SLOAN, James Forman ("Tod")

(b. 10 August 1874 in Bunker Hill, Indiana; d. 21 December 1933 in Los Angeles, California), jockey who became the most prominent in his sport in America and England at the close of the nineteenth century.

Sloan's mother died when he was five, and his father, a barber and realtor who abandoned him to the care of neighbors, left him with little more than the nickname "Tod," by which he became known. At age thirteen he was on his own, sweeping up in a saloon and traveling with sideshows. Everything he did was limited by the controlling fact of his life, his diminutive size. Fully grown, he was under five feet in height and, in his twenties, weighed only ninety pounds. While working in stables and caring for horses, Sloan gained a remarkable understanding of the animals' individual moods and temperaments. His guiding insight was that horses didn't want to be bullied and would not respond to whipping and digging into them with spurs. He came to have a sixth sense about horses; they responded to his touch, to the sound of his voice. Eventually, although he insisted that he had initially been terrified of being on horseback, he began a career as a professional jockey. In spite of a disappointing start, he did not give up, and in 1892 or 1893 he traveled to northern California to participate in the winter racing, which took place in the warmer climates of the country.

In the blatantly corrupt racing there, Sloan learned his craft, mastered the tricks of his trade, and created an unmistakable personal style, exhibiting bumptious independence and cocky self confidence. There, too, he evolved the riding style that would be his enduring claim to fame, the forward seat: the rider perched on the withers of the horse, with short stirrups and short rein. In the memoirs he dictated many years later, he claimed that he had inadvertently and by himself stumbled on the advantages of riding this way, which included a clearer view of the field, better control of the horse, and less wind resistance. But Sloan did not invent this seat; it was an American variant of the traditional English style of riding: straight upright, long stirrups, and a long rein. This American style evolved gradually, shaped by the crude conditions of racing; it was the creation of innumerable stable boys, black and white, who had no formal training as jockeys and little equipment, and who rode in the small town and country race tracks. In the big city tracks, the traditional style still prevailed.

Wherever its origin, Sloan realized that the forward seat suited riders of his size and was adaptable to the growing emphasis in American racing on speed over endurance. This seat enabled him to win races, frequently and spectacularly, with all sorts of horses. After winning in San Francisco, Sloan then went east to the New York race tracks, the center of American racing; where he continued to win. Between 1896 and 1900 he dominated riding and achieved an astonishingly high percentage of winning mounts, often over 30 percent. Consequently, he became a favorite on the track and a celebrity off it.

In 1897 Sloan went to England to ride. The forward seat was greeted with incredulity and derision, mocked as a "monkey on a stick." Who was this upstart to defy two centuries of tradition? Nevertheless, Sloan won, and won again. His short visit to England was followed by a longer one in 1898, in which he repeated his success. Derision turned to admiration, and it was his triumphs in England that fixed him in the public mind as the originator of a new riding style. Soon, all English jockeys were riding in the same fashion.

Sloan's Yankee brashness gained him the affection of the British racing masses and adoption of his name into cockney rhyming slang, such that to be independent and to defer to no authority was "to be on your Tod": "on your own/Tod Sloan." The ultimate accolade came at the end of the 1900 season, when the Prince of Wales engaged him to ride for his stable the following year.

But ominous troubles were piling up. Some influential people considered Sloan more insolent than independent. Also, English racing was becoming inundated by a host of American gamblers and trainers who had followed in Sloan's wake and whose company he did not shun; trainers were widely believed to routinely use dope, though no one accused Sloan of this. Most troubling, Sloan wagered on horses heavily and openly, leading inevitably to suspicions of questionable riding. He was called to testify before the Jockey Club, which in December 1900 informed him that he "need not apply for a license to ride the following year." He could attend races and train horses; but he could not do the one thing he did supremely well. This crushing injunction, accepted by almost all American racetracks as well, was never lifted.

Although Sloan was just twenty-six, his career was over. The next three decades were ones of restless wandering, primarily throughout Europe and in the U.S. as well. He attempted a career in vaudeville, gambled incessantly, became a bookmaker, squandered all his money, and underwent two failed marriages: in 1907 he married Julia Sanderson and they divorced in 1913, without having any children; in 1920 he married Elizabeth Saxon Malone, with whom he had one child, a daughter, and whom he divorced in 1927. Sloan died of cirrhosis of the liver in Los Angeles, California, where he is buried.

The overworked term "legendary" can justly be applied to Sloan's life and career, for stories about him abounded in his day and after. In 1904 George M. Cohan composed a musical based on Sloan's life, Little Johnny Jones, containing some of Cohan's most memorable music (such as "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy"). In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway wrote a moving short story, "My Old Man," sensitively exploring a life very like Sloan's. Over a career spectacular in its triumphs and failures, Sloan ironically helped bring about the modern, regulated form of American horse racing in which there was no place for him and his anarchic individualism.

Sloan's dictated memoirs, Tod Sloan, by Himself, edited by A. Dick Luckman (1988; reprint of 1915 edition), are bafflingly evasive. See also Roger Longrigg, The History of Horse Racing (1972); Wray Vamplew, The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing (1976); and John Dizikes, Yankee Doodle Dandy: The Life and Times of Tod Sloan (2000).

John Dizikes