Chris McCarron Every jockey dreams of riding in, and winning, the Kentucky Derby, but to Chris McCarron's way of thinking, the decision he faced back in 1995 was rather clear-cut. He could travel to Louisville for a mount on Knockadoon, who would likely go postward as one of the longest shots in the field, or he could remain home in suburban Los Angeles for Derby Day and ride a number of likely favorites at Hollywood Park.

After McCarron initially had turned down the ride on Knockadoon, the horse's owner, Bill Warren Jr., the chairman of a not-for-profit foundation in Tulsa, Okla., proceeded to sweeten the offer. He called Scott McClellan, McCarron's agent, and told him to pass along this deal: If McCarron would ride Knockadoon in the Derby, he'd host McCarron for a weekend of golf at one of the four clubs at which he is a member. In this case the course he had in mind was none other than Augusta National.

That, as you might expect, was enough to change McCarron's mind. The decision turned out to be one of the most memorable of his sensational Hall of Fame career. "Mr. Warren was absolutely right," McCarron insisted nearly two years later. "The horse ran very well. The horse got bothered traffic-wise three times in the race, then came flyin'. . . . If he didn't have traffic trouble, I'm not saying he would have won, but he'd have been right there. And I think he was 35- or 40-to-1. It was a great effort."

Knockdoon, who placed seventh, was Warren's first and only opportunity to run a horse in the Derby, and though the owner had his choice of dozens of accomplished jockeys who would have accepted a chance to ride in the most famous horse race of them all with no questions asked, he wasn't settling for a second choice until he'd played all the cards in his hand.

"From talking with other jockeys and other horsemen," remembers Warren, "I knew Chris was a pretty avid golfer. And in talking with him, I'd asked Chris if he'd ever played Augusta and he'd said Ôno,' so I figured I might be able to use that as an inducement of sorts. I'm very glad I made the offer because it gave me the chance to get to know a first-class gentleman . . . and a pretty good golfer, too."

Later that autumn, on his way to Augusta, McCarron first flew to New York to ride in the Breeders' Cup, where he came home a winner on Northern Spur in the $2 million Turf, one of the richest of his 6,500-plus career victories (No. 7 on the all-time list). But having several million dollars worth of horseflesh in your hands during the course of one afternoon is nothing compared to stepping onto the first tee at Augusta National for the first time.

McCarron can tour a shed row and rattle off minute details of races run a decade ago; he remembers his day at Augusta with a similar clarity.

"Looking up that hill . . ." McCarron recalls, "there were two or three groups of players behind us, waiting to tee off after we did, and everyone's got a caddie, so it's like I've got a little gallery watching me. My knees were knockin', I'm certain of that, and thank God I hit one straight. . . . We played 70 holes in two days; thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

McCarron's trip had one more lasting memory. From Georgia he flew to Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Judy, met her natural parents for the first time. (Judy, who was adopted when she was 14 months old, located her parents after six months of research and, when she met them, discovered she had five sisters as well.) "That weekend," recalls McCarron, "the Breeders' Cup win, Augusta National, meeting my wife's parents -- just unbelievable."

You don't survive 23 years as a jockey without feeling some of the responsibility you hold in your hands every day. It is a unique talent, trying to ascertain just the right mix of speed, strength and stamina from a 1,000-pound animal that can at the same time be as fragile as the ice that forms on a newly frozen pond. Knowing that trainers, owners and tens of thousands of wagering fans are watching your every move. That your actions over the span of a minute or two will directly affect the distribution of millions of dollars. Six or eight times a day, every day. For better than 23 years.

Golf provides that release to McCarron, who's ridden six Triple Crown winners, including Touch Gold in a stirring Belmont Stakes five months ago, and amassed more than $212 million in purses, more than any other jockey in history. "The people who are into tennis or racquetball and whatever other sports, they say their biggest complaint about golf is that it's so time consuming," McCarron notes. "But that's exactly what I love about it. Once a week or so, I need my six hours away from everything. . . . That's my escape, and a real pleasant one -- unless I shoot 88."

