Jose Ferrer wants to teach some of the lessons he has learned as a jockey to his sons Derek and Joey, who are beginning to go after their own athletic dreams.
“They’ve seen me get hurt, and they know how dangerous this sport can be. They’re into football now, and I tell Derek when you fall down running, you have to get back up. Or I tell Joey when he takes a big hit he has to get back on the field. It’s part of the game,” Ferrer said.
For Ferrer, a race-rider for 43 years, so is winning. He has 12 victories from 52 mounts at the current Tampa Bay Downs meet, with 10 seconds, and is the Mother’s Restaurant Jockey of the Month. Two of his winners came on today’s card: in the first race with Swen, a 4-year-old Florida-bred gelding owned by Judy Karlin and trained by Dennis Ward, and in the seventh on the turf with Bonita Breeze, a 4-year-old Florida-bred filly owned by Gordon Bredeson and Peter D. Mattson and trained by Moises Yanez.
At 60 one of the oldest active jockeys in North America, Ferrer is proving there is a place on the racetrack for a senior who can keep himself in great shape, understands how to position a horse in a race and knows the real running usually doesn’t start until the top of the stretch.
To call him a keen student of the game is an understatement. Only 13 active jockeys have more wins than Ferrer’s total of 4,787, and after a slow summer and fall at Gulfstream Park, Ferrer seems to have been reinvigorated – which is perhaps not a surprise, given his surroundings.
The Tampa resident loves having 10-year-old Derek; Joey, who turns 9 this month; and his wife Steffi around to share in his successes.
“I’m so blessed to be able to do what I love to do and to have my family’s support,” said Ferrer, who was honored with the 2018 George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award in voting by his fellow riders. The award recognizes the recipient as an individual whose career and personal character reflect positively on the sport.
“When I get to the sixteenth pole on the lead, it’s like a sports team having the home-field advantage. I can hear my boys and Steffi screaming and hollering for me,” Ferrer said. “The joy they bring watching me get the job done, I feed off that. Their energy is my battery, the fuel I need to keep going.
“They love to see me out there, so that’s why I continue to do what I do.”
Ferrer is also supported by Tampa Bay Downs trainers who have won with him countless times over the years, such as Kathleen O’Connell and Ward, plus a new addition to his team – his agent Jose Angel Garcia, a retired jockey whom he competed against here for more than 10 years.
Garcia, who has a burning desire to succeed as an agent, makes working for Ferrer sound like a stroll through the park.
“No pressure at all. He loves what he does, and as an agent you enjoy working with a rider when they just let you work,” Garcia, 38, said. “I never had an incident when I rode against him, and he was always a very active person trying to help younger jockeys if they did something wrong.
“He works six days a week, and he always has the same enthusiastic attitude toward his job, the people and the horses. That kind of mentality is key, and he has been in the game long enough that he gets it,” added Garcia, who also represents Oldsmar jockey Marcos Meneses and Gulfstream jockeys Joe Bravo and Miguel Vasquez.
It will be interesting to see if Ferrer gets any opportunities this season in graded stakes. The most recent of his 29 career graded victories came in the 2023 Grade III Philip H. Iselin Stakes at Monmouth Park aboard Whelen Springs for trainer Lindsay Schultz. In 2021, he won the Grade II Lambholm South Tampa Bay Derby on Helium and the Grade III Salvator Mile Stakes at Monmouth on Informative, a 79-1 shot.
With Garcia in his corner, Ferrer isn’t ready to rule out anything. With his demanding regimen of pre-dawn workouts in his home gym, his light yet muscular frame and all that experience, his self-belief remains high.
“I know what to do out there. I go out there every race with at least a couple of game plans, because there are so many things that can go wrong to ruin Plan A,” he said. “Another thing that helps me is that I’m light, 110-to-112 pounds, so I don’t have to lose weight. And I’ve got an agent who knows the horses and the riders and knows what is going on here.”
And perhaps most important, a rooting section that is loud and devoted and happy to welcome him home, no matter the outcome of a race.
Around the oval. The Oldsmar oval’s two-day, on-track High Rollers Handicapping Contest will be held Feb. 21 and 22. An incorrect date was given in a recent press release. The Live It Up Challenge Handicapping Contest begins Jan. 18.
Saturday’s nine-race card begins at 12:28 p.m. Tampa Bay Downs races each Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and is open every day for simulcast wagering, no-limits action and tournament play in The Silks Poker Room and golf fun and instruction at The Downs Golf Practice Facility.
