This is part two of a two-part series. In part one of this series, former professional jockey and new ACC ag instructor, Josh Boyd, recalled the horse racing accident that nearly cost him his life. Subscribers can read part one here.
It?s around 10 o?clock on a rainy Thursday morning. Josh Boyd commandeers an empty classroom at Allen Community College. Boyd is carrying a DVD ? the only one of its kind ? which it took him three difficult years to liberate from the top brass at the Sunland Park Racetrack & Casino, in Sunland Park, N.M. The video is of Boyd?s last race as a professional jockey, and of the accident that ended his career.
Boyd tinkers a while with the DVD console until, eventually, a still image is projected onto the classroom?s large smartboard. Boyd turns off the lights in the room and presses play. It?s grainy, the footage nearly 14 years old. Lines of chyron at the bottom of the screen tell the TV audience a little about each horse and each rider. And there?s some preliminary audio commentary, too. A broadcaster, an Australian by the sound of it, describes the expectations for the race while the jockeys load their horses into the starting gates: ?Cuervo Brown is in. There?s two or three still to come. New Car Caviar, Secret Looker, Marty?s Valentine? OK, almost ready for a start.?
THE VIDEO replays the entire January 30, 2005, race from three separate angles. There are two side views, which show the point at which Boyd, just inside the quarter pole, is suddenly unseated from his horse. The jockey hits the dirt and is immediately tumbled beneath the next horse, who spits Boyd out onto his hands and knees, at which point the final trailing horse, New Car Caviar, plows straight through Boyd?s right temple. ?Racing for home, it?s Secret Looker, Marty?s Valentine second? Secret Looker in front but [inaudible] chomping away on the outside with every stride. Oh, we?ve had a fall, we?ve had a fall! A rider?s come off and it?s Cuervo Brown who?s crashed??
But it?s this third angle, the straight-ahead shot, the shot that shows the pack of horses charging straight toward the camera, that is the hardest to watch.
In this one, you see Boyd hit the ground, then pop up on all fours, where he seems at the point of getting up ? but there?s no time. New Car Caviar is heading straight toward Boyd. The urge is to shout at the fallen rider, ?Watch out! Move!?
The direct impact to the side of Boyd?s head is so hard that his body helicopters through the air, before being delivered back to earth, where it lay motionless, quiet, a bundle of bright jockey silks on a wide dirt track.
But there?s money on this race and so the camera abandons Boyd and pans back toward the finish line, where the announcer narrates the race?s neck-and-neck finish. We follow the smiling victor into the winner?s circle, and then the coverage pauses for a brief break before returning to announce the start of the afternoon?s eighth race.
?Welcome back, racing fans. We hope that Josh Boyd was not seriously injured in that mishap in our seventh. Let?s try to handicap the eighth as it?s coming up in 14 minutes…?
IT?S AT THIS point while watching the video that Boyd?s eyes well up. ?It?s not so much watching the wreck that bothers me,? said Boyd. ?It?s when the announcer says ?We hope Josh Boyd is not seriously injured in that wreck.? Because, obviously, I know how bad it was, I know that it was serious.?
From the track, Boyd was rushed into emergency brain surgery at a hospital in El Paso. Doctors removed damaged portions of his brain and attended to his shattered skull. He suffered two strokes while in the operating theater. His life hung in the balance. If he made it, doctors couldn?t say whether he?d be paralyzed. At the moment, however, there was no choice except to plunge Josh Boyd into a coma, and so they did.
After 45 uncertain days, this smart, articulate, physically gifted young man ? he was 29 at the time ? surfaced from his long sleep. He was alive. He wasn?t paralyzed. But he did find himself reduced, in his motor skills and in most of his cognitive capacities, to the level of a 4-year-old. Besides being blind in one eye, Boyd would have to learn to walk again, learn to talk again, learn to comprehend basic information again. In a word, he would have to start all over.
?Adapt and overcome. This is the message I like to share with my students,? said Boyd, who is the new ag instructor and livestock judging coach at ACC. ?You have things that come up in your life, everyone does. But you have to adapt your life and do everything possible to overcome those circumstances that affect you. Adapt and overcome, adapt and overcome.?
JOSH BOYD was training and breaking horses by the time he was 15. The Boyds, who had a cattle ranch and horse operation in central New Mexico, 10 miles north of a tiny town called Mountainair, dealt mostly with cutting horses and saddle horses, but they broke their fair share of juvenile racehorses, too.
In this last category, Boyd was a natural.