That may have been common 20 years ago when his only golf was an occasional, casual outing with fellow riders and others who worked at the race track -- before he got hooked. "I'd never had anybody stand there and teach me -- nobody qualified," he recalls. "But I really got to enjoy the game, appreciate the game much more because it sure was more difficult than I thought it was going to be."

He soon got into the habit of finishing his morning workouts at Hollywood Park and then visiting Joe, his brother and the oldest of nine McCarron children, who at that time was a teaching pro at an executive course near LAX. "I knew how difficult it was to strike the ball properly," McCarron recalls, "but after about 10 lessons Joe had me hitting the ball straight."

McCarron applies the same philosophy to the golf swing as he does riding horses: No motion is wasted; every movement serves a purpose. "As soon as you put anything on a horse's back," he explains, "even if it's just a saddle, it's a hindrance. It's already becoming a handicap because it weighs something; to a degree it's going to slow him down. Now if you put a body on that saddle, and if that body is not in synch with the movements and motions of that horse, if you're not in rhythm, you're going to do things that are hindering the performance, the stride, the speed and everything that goes with it. I do try to use some of my learned technique with my golf swing, but I've gone overboard with it, I think."

He's able to maintain a handicap in the high single digits at San Gabriel Country Club, his home course that is wedged amid the sprawl of Los Angeles suburbia north and east of the city and conveniently located just minutes from Santa Anita, one of the mainstays of southern California racing. His fundamentally sound swing produces shots that are both straight and long, though not as lengthy as those of fellow rider Corey Nakatani, who may hold the unofficial title as the game's longest hitter, pound for pound. "Chris and I both hit it out there," says Corey Black, a southern California-based rider and a frequent playing companion of McCarron's. "But more than a few times I've stepped off Corey's drives at 285 or 290." (A 275-yard drive from the 110-pound Nakatani would translate to 2.5 yards per pound of body weight. Conversely, the 155-pound Tiger Woods carried a 1.9 average into mid-October and John Daly, 190 pounds according to the 1997 PGA Tour Media Guide, just 1.59.)

San Gabriel Country Club's most unforgettable feature may be its 18th hole, which requires a drive over an eight-foot-high chain-link fence protecting vehicular traffic at the intersection of Country Club Drive and Hermosa Avenue. But the course's great variety of holes and shot requirements enables players to hit virtually every club in the bag and usually in differing manners.

But for a person whose mind may weigh dozens of split-second decisions in every race, it is McCarron's concentration that often deserts him on the golf course.

"I think it's because for the last 23 years my mind has been trained in a different fashion," he says. "I read a book about sports psychology, and the author kept using the terms Ôbroad-mindedness' and Ônarrow-mindedness,' but not in the context of what you think when you hear someone described as narrow-minded. It had to do with changing your range of focus -- from very narrow, so you could concentrate on making a four-foot putt, for example, to broad-mindedness, to where you're very aware of everything going on around you, which is what I need to succeed on the racetrack.

"I have to be able to know who's coming, where they're coming from, who's in front of me. Before every race I have a strategy, and if something happens coming out of the gate, for instance, I have a second strategy, and maybe a third. I have to be able to change my strategy like that," he continues with a snap of his fingers. "You can't do that in the middle of a golf swing. I think that because for the last 23 years my mind has been working in that fashion, very successfully, now it's different for me, and difficult, to stay narrow-minded, to just stay focused on what you're supposed to do."

The old racetrack axiom holds that jockeys know better than to wager on the horses they ride, but there's usually a little at stake when McCarron, Black, Nakatani, Kent Desormeaux, Eddie Delahoussaye and others from the southern California riding colony set off from the first tee. "We go out to enjoy it, but we're competitive," McCarron says. "There are no good losers in our group, but by the same token there are no bridge-jumpers."

What may also surprise onlookers is the distance obtained by these golfers who generally don't top 5 feet and change or 110 pounds. "That's one of the first things my brother taught me," McCarron explains. "He showed me a long time ago that it doesn't mean a little guy can't compete on the golf course with the big guy, because distance isn't necessarily the primary goal. I think a lot of people are very surprised at how far some of these jockeys hit the ball. Like at Augusta, I got a little ÔWhoa!" from all those guys standing at the first tee."

And who could ever forget that? Who would want to?

-- Rich Skyzinski