Hovdey: A scathed Espinoza counts his blessings

Another jockey, another hospital room. Wounded warriors in a ridiculous war. Daredevils who never use a net.

There was Gary Stevens with his right shoulder and knee mangled in a morning horror show. Eddie Delahoussaye numbed to the awful pain of a shattered pelvis. Tyler Baze fighting back the dread of facial fractures. Laffit Pincay dealing with yet another damaged clavicle. Julie Krone with a broken back.

This time it was Victor Espinoza, propped up in his bed in a corner room of Scripps Memorial Hospital, the go-to repository for riders injured at Del Mar. It was Wednesday, three days after Espinoza was speared head first to the ground nearing the end of a workout aboard the stakes-winning sprinter Bobby Abu Dhabi, who collapsed in mid-stride from what could have been some kind of fatal cardiac failure.

Espinoza was raised in his bed to a 45-degree angle, his neck supported by a rigid brace that prevented any movement of his head. In addition to a fracture of a transverse process bone of the third cervical vertebra and a herniated disc between C-3 and C-4, Espinoza suffered a trauma to muscles, ligaments, blood vessels, and the nerves leading to his left arm and shoulder.

“Here’s another one,” said a hospital attendant, as she placed a colorful flower arrangement, complete with balloon, on Espinoza’s bedside table. There were others clustered around the room. “A lot of flowers came while you were still in the ICU.”

“Who’s it from,” a visitor wondered.

The note card read, “The Peter Miller family.” Miller was the trainer of Bobby Abu Dhabi.

“Jill and Bob were here yesterday,” Espinoza said softly, his chin barely moving in the brace. “They brought me that cake, my favorite.”

It was a red velvet, a tempting treat from the Bafferts but so far untouched.

“And candy,” Espinoza said. “People send me candy, just what a jockey needs to recover.”

There it was, the jockey sense of dark humor that muscles up through the pain and the anguish and the fear of what might have been. Chris McCarron, once lying in a hospital bed near Hollywood Park with two broken legs and a broken arm, was informed his good friend, comedian Tim Conway, was on his way up for a visit. McCarron asked his wife, Judy, to hand him a single red rose from a nearby arrangement, then held the flower to his chest and closed his eyes. A minute later the room curtain parted, and the comedian took his cue.

“Is he gone yet?” Conway said. “We need the bed.”

Espinoza recalled hitting the ground last Sunday and then feeling nothing, literally nothing, before finding that he could move one leg, then the other. It may have been only seconds, but during those seconds came the terror of possible paralysis that haunts every airborne jockey as the hard ground rises.

“My horse was working pretty good, then for about two jumps he kind of slowed down,” Espinoza said. “I didn’t have time to do anything, one-tenth of a second, then he was down. All I could think was where I was going to fall, and how. I ended up kind of on my left side, so I couldn’t turn my head to see my horse. But I’m kind of glad, because I really didn’t want to. I knew it was bad.”

In the immediate wake of the accident, Espinoza’s main concern was the intense nerve pain in his left shoulder and his inability to move his left arm. He was given medication to reduce swelling and thin the blood, and to his great relief movement began to return.

“The doctor told me if that didn’t work, I would need surgery,” Espinoza said. “Lucky for me it worked.”

The word gets thrown around a lot in racing. Espinoza, who just suffered the worst injury of his Hall of Fame career at 46, considered himself lucky to be slowly regaining strength in his left arm and hand, and lucky that he has to wear the neck brace for only about six weeks. This weekend he would have been riding Bobby Abu Dhabi in the Grade 1 Bing Crosby, a race he has won three times, and next month he would have been aboard favored Accelerate in the $1 million Pacific Classic.

“I can’t think about those things,” Espinoza said. “I can only think about getting healthy. That’s more important than anything.”

By the time this is read, Espinoza may have been transitioned from the hospital to a rehabilitation facility. In the meantime, his hospital visitors included his older brother Jose, whose career as a jockey ended after suffering head trauma in a Saratoga accident five years ago, and his nephew Asa Espinoza, an up-and-coming apprentice on the Southern California scene.

“I told him even before he started that if he wanted to be a jockey he’d better think about it twice, and be very sure he wanted to do this,” Espinoza said. “It’s not easy.”

This from a guy lying in a hospital bed wearing a neck brace and faced with a tough recovery.

“I’m sure if he saw me like this before he would not have started riding,” Espinoza said, laughing as best he could. “But who knows? Probably not. If they really want to do it, they will find a way.”