Fred Ecoffey, Nebraska’s winningest jockey, preps for 66th season in racing
By Heidi Beguin
Fred Ecoffey, regularly travels the 40-some miles from his home near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota to compete in a local bowling league with his son Allen at King Pin Lanes of Gordon. Many of the people who see the polite, soft-spoken man, have no idea he started more than 17,522 horse races, winning 2,683 of them. Around 2,400 of those wins were all on Nebraska race tracks, giving Fred the title of “the winningest jockey in Nebraska history.”
“My dad was quite the horseman, that’s how I got started,” Fred recalls. “Dad started in the horse business back when me and my brother were born. They gave us so much land back then, and he sold the land and bought race horses.” Frank Ecoffey was a trainer. He bred Thoroughbreds, many of which would go on to win on race tracks in numerous areas for decades. Frank “Posey” Ecoffey often registered his horses’ names with “Posey” like “Posey’s Petal.”
“My whole family came with me to the races until the kids started school.” Then when they were old enough to go to school, rather than following dad and constantly changing schools, his wife stayed home with their four children. Allen, the oldest at 65, was a Gordon High School graduate and a member of the undefeated Bronc football team. Three of his four children graduated from Gordon, while one daughter graduated from Batesland. Both of his boys stay with him now, at his place in Wounded Knee. “All my kids were too big to be jockeys. Thank God!”
Fred continues, “They claim being a jockey is the most dangerous sport. I got hurt a lot. Horses break a leg, clippin’ heels, torn down. Especially in the Kentucky Derby, there’s too many horses. They’re lucky they don’t have a big mess.”
Thinking back Fred says, “I’ve fallen several times, had a broken pelvis, broke my collarbone three times, but the one that scared me the worst was what really caused me to finally retire.” While racing at the Lincoln Fairgrounds there was a massive pileup and Fred was in the middle of it. According to an article from the 2017 Black Hills Stock Show magazine, “I’d been riding for one man and then he got a horse that was bad-legged in front, and I wouldn’t ride it. Another jockey had him in this field of eight, and going into the first turn he broke a leg and went down. I went down over him and four more went over me, six out of the eight. It broke the neck of the horse I was riding.”
The article goes on to explain that Fred probably didn’t realize it, but his daughter Renee says, “When the EMT’s got out there Dad was the first one they came to, but they stepped over him, thinking he was already dead.” Fred jumps in to say, “I wasn’t able to finish out the meet, but I still made Leading Rider,” a title he claimed 26 times on Nebraska tracks.
Ecoffey has a fading scar on his face that runs from his mouth up to his cheek bone. “I tore my lip from here to here. I had to have 67 stitches. It just tore everything, broke my upper jaw and knocked four of my teeth out. It drove my eye tooth up and almost blinded me. I went through lots and lots of surgeries. But as soon as the swelling went out of my head, as soon as I could get my helmet back on, I rode. I rode with all those stitches and my jaw wired shut,” he smiles.
“Oh yeah, it hurt. Couple times when my jaws were wired shut they gave me snippers so that if I got sick to my stomach, I could clip my jaw open or I would’ve drowned myself when I threw up. That scared me the worst and what caused me to retire. The injuries I had. I retired when I was 46 and probably could’ve rode another ten years but I started to get cautious and that caused me to not win as many races. When I was winning I never gave a thought to being hurt, just like riding with those stitches, but I started to think about what could happen.”
The year 1983 would be his last year of riding. He retired in 1984.
When asked if he ever took a break from racing, Fred says, “The only time I was absent from Nebraska racing, was when my wife Phyllis was pretty sick and I had to come home and take care of her for six years. She was bedridden. Two weeks after she passed away, they called me and wanted me to come back to Nebraska racing,” he pauses, thinking. “I was ready to go back, after she passed. It keeps me going, I don’t know how much longer I can do it, but they keep wanting me back.”
“This will be my 66th year of working at racetracks. As soon as I retired, they always told me they would hire me as a racing official. I’ve timed, I’ve gone through it all, a steward, an identifier, paddock judge, scale worker, clocker in the morning, all of it.”
