Knute Rockne and Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen, with Bobby Jones, Helen Wills, and, of course, the Babe and Dempsey. He won the Derby with Zev, did the same with Flying Ebony as he nursed along for a mile and a quarter a horse that’d never before gone beyond six furlongs. He got Gallant Fox across for the roses on the first Saturday of May at Churchill Downs in 1930, went on with him to the Preakness at Pimlico and the Belmont in New York: the Triple Crown. (Gallant Fox is just one of his five Belmont Stakes victories.) He rode Exterminator, Grey Lag, Sir Barton, Crusader, Mad Hatter, Sarazen. His presence in the saddle always sent down the odds. The money he took down was uncountable.

He had an extraordinary in-the-money record, was known for never “doing business”—pulling a horse. Tall for a jockey at five feet six, he fought to make weight. Twice married, his first wife having died, he was childless. He suffered falls, as do all jocks, took time off, came back with nerve intact, won new victories. “Sande appealed to the racing public in a manner that has never been equaled,” said The Horseman’s Journal.

In 1932, he retired and became a trainer. Six years later, he was the country’s leading money winner at his new trade. He decided to go into ownership and breeding. But that, he was told by the great trainer Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, was a terrible mistake. That was for rich men, like a Vanderbilt or a Whitney. “I guess I should have listened to him,” Sande said later. But he didn’t listen. Everything went wrong. Most of his horses couldn’t cover ground any faster than a fat man running up hill. “Earl,” said the race-track clocker Gene (“Frenchy”) Schwartz, “you do better for yourself putting them things into cans for dog food.”

But Sande had never failed at anything and could not connect failure with what he was doing. He madly poured out money, sold his stocks, sold his real estate. Nothing worked. His horses couldn’t run. He went down, down. He mucked out his horses’ stalls himself to save on stable help. By the late 1940s, he couldn’t pay at the hotel where he lived, and went to be in one room over a Long Island bar. There was a pullstring light in the ceiling. The shower and toilet were across the hall. He was soon behind with the rent. “How could a guy like him go bad?” Jack Dempsey wondered. “Money and I are incompatible,” Sande explained.

Yet he had ample opportunities for employment at good wages—steward, racing publicist, greeter at tracks. He turned down all offers. He would do it with a horse or not at all, be his own man, he said. In 1953, 55 years old, bald, he

dieted from 138 pounds to 115 and went to riding again. He was up against jocks a quarter of a century younger—and, in the case of bug boys (apprentices), nearly forty years younger. He won one race and was given, says William Robertson in The History of Thoroughbred Racing in America, “the most enthusiastic ovation ever tendered man or beast” at the ancient Jamaica Racetrack. To many, it looked as if the other jocks had taken a dive, as if the whole affair had been a tank job, a boat race. “Hell, naw,” said Eddie Arcaro, who’d been up on the favorite, years later. He winked as he said it.

Sande announced his permanent retirement from riding. The whole business had been gone through in the hope someone would give him some good horses to train. No one did. He remained in his creaking-stairs walkup room over the bar, too impoverished to spend the fifty cents a day required for purchase of a racing paper, dining alone on a can of soup and a tin of salmon. He got an offer for $50,000 for a couple of weeks’ work to publicize an upcoming race but turned it down. “We’ve done everything humanly possible to straighten him out, but you just can’t force a man to take money,” said a New York racing official.

Yet the Earl of Sande never seemed bitter, was always pleasant, had a firm handshake, showed not the slightest touch of self-pity. “I sure appreciate it, the way the track sends me a pass every year,” he told a reporter in 1959. “Maybe I could get out there; I’d certainly like to. I really would.” But bus connections were difficult, and of course he didn’t have a car. Didn’t even have a working television; his black-and-white was broken. “There’s a place down the street where they turn on the races and I watch down there.”

Many said he was nuts, had to be, turning down good money for decades while living as he did. Others thought that he was a proud, a very proud, man. That he was too proud to take from anybody. That he would do it his way or not at all. That someone who had been where he had been did not accept what was offered because of who he was or what his name was but instead earned by his own doings or did without.

He became very ill. A couple of horsemen friends put up the money for a one-way ticket so he could go out West to be with his aged father. He spent time in a rocking chair on the porch of an Oregon nursing home and died in the summer of 1968, at age sixty-nine. In the great days Damon Runyon wrote: 
"Maybe there’ll be another, Heady and game and true. Maybe we’ll find his brother At drivin’ them horses through. Maybe

but, say I doubt it, Never his like agin, Never a handy guy like Sande Bootin’ them babies in."