Winning Combination: Book signing to honor Brownsville racing great

Author Manuel Hinojosa is throwing a book-signing party on Kentucky Derby Day to honor Brownsville sports legend Herbie Hinojosa, who rode in the Preakness Stakes and rose to the upper echelons of thoroughbred racing during the sport’s golden age.

Hinojosa is also an architect and artist who co-owns Doubleday Bar of Champions in Port Isabel, where he displays his artwork. He’s written a book about Herbie Hinojosa, who passed away in December 2019. It published two weeks ago.

“Rode Hard, The Rise and Fall of a Jockey Legend,” is available on Amazon and will be available for purchase starting at 4 p.m. on Derby Day, Saturday, May 1, at Doubleday Bar of Champions. Book signings will be held before and after the Kentucky Derby, Hinojosa says on the invitation. “We encourage you to wear your Kentucky Derby attire,” meaning hats for women.

The event will be kind of a stand-in for live wagering on the race, which in a non-pandemic year would be offered at Valley Race Park in Harlingen.

“We’ll have a leader board and food and refreshments,” Hinojosa said. “Everyone is invited.”

The book is about a jockey’s life during the golden age of racing in the 1950s, ‘60s and 70s, when Hinojosa rode alongside and against racing greats like Eddie Arcaro, Bill Shoemaker, Ronald Blum, Ismael “Milo” Valenzuela, Bill Hartack, Braulio Baeza, Manuel Ycaza, Angel Cordero and Don Pierce among others.

“I called all of them up and they all had good things to say about Herberto Hinojosa,” Manuel Hinojosa said. “Herbie was a national icon and a hometown Brownsville guy put in this huge theater” that was horse racing at the time. “He did it on his own. The unbelievable stories he told to me, I checked them all out and they all checked out.”

Hinojosa characterized Herbie Hinojosa as an honest guy who would tell the truth and was prone to enjoy the enjoyable aspects of after-the-races life. He developed the material for the book during mornings spent drinking coffee with the former jockey during the final years of his life at his Southmost residence.

Hinojosa said he was “overwhelmed with information” for the book, and spent 30 hours a week writing it for weeks on end. When he first met Herbie Hinojosa, he knew nothing about horse racing. The book ends in the mid-1960s, although Hinojosa’s career continued into the 1990s. In his later years, he tutored modern-day jockeys like Chris McCarron and Julie Krone.

“I loved it. I couldn’t wait to write about it,” he said. “Those jockeys worked hard. They got up early and were on the racetrack first thing in the morning working out the horses. You had to be in the jockey room by 11 a.m., and the races were over by 5 p.m. It all started all over the next day. It was a hectic life.”

At his peak, Hinojosa would fly to multiple cities within a few days of each other to ride in stakes races with big purses, of which the winning jockey earned a 10% share. At the height of his earning power he made more money than other sports stars of the day, Johnny Unitas, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and others.

Herbie Hinojosa started riding races at age 8. He grew up between his father’s ranch in El Ranchito, Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville before dropping out of Longoria Elementary School to pursue a riding career that took him first to quarter horse tracks in New Mexico and Arizona, and eventually to the best thoroughbred tracks in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

During a career that spanned 40 years, Hinojosa won 3,334 of the 25,160 thoroughbred races he rode, and his mounts earned just under $18 million. He won 13% of his races, placed first, second or third in 39% of them, and won multiple graded stakes races, according to Equibase, the horse racing industry data base.

Manuel Hinojosa is no relation to Herbie Hinojosa and lives in Port Isabel. He discovered the famous jockey while doing sports memorabilia research in the early 2000s when the jockey’s name showed up in Google searches as having been born in deep South Texas and living in Brownsville.

Hinojosa took a chance and went to the address listed for the former jockey, now 10 years retired. The two became close friends over the following 10 years. As Herbie would recount tales from his racetrack years, Manuel would confirm their veracity by tracing them back to newspaper stories about actual races and from other sources.

“I was looking for people to nominate to the RGV Sports Hall of Fame and here was this guy who is one of the biggest celebrity sports figures ever produced by the Rio Grande Valley and we didn’t even know it. He was living in Southmost just miles from where I was, and nobody even knew,” Hinojosa said.

“I hope this book solidifies his celebrity status and cements the legacy of this man who should not have been forgotten. I caught him just in time.”

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