The finest in the world are here, horses and riders. The TV trucks and reporters and VIPs in business suits have been filling the place for days.
It's Preakness Week, there's a buzz in the air, and even Donald "Coos" Cusick allows a lump to come to his throat.
"It's the Indy 500, the World Series, the whole deal wrapped up in one," says Cusick, a grizzled man of 55 who has broken both shoulders and one wrist, mangled each hand and even fractured his back in service to the only place he has ever worked — Pimlico Race Course.
Just 12 men hold the coveted job of jockeys' valet at the track, and Cusick is the only one raised in Baltimore. He grew up across the street from Pimlico, the youngest of 17 kids in a house on Belvedere Avenue. Folks in the "jocks' room" say he's respected throughout the industry. With the horse's head tattoo on his forearm, partially missing finger and penchant for quick comebacks, he could have been a Dead End Kid if he hadn't grown up in Charm City.
Tomorrow, he'll saddle up a bunch of 1,200-pound horses just before they run, as he has done at Old Hilltop for the past 33 years. He'll tend to six of the world's top riders, including his old friend Calvin Borel, winner of three of the past four Kentucky Derbies. "I wouldn't trade this for anything," he says, hanging yet another set of silks.
It has been 47 years since he started out shining shoes and selling newspapers at the track. Cusick didn't get where he is by being soft. No, that's just this time of year.
The Hustler
Those who know Cusick have heard his tales of getting thrown from horses, wrangling thoroughbreds into stalls, helping high-strung jockeys make weight and taking care of legends such as Willie Shoemaker.
At some point, everyone asks how in the world you grow up with 16 siblings in a three-bedroom house.
It's simple, Cusick says. When your mom puts food on the table, grab it fast. Be OK with sleeping four or five in a bed. And when your parents turn the dining room into their boudoir, try to stay out. "You never knew when Dad might be working on No. 18," he says, laughing.
A small, wiry kid, Cusick was energetic and smart, a born leader, but poverty hit him like a ton of bricks. He never liked that his mom, Mary Rita, had to do without the things she wanted. It shamed him to go to school with cardboard patches in the bottoms of his shoes.
So he did what he always has: He made stuff happen. "I became a hustler," he says.
In 1963, when he was 8 and Pimlico was usually so crowded it was nearly impossible to find a parking spot, he got a shoeshine box, crossed the street and hit up customers at the track.
He gravitated toward bettors who'd just won since they were happy and free with their money. "I'd say, 'How 'bout a shine, Mister?' 'Sure, kid, here's a quarter.' You could make $50 or $60 a day," he says.
Money drew him like a salt lick, and from boyhood on he always found some. He hawked copies of The Sun for a nickel. He made $500 a week reselling Christmas trees. He reset pins at the bowling alley. "I tell my kids, 'You pick flies out of horse [dung] with boxing gloves on, if it pays right,'" he says.
Before long he wanted to move to where folks had big cars and nice clothes — inside Pimlico. Cusick hung around the guards at the gate so much they figured it was easier just to let him through. Lying about his age, he got work as a "hot walker" — the guy who leads horses around the track, post-exercise, to cool them down.
Since everyone knew he was underage, he had to jump the fence or hitch a ride inside just to get to work. It was worth the trouble.
"Thirty-five dollars a week steady income," he says, shaking his head. "I felt like I was [defecating] in tall cotton."
Learning the ropes
His track knowledge paid off in school, where his best subject was math, in part because he was a natural problem solver, in part because his teacher loved the ponies. Cusick would share an inside tip or two and later place the man's $10 bet. ("We usually did well. I got an A," he says.) With others, he had a deal: If he kept up with his classmates, they'd refrain from giving him homework. "They knew I didn't have the time," he says.
By 13, he saw he'd never have the financial backing to do what he really wanted: become a surgeon. "That was a heavy decision for a kid, but I realized it was horses for me," he says.
Cusick made himself so insufferably useful he worked his way up the ladder — groom, exercise rider, jockey, porter — and once he realized that at 5 feet 10 inches, he'd grown too big to be a jockey, he spent 12 years insinuating himself with the old-timers who were then the valets. Some retired; another died. He got his current job in 1977.
