Spectacular Bid's late jockey Franklin lived fast, loved horses

He was born and raised in Dundalk, Maryland. Standing 5-foot-1 tall and weighing 106 pounds soaking wet, he learned how to take care of himself, having to hear all the short people jokes and withstand the pushing and shoving. He fought back. He learned to be tough.

But he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life until one day when a neighbor saw him wrestling with a few boys. That gave "Uncle" Hank Tiburzi an idea: with strength like that, Franklin could be a jockey. Tiburzi took Franklin to Pimlico Race Track, and from the moment he walked on the track, he was hooked.

As if he knew this would be his life’s work, he began asking stable hands around the barn about employment. After a few minutes, the public-address system announced, “There’s a young man at the stable gate looking for a hot walker’s job.” Franklin didn't even know what a hot walker did.

Trainer Grover G. "Bud" Delp heard the announcement and hired the boy to hot walk horses for $75 a week. Brian Delp, Bud Delp’s nephew,  led him back to the barn where Delp ran his operations. Franklin was honest with him. “Look, I’ve never been around horses, I don’t know them, I don’t know nothing,” he told Brian Delp. The younger Delp replied, “Don’t worry. We’ll teach you.”

Eventually, Franklin worked his way up to becoming an exercise rider, and then an apprentice jockey. He just happened to be at the right place at the right time; in 1978, Delp had a 2-year-old horse named Spectacular Bid, and Franklin had been exercising him for a while. Delp let him ride the horse in a few allowance races and soon, aside from a few starts, he became Bid's regular rider. The two seemed to have a special bond.

The decision was not without controversy. Horse writers bemoaned the decision as Spectacular Bid's greatness became apparent at the end of his 2-year-old campaign. They argued that a champion horse needed a champion rider. And after Franklin nearly caused several accidents in the Florida Derby on Bid (and still won), Delp screamed at him in front of the press like a father whose son had wrecked his car.

Delp and the Meyerhoff family, who owned Spectacular Bid, discussed replacing Franklin with a more seasoned veteran. But in the end, the Meyerhoffs' heart won over, and Franklin stayed on the horse.

Franklin did well in the Derby, directing Bid to an easy victory, and despite moving Bid way to the outside in the Preakness to get away from his nemesis Angel Cordero, he secured a 5 1/2 length win. He was on top of the world, and he celebrated that night with some cocaine.

It was the beginning of the end.

Two weeks later, Spectacular Bid stepped on a safety pin (yes, he really did) on the morning of the Belmont Stakes. Franklin perhaps took Bid out too quickly, chasing an 80-1 pacesetter, but Bid never changed leads during the race and tired in the homestretch, the laminae of his hoof beginning to bruise and turn into a hematoma. It became infected, and Bid was out of racing for several months.

The Belmont, coupled with Franklin's arrest in a Disneyland parking lot for possession of cocaine, spelled the end of his riding Spectacular Bid. The Meyerhoffs went with the veteran Bill Shoemaker for the rest of Bid's career, and the horse won 12 of the next 13 races under Shoemaker.

Franklin never recovered. He was arrested again in 1982 on cocaine charges and spent 60 days in jail. Billy Reed of the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote, "You wanted this kid to make it, somehow. You hoped that he would overcome it all — the scuffling boyhood, the lack of education, the fame that came too big and too soon, the drug thing. You wanted this simple child bent and shaped by pressures that he never comprehended to find happiness in the end.”

He tried to find happiness in riding horses, and for a few years succeeded, but drugs kept getting in the way. He failed drug tests in 1991 and 1992 and was suspended by the Maryland Racing Commission. He tried several times to get reinstated, but was denied every time. His career as a jockey was over.

"I want to ride again,” Franklin told the commission. “My most enjoyment out of life is to ride.” And it was. Between odd jobs, he exercised horses and even helped with training just so he could be around the animals. One day in 1979, as Bud Delp was pontificating in front of a crowd of reporters, one journalist spotted Franklin in the stall of one of Delp's claimers, speaking softly to him and handing him a doughnut. It didn't matter whether the horse was famous; Franklin loved being around horses.

When the Commission suspended him in 1992, he had 1,403 wins under his belt and had won more than $14 million in earnings. 

When asked two years ago if he wished his life had turned out differently, he paused for a long time, then said, “No, not really. No. I’m not second-guessing nothing.”

And why should he? As Delp was known to say, "Ronnie and horses. Horses run fast for him." And for several months in 1978 and 1979, he rode one of the fastest. No one can take those days away from him.