Mike Joyce is that cigar-smoking, selfie-taking guy on FanDuel TV with a seemingly endless string of wisecracks. He's a Southern Californian by way of Chicago and Wyoming whose irreverence on social media has prompted some high-brow horseplayers to go screaming not so gentle into that good night. Sans mutton chops and a deerstalker hat, Joyce is the closest thing American racing television has to the late John McCririck, who was a legend in the United Kingdom for his sometimes outrageous on-air antics.
Putting all of that aside, however, Joyce has made a serious commitment toward one of the most important causes in our sport: the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund, a 501(c)(3) charity offering financial support to 60 former Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse riders whose lives have been changed forever by an accident on horseback.
As a member of the PDJF board of directors since 2015, Joyce has helped elevate the charity's national profile, bringing a jockey karaoke fundraiser – a popular annual event in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. – to Del Mar. He's also played a major role in the success of the PDJF Telethon, an event inaugurated in 2018 that has raised more than $1.5 million in five years, thanks to the broadcast support of FanDuel TV (formerly TVG) and more recently the New York Racing Association's FOX Sports telecast, “America's Day at the Races.”
Joyce, the youngest of 13 children, is the son of Joe Joyce, a New Yorker who came to Chicago in 1977 to run Arlington Park for then-owner Madison Square Garden Corp. and its successor, Gulf & Western. It was Joyce who conceived the idea for the Arlington Million, inaugurated in 1981, and two years later would put together the investor group – himself, Ralph Ross, Sheldon Robbins, and Richard Duchossois – to buy the track.
Following the fire that destroyed Arlington Park in 1985, Duchossois bought out his partners, and a couple of years later Joe Joyce moved the family to Wyoming, a seemingly odd change of scenery for a big city guy. Joyce bought struggling Wyoming Downs and an off-track betting network in the state, and the Evanston, Wyo., track was where Mike Joyce began his professional career in racing.
Born in 1977, shortly after the family moved to Chicago, young Mike was put to work at Wyoming Downs by his father at the age of 12, earning $5 a night for running the photo finish strip up to the stewards' room and then posting the print on a bulletin board for the public to see.
“Three years later I got promoted to shoveling (manure) in the paddock,” he quipped. “Over the years, I did just about every job you could do on the front side except selling pari-mutuel tickets. But it wasn't until I worked in the racing office that I began to better understand the game.”
Joyce wanted to get into television work after graduating from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He got his foot in the door at TVG in 2001, not long after the Los Angeles-based racing network was launched.
“I was hired as a production assistant and took home $1,200 a month,” Joyce said. “Rent was $900. There were a couple of nights at Los Alamitos when I hit the Pick 4 and it paid my rent.”
He worked his way up the ladder and eventually landed an on-air position co-hosting The Quarters at Los Alamitos with Dave Weaver. At the time, TVG did not have rights to broadcast races from Santa Anita, so Quarter Horse racing from Los Alamitos was a key part of their West Coast schedule.
That led to additional on-air opportunities as analyst, host, or reporter. In 2023, Joyce said with no small amount of pride, he was at Churchill Downs to help cover his first Kentucky Derby.
PDJF board member and all-time leading Quarter Horse jockey G. R. Carter Jr. nominated Joyce to the organization's board of directors in 2015, and he's been a member ever since.
“It always struck me, whenever something tragic happens in our game, so much of the attention goes to the horse – which is just, don't get me wrong,” said Joyce. “Oftentimes what happened to the rider is an afterthought. It seems like everybody's immediate reaction is, 'Oh, my God, I can't look at that horse.' For me it was always, 'What about this rider?'
“There's been some incidents, especially in Quarter Horse racing when Hector Cuevas went down, or Sam Thompson, who was a friend of mine, died one night on a horse,” he said. “Those things are very poignant with me. There's only so much protection the jockeys can get – a helmet and a flak jacket.”
Joyce said Nancy LaSala, who has served as PDJF president since the all-volunteer charity was created in 2006, is “an absolute hurricane of activity. … I've never seen anyone juggle more tasks and do as much as she does.
“It's a cast of people who do it out of kindness, because they care,” he said of the volunteers who devote much of their free time to PDJF. “When you get to know some of the recipients and see how they live, you wish you could do more. We don't give our recipients as much as we'd like to. We're trying to get our fund-raising to a point where we can provide them a stipend that equals the poverty level – we're trying to bring it up to the poverty level. Right now we're well below that.”
To help get there, Joyce said, the Del Mar karaoke night for which he's been a driving force has been a “six-figure” fund raiser, and the annual Telethon, which began in 2018 and he's hosted several times, has averaged over $300,000 a year in its first five events.
Terry Meyocks, president and CEO of the Jockeys' Guild, and FanDuel's Jeff Lowich came up with the idea for the PDJF Telethon, Joyce said.
“When they first laid this in our lap,” Joyce said, “my first thought was, 'C'mon, a Telethon? What year is this, 1964?' We just kind of laughed at the idea but thought if we make a few bucks with it, great. Nancy and I were not expecting anything big. But that first year we made so much money, well into six figures, I was blown away.”
Tom Cassidy hosted the first Telethon but Joyce has been the host in the following years.
“One of the reasons it has done so well is we get the cooperation from Hall of Fame riders, and a lot of them are in Kentucky or California (where the phone banks and cameras are set up),” he said. “So people call in and they want to talk to Sandy Hawley, or they want to talk with Eddie D, or want to talk to Laffit or Mike Smith or Gary Stevens. That part of it really does go a long way. I could never have imagined how successful that Telethon has been.”
Joyce admits that much of what he does on FanDuel TV and on social media is ego-driven, but his volunteer work with PDJF falls into a different category.
“It's the one thing I do that I know is unequivocally good,” Joyce said. And that makes him a difference maker. If you would like to make a difference, please consider a donation to the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund.
Difference Makers is presented by Richard Pearson's Avion Law, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm specializing on the aviation industry. Avion Law has a “giving back” program supporting awareness campaigns and donating to charitable organizations in and outside of horse racing.
The post Mike Joyce’s ‘Unequivocally Good’ Work For PDJF: Difference Makers Presented By Avion Law appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
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