He remembers another job he’s done, “I’ve put the tattoos in the horses, that’s how they identify them, tattoos in their lips and I did that for ten years. I got hurt at that a few times. The horses don’t want me in their lip. I had a helper who would hold the horse. I stand in front of them and I would put a letter and five numbers in the inside of their lip. Nowadays they put a chip in their neck to identify them. I would have to look at their tattoo numbers. Now they scan the chip and it brings up a picture of the horse with their number and their markings and everything. Horses don’t have to be out for that, it’s just injected.”
In 1981, three years before he would retire, he was inducted into the Nebraska Racing Hall of Fame at Ak-sar-ben with this statement, “Ecoffey has ridden horses to more than a million dollars in winnings, while competing full time on the Nebraska riding circuit. Six times he was leading rider at Columbus and Atokad, five times at Fonner Park, and four times at Lincoln.” When that track closed, they moved the display about Fred to Grand Island to Fonner Park and it’s still available in the casino for the public to see.
Ecoffey says, “The tribe honored me. I got a name from them. They gave me a jacket with the name “Straight Arrow” on the back. I was honored at their big powwow for my achievements.” There’s also been talk about honoring him at the Cowboy Museum in Gordon. When visiting the Italian Inn, diners can check out a photo of Fred on their wall. There’s also been an article written about him in The Boston Globe.
For now, Fred is packed and ready to head back to the race track. “They start running the 17th,” he says of the races starting again. “I’ll be there for five weeks and then I move on to Columbus.”
This soft-spoken man with the kind eyes is proud of his racing lifestyle and obviously excited to get back into it. “I made a good living at it. That’s how I raised my family.”
“My grandmother Rose Ecoffey, whose Indian name was Princess Blue Water, was Chief Red Cloud’s sister. When she was seven years old, she and her whole family were in the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.” They performed for Buffalo Bill, and even went over to Europe to perform as part of the American Exhibition for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. “Later, she was the head of Cheyenne Frontier Days. She took Lakota dancers there to perform for 40 years,” Fred smiles as he talks about her.
Fred remembers, “My dad wouldn’t let me ride until I was 20,” because Fred had epilepsy. “He made me wait until I had pretty much outgrown it.” When he started riding in 1957, he started getting sick again. He was riding at 109 pounds, which meant his body weight plus the saddle had to all weigh in at 109 pounds. In ‘58 he quit because he was experiencing the same epileptic symptoms again.
He went to college in the now closed University of South Dakota in Springfield, South Dakota, for two years. After the first year, the racetrack Park Jefferson called. “It wasn’t very far away from the school.” He started riding on the weekends. “Pretty soon I started to play hooky on Fridays but they didn’t count me absent because they thought it was a pretty big deal,” Fred chuckles. He graduated from college and came to Nebraska.
“As soon as I began racing in Nebraska, the Head of the Racing Commission or the State Steward, called me to his office. He told me why I was getting sick,” Ecoffey recalls. The man said Fred was doing too much because he was trying to stay at a weight of 109. To race at this weight he had to weigh 106 with the saddle weight bringing him to 109. He told Fred he needed to go up a bit in weight. He began riding at 113 and started winning race after race. Fred smiles as he says, “It was the best thing that I ever did, to go to 113. I was fine then.”
Fred had to watch what he ate to stay at the same weight. He would get up to 127 pounds in the winter and then have to lose it. “Oh yes, it was so hard, I spent a lot of time in the hot box. A lot of riders anymore, they eat constantly, but they throw it up and I did that too. It becomes a habit,” Fred shakes his head.
Ecoffey began riding all over, including seven places in Nebraska. “We had races almost seven months out of the year in Mitchell, Alliance, Madison, Lincoln, Columbus, South Sioux City, and Ak-sar-ben in Omaha. That was the biggest race track in the US. There would be 50-some riders there. It was really tough,” Fred recalls.