while ownership hoped to be granted a casino license. When Suffolk lost its bid, it was over. The track last raced June 30, 2019, and I was there to say goodbye. The property will soon be developed and include housing, stores, offices, you know, the usual stuff.

The Massachusetts fairs didn’t make it nearly as far. Back in the day, there was nothing like them. With a Ferris wheel, carnival games and 4-H club exhibits as a backdrop, Marshfield, Northampton and Great Barrington were New England institutions. With the legalization of pari-mutuel wagering in Massachusetts in the thirties, a thriving fair circuit got going, a refuge for horses and jockeys that couldn’t win any place else. Everybody who went to the fairs had a story about the fairs, like seeing 17-year-old Golden Arrow win at Great Barrington in 1978 or the time Zippy Chippy finished second at Northampton in his 98th attempt to break his maiden. And who can forget all the races that were fixed? There were hundreds of them over the years.

The fairs were so popular that a crowd of 27,048 once showed up at Great Barrington, which called itself “the Belmont of the Berkshires.” But they were a product of a very different time in racing. Northampton was the last survivor, running its last race in 2005. The fairs at Marshfield and Northampton continue to this day. Great Barrington has completely closed but there was talk before COVID-19 that it would be revived and run some of the dates normally reserved for Suffolk Downs.

I caught Ak-Sar-Ben near the very end. The same racetrack that once regularly drew 25,000 people Saturdays was crippled by competition from casinos in bordering states. It last raced in 1995

and the property has been converted to something called Aksarben Village, a development that includes part of the campus of University Nebraska-Omaha and a Godfather’s Pizza shop. I imagine Ak-Sar-Ben was a great track in its prime.

Bay Meadows is gone. So is Beulah Park, the Woodlands, Bowie, Liberty Bell, Sportsman’s Park, Manor Downs. I have been to them all. Green Mountain, which hadn’t run Thoroughbreds since 1976, burned to the ground in a suspicious fire just this last September. I remember taking the short trip over from Saratoga to catch a card at what was one of the sport’s most remote racetracks.
There was no saving most of these tracks. The exception is Hialeah. When it comes to sheer beauty and class, there was a time when it had no equal. To this day, the track’s website refers to it as “the world’s most beautiful race course.” Losing out on a war for the prime Florida dates, it became less relevant with each passing year until it ran its last Thoroughbred race in 2001. But still it sits there, kept somewhat alive by slot machines and fake quarter horse races. That the sport has never come together and found a way to bring Hialeah back to life is a failure that should have been corrected long ago.

There will be a new member to this list in just a few weeks. Calder/Gulfstream Park West is set to close for good after the Nov. 28 card. That will make my number 29. I’d be fine if it stopped right there.

Editor’s note: Think you can beat Bill’s Finley’s visits for live racing to 28 (soon to be 29) defunct tracks? Email us at suefinley@thetdn.com.

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