BRENTWOOD — Roberto Gonzalez shifts uncomfortably in the padded armchair.
A once-broken neck reminds the 56-year-old jockey that he can’t sit in one place for long as he gets to his feet and repositions himself behind the recliner, leaning on the back for support.
Pain still radiates from his back to his legs 20 months after the crash that ended one of the most successful careers in Northern California horse racing.
“It’s in your bones,” Gonzalez says of the discomfort. “From top to bottom, I had damage.”
On April 29, 2009, he was riding a 2-year-old filly at Golden Gate Fields in her maiden race when she broke a leg and careened into the path of another horse.
Trainer Valerie Rhoden, who was watching the action on TV from a barn, remembers seeing Gonzalez tumble onto the track as his horse went down.
“When jockeys hit it, they say it’s harder than dirt,” she says, noting that the synthetic surface covers a layer of asphalt.
Gonzalez fractured the second cervical vertebra in his neck along with his left heel, and doctors initially warned that he might be permanently paralyzed.
Gonzalez prayed to St. Nicholas, after whom his Brentwood horse ranch and hometown church in Mexico were named and whose picture hangs in his office.
“I said, ‘Please don’t let me be in a wheelchair,’” he says, recalling his promise to bring flowers to the church if he could walk again. And after spending several months immobilized in a halo and receiving weekly physical therapy, Gonzalez finally did.
But the pain persists.
The casual observer can’t tell, but Gonzalez’s suffering is unrelenting. it wakes him several times a night, and when he lies down during the day to take the weight off his bad foot, his neck will start to hurt within an hour. yet when he gets up and walks around, his heel acts up again.
Gonzalez is able to turn his head only slightly and must steady himself against the wall when climbing out of bed in the morning.
“I have to get up like a 90-year-old man,” he says in heavily accented English, smiling.
He pauses to take a Vicodin pill with the Diet Coke he has been sipping.
A portable heater in the office at his ranch wards off the winter chill and damp that exacerbate his symptoms.
But Gonzalez is good-natured as he reminisces about his glory days, surrounded by reminders of a career that spanned more than three decades during which he posted 4,454 victories to become the second-winningest jockey in the history of the Northern California circuit.
Small boy, big horses
Gonzalez was still in grade school when he began following in his father’s footsteps by entering informal races in Via Jiménez, Mexico, where residents of the tiny farming town recognized his natural talent by lending the diminutive boy their horses.
After his father took him to an actual racetrack in Tijuana, Gonzalez began thinking about making racehorses his life’s work.
“I guess I like the speed,” he says simply. “I come … with the blood to race horses like my dad.”
He set his sights on moving to the United States to learn the ropes — “I was going to get paid for something I loved to do” — and Gonzalez’s father worked the connections he had to get his son a job at a thoroughbred farm in San Clemente.
Just 16 when he left his family, Gonzalez spent the next four years mucking out stalls and corrals.
“I didn’t think my dreams would go that far to become a jockey,” he says, noting that he didn’t speak English, have immigration papers or know of anyone who could put a good word in for him at a racetrack.
What’s more, his boss thought Gonzalez — who then tipped the scales at about 95 pounds — was too slight even by jockeys’ standards to control the 1,100-pound animals.
But doors began to open when a visiting trainer invited him to exercise horses at the Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood.
Nervous but eager, Gonzalez accepted the $350-per-month job.
“I was just happy to be around horses,” he recalls.
Over the next year his ability in the saddle also caught the eye of other trainers who suggested that Gonzalez get his jockey’s license.
An apprenticeship followed, during which Gonzalez began racing horses for the first time professionally and ended the year with the third most wins at Hollywood Park.
Over his 32-year career, Gonzalez has traveled to Canada and around the United States from Florida to Arizona, although most of his races have been at tracks in Northern California.
The Castro Valley resident earned a reputation for his ability to get the best out of the horses with which trainers matched him.
“He was a hell of a gate man, and nobody would get through on the rail,” says Golden Gate Fields trainer Doug Utley of Gonzalez’s fast starts and knack for blocking other jockeys from passing on the inside.
But his real forte was pacing horses, knowing when to hold them back to ration their energy and when to let them fly.
“He had a clock in his head,” says Utley, who has worked with Gonzalez since the late 1970s. “He was the best speed rider I’ve ever been around. I’d use Bobby just about any time I could get him.”
Gonzalez balanced himself in the saddle and gripped the reins in such a way that he could get a horse to “relax,” maintaining speed without exhausting the animal, said longtime Northern California horse racing writer Chuck Dybdal.
“He perfected the art so well that it made him unique,” he says. “He was just a master at it.”
Gonzalez was barely out of the starting gates himself when he won the Bay Meadows Handicap in 1979 by beating future Hall of Famer John Henry, the odds-on favorite and a horse widely considered one of the best anywhere.
Gonzalez’s number of first-place showings ranked him among the top 100 jockeys in the United States in 2008 as well as from 2003 through 2006, according to Equibase, the company that maintains racing records.
Then came the terrible tumble at Golden Gate Fields.
Gonzalez had been injured on the job before — there was the dislocated right shoulder, the broken ribs and right ankle, and the clavicle he’d fractured three times — but the peak condition he maintained through daily workouts always enabled him to rebound.
This time was different, however.
These days, Gonzalez is on seven medications and has nightmares of being trampled under galloping hoofs.
Silvia, his wife of 33 years, drives him between their home and the ranch, and his four daughters also help where they can. he has yet to climb back in the saddle.
He nonetheless returns to Golden Gate Fields occasionally for bittersweet reunions with colleagues.
“I know it’s very, very hard for him. he gets really emotional about it,” Rhoden says, noting that Gonzalez avoids the jockeys’ room because the tack and racing silks are a particularly difficult reminder of what he’s missing.
Gonzalez also canvasses trainers there to drum up business for his 9.3-acre ranch, where he boards racehorses that come to recuperate from knee surgeries and pulled ligaments or simply to rest.
He speaks wistfully of returning to the sport that has been his lifelong passion but admits that he faces staunch opposition.
“Everyone say, ‘Don’t ride no more,’” he says. “My brothers, sisters, my friends, doctors — they say, ‘Don’t even think about riding again.’”
Their reminders that he has had a great run are cold comfort to Gonzalez, who still refers to his life’s work in the present tense.
It has allowed him to travel, to meet the likes of Richard Nixon and Hollywood celebrities, and sign autographs for fans of the sport who recognize him on the street.
It’s also an adrenaline rush to charge toward the finish line knowing that an untold number of people are watching, Gonzalez says.
“I’m addicted to my job,” he says. “My job is beautiful.”
Contact Rowena Coetsee at 925-779-7141.