SHELBYVILLE, Ind. — Western Hills High School alum DeShawn Parker has dedicated his life to horse racing. Parker has spent the last 35 yeas as a professional jockey.
"The thrill," is what keeps drawing him back, Parker said.
"I just go out there and win as many races as I can," Parker said.
Parker wins a lot of races. Parker is the 20th winningest jockey in professional horse racing history and the winningest Black jockey ever.
A legendary career, takes a legendary work ethic.
”You definitely have to put in the time. Like today I got on six horses this morning. I’ll go home for a little bit and turn around and ride this afternoon,” Parker said.
“He is going to do whatever it takes to be successful. He tries hard, he works really hard,” horse trainer George Leonard III said.
Parker had extra obstacles, especially as a young jockey.
“Problem because I was tall and Black…everybody that told me I couldn’t do it, I just tried to prove them wrong and do it better,” Parker said.
In the late 1800s, black jockeys dominated horse racing, then the early 1900s and the Jim Crow-era came along.
“It kind of phased out, because those guys started making a little more money, so the other guys wanted to take the fame and glory and all that stuff,” Parker said.
Parker became an exception, growing up around the sport.
“I was raised in the jockeys room,” Parker said, because of his dad, Daryl.
“He was the first African-American, Black steward… Before there was all African-American riders my dad was so known that probably five times a day and tell me something and talk about my dad,” DeShawn said.
“His dad was a great guy. DeShawn is just a chip off the old block like his dad. His dad was the nicest guy, never knew a stranger,” said Leonard, who was a friend of Daryl Parker's.
“A lot of time you find steward’s are tough on people; he was fair to everybody. Even if they were in trouble, he’d try to get them out of trouble,” DeShawn said.
“Like a father figure, he was that warm type of guy, that you had to like him, even though you wanted to hate him, you had to like him because he is right,” Leonard said.
Daryl died from cancer two years ago.
“When I was going for the 6,000 I think I would have talked to my dad a lot more that week. Like I said I was on a bunch of favorites, and they were getting beat, they were getting beat bad, normally that’s the time I would call my dad and I would talk to him and he would just pick my head up," DeShawn said.
On Tuesday, June 21, 2022, on the horse For Mama, DeShawn got his 6,000th win. He said it was for his father.
“I knew my dad was riding with me, so it was the perfect thing,” DeShawn said.
Only 21 jockeys in history have won 6,000 races. Only one of those jockeys is a Black man.
“A lot of people didn’t think I’d win one race, growing up,” DeShawn said.
And he has not crossed the final finish line yet.
“Everyone keeps asking ‘when are you going to retire?’ and I say ‘as soon as I stop winning races, I’ll start thinking about it," DeShawn said.
More than three decades of defying the odds, with no final stretch in sight.