"I've known Donald for years, and I have to tell you, he can do anything," says Frank Saumell, Pimlico's assistant clerk of scales. "His riders love him, and he's organized, but he knows so much more than that. He's [the valets'] union rep. He built a deck on the back of my house. He could build a house."
One thing that helped: He loved work more than his own safety. At 15, when he decided to teach himself to ride the horses at the track, he figured getting thrown every other ride was part of the deal. Jockeys took pity and showed him some skills. He can't remember how many bones he cracked in his afternoon job, breaking horses at local farms.
Once, he says, a horse threw Cusick, damaging his wrist. When a doctor told him it was broken in five places and put a cast on it, he went home, sawed the cast back to the knuckles and kept riding. When another horse pitched him, he didn't find out till years later he'd fractured a vertebra.
Three years ago, Cusick caught his wedding ring on something at home — he and his wife, Lori, bought a house in New Windsor in 1981 — and lost half a finger on his left hand.
He was back in the jocks' room the next day.
No fear
On race days, Cusick is the first guy to arrive, at about 6:30 a.m. He helps his daughter, Krista, set up the jockeys' snack bar, then makes up his board for the day. Over the next 12 hours, he'll serve the needs of his stable (the six jockeys who have requested to work with him) and get everything they need ready for the moment they head out for a race: boots, helmets, goggles, girths, saddles, silks, protective vests and more.
Each rides about six times, totaling 36 or more handoffs most days.
"Donald isn't just a great storyteller and a personable man. He's extremely organized," says Sheldon Russell, a 22-year-old jockey from England who has known Cusick for three years. "With him, we don't lack for anything. That takes a lot of the stress off of us."
But the "babysitting" part, as Cusick calls it, isn't all. At least 10 times a day, he interrupts that activity to race down a flight of steps into the paddock, guide a snorting horse into a stall and saddle him just before post time. (The Maryland Jockey Club pays a valet as a saddle man. He gets additional money from the jockeys themselves. In a good year, he says, he has made $80,000.)
An expert can accomplish most saddlings in a minute or so. A good valet sees trouble coming ahead of time — a horse that's crouching low, for instance, suggesting agitation — and heads it off by loosening the bit in its mouth or ordering the horse taken for a walk.
Part of the job, then, is confidence. "Some of the other valets are a little bit on the shaky side, which is not good," Saumell says. "Donald is fearless."
In an afternoon, you're liable to catch Cusick schooling a rider about a horse ("he runs strong at the end") or making weight, giving counsel on nursing injuries (he tells them to do what he did not: take it slow), sitting in the 100-degree "hotbox" (sauna) or sharing stories from the old days.
Jocks choose valets for any number of reasons, Russell says, but for him, there was little choice to be made. Three years ago, when he was a nervous rookie on his first day, Cusick sought him out and made him comfortable.
"He's a genuinely good guy," he says. "That's why the best riders in the world will be sitting right here" this weekend — at Cusick's row of lockers.
Up on the roof
Joseph and Mary Rita, Cusick's parents, died years ago. Six of his siblings are gone. The oldest of the rest, a sister named Betty, is 83.
The others come to the Cusicks' Carroll County home for reunions. "It ain't that much, but they can't believe the space I have," Cusick says, laughing. He plans to retire in seven years or when he starts fearing the horses, whichever comes first.
Preakness Week, too, is a reunion, the only time each year when luminaries such as Borel and Robbie Alvarado come to Old Hilltop. Most ask for Cusick, who has worked with Borel — "a real Southern gentleman, very down-to-earth," he says — since 1983.
This time of year can be "a magic time," Cusick says. "Everyone still wants to be a part of Preakness. It'll bring a tear to your eye."
And the 12th race is the only one of the year when the valets drop what they're doing and step outside to watch. They don't have seats, mind you. They shimmy up a pipe and onto a battered roof.
That suits the hustler from across the street just fine. "Best seat in the house," he says.