By Jennifer KilbourneHe trained me to ride horses; more specifically he trained me to ride whatever horse he had on hand at the time -- through mud and across anthills and over jumps. During this period, my mount was a grey horse named Trustworthy, who was for the most part. Jack had about six students at then, commuting from New Orleans and Baton Rouge to ride with him. We ranged from middle-class hobbyists to the extremely wealthy and extremely competitive. As I remember them, these were the halcyon days of Jack’s operation, the transient Rivendell Farm. Then he moved farther from New Orleans and, having grown fat and sluggish at boarding school, I failed to follow him. But like so many of his former students, I couldn’t stay away long. Jack always has something to teach. Jack is someone to return to.
Jack Rockwell, 60, and I go back about eight years, but those years came after he grew up in a barn, after he missed the Olympics, after he had been State Champion around 10 times, after his wife took his baby away. I followed him to three different barns – technically, four – before we fell out of touch, and the man hasn’t settled down yet. He can’t stand society or people in general, though he is well liked by many for being knowledgeable and even-tempered. A long past, and a limited interest in the future, have crafted the personality of this passionate, if understated, man. That passion serves him well as a teacher, but for better and for worse, he can’t seem to help changing the lives he touches.
One hallmark of the archetypal trainer—that wiry, middle-aged woman with a dry, creased face wearing a baseball cap and jodhpurs,— is that she yells instructions. Though Jack has his own skin issues, he deviates from the norm in two key ways. Primarily, he is as male as they come. More interestingly, he does not yell except in the most desperate situations. His method of teaching is to watch from a camping chair in the middle of the ring. He sits between two jumps, smoking constantly. Sometimes he talks to a mother who has brought her daughter out for a lesson, but only if she initiates. He watches everything, measuring the length of the horse’s stride as well as the position of each of its rider’s relevant parts. Hands: should be off the neck, with constant, light pressure on the horse’s mouth. Feet: a little less than halfway into the stirrups, heels slightly below toes. Legs: slightly bent, still against the horse. He watches and when he is ready to refine position or timing on the approach to a jump he gives a whistle or a deep “Okay.”
What follows is a lecture, usually brief, on the importance of position or control or monitoring the situation. Jack picks up on fear and uncertainty through body language, just the way a horse does.
A student just misses falling off her horse, which stopped short of a jump.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, I almost came off, though,” the disgruntled student replies.
“You know why.”
“I was too far forward before we left the ground.”
“Uh-huh. Have you ever seen somebody fall off a horse backwards?”
“…In the movies?”
“Ha, well, that’s the movies. No, you always fall off the front, leaning forward. Now do it again, and remember - It’s not the first thing that goes wrong, it’s the second and the third. If he starts trying to misbehave on the way to the jump, you make a circle. Stay in control.”
Jack is giving one such lecture when I surprise him. We have stayed loosely in touch through the wonders of cell phones and Facebook, which he uses to post pictures of his best students and horses he’s ready to sell. I called him out of the blue last week wondering if he’d give me an interview. “Well,” he said, “we’re going to the Gulfport show next week… Right by the Long Beach exit.” Two years apart and the man remembered which tiny town in Mississippi my grandmother lives in and used it to wheedle me into coming to the Gulf Coast Classic, a huge yearly horseshow in southern Mississippi. A big money show. I begged off, saying I’d come up to his barn when it was over. As luck would have it, I found a ride to Mississippi and decided to stop by. The grounds were huge and he, ever disconnected, had not charged his cell phone. I was afraid I had made the trip for nothing when there he was.
Standing between two jumps in a practice ring, he gives instructions to one of his students as she warms up for her round. His hair is long now, to his shoulders and completely gray. The day is breezy and cool but sunny, almost a perfect day to ride, if it weren’t for the wind. He is still my height, 5’4”. Maybe the bags under his eyes have deepened; it’s hard to tell. His jeans and 1980’s -style windbreaker are filthy, as always. He is wearing some kind of hat. In the realm of $2000 leather and slim thighs in the latest cut of spandex jodhpurs, he stands out. I call to him three times, looking past someone else’s better-dressed trainer before he finally sees me. For an instant he doesn’t recognize me, and when he does he shakes his head and takes a moment. “Well, I’m so surprised to see you,” he says. “I am right in the middle of this right now though.”
Those are the same words he said to April when she came to visit him at the plantation-barn in Sorrento. April is beautiful. She met Jack shortly before I did, which is to say before 2002, when she was the nanny to the little rich girl, Courtney, who would become Jack’s star pupil. April was a slim 22 year-old, more than a few inches taller than he, and a practicing Catholic with a home organizing business. Jack was smitten and for whatever reason, so was she. There was never a more unlikely couple. “She wanted to get married,” he told me once. “She was trying to turn me into a keeper. She didn’t know I am not a keeper, so I broke that off.” It’s a different story from April’s. As she tells it, back in 2004, when Rivendell Farm and Jack were located in a wooded area next to the levee in St. Rose (just-past-Kenner), Louisiana, he had looked into buying a house. He coaxed April into seeing it. Leaving the dark, moldy ranch-style house, she drove hard as she said, “He expects me to live in that house with him.” Jack has never cared much about appearances.
Once his rider enters the ring on a gray thoroughbred he comes and sits by me. “I don’t mess with this stuff very much anymore,” he tells me as the horse, My Silver Porsche, leaves out a step approaching a jump. By “this stuff” he means hunter classes. There are two ways to show in an English equestrian event: hunters and jumpers. The difference is basically form versus content. In hunters, the judges are monitoring how well put-together everything looks - if the rider’s form is good, if the horse moves well, but also how well dressed both horse and rider are. “In part it’s just economics,” he explains. “If the kid with the $10,000 horse beats the kid with the $30,000 horse too much, they quit, and that’s bad for the business.” I look back at Porsche, whose rider is over a worn saddle and a sweat-stained saddle pad. It’s Jack’s tack, not hers; the horse, which could use a bath, is owned by a girl I used to ride with. Why are they showing this horse in hunters then? “Show him off for buyers. Erica [the owner] is trying to go to vet school and she doesn’t have time anymore.” Porsche is going for $30,000. Jack, intimately acquainted with the protocol and tendency for gossip on the show circuit, is hesitant to answer the question in front of the other riders and trainers waiting their turns. We are silent for a minute, watching Porsche canter from jump to jump. He looks heavy on his feet, and his spots are not all perfect.
The “spot” is the point from which a horse leaves the ground before a jump. It can mean the difference between winning a horse show or, in cases like Christopher Reeve’s, paralysis. A rider directs her horse to the correct spot by controlling its speed. A horse’s speed is largely determined by the length of its stride. The stride length also determines how many steps a horse can fit between jumps. Most courses are designed for a specific number of strides between jumps, so that when it completes its final step before launching, the horse is half a stride (roughly 3 feet) from the jump and won’t have to strain to reach it or knock the jump taking off. If the horse’s stride is too long or too small, its last step falls either too far or too close to the jump, and problems arise. The horse has to make a larger jump or jump from almost a standstill. The best horses moderate their strides almost on their own, but bad ones have to be carefully regulated. “Your job,” Jack tells his students, “Is to make whatever you’re riding look like a good horse.” In hunter classes this is critical. Porsche, with the wind blowing up under his tail, begins bucking after a close jump. “Well, that’s it.” Jack says quietly. The rider will finish the course, but a win is out of the question. Jack looks down.
“You know, my daughter is going to have a child.” Apparently he’d rather talk about this than what has taken place in the ring. Jack’s daughter is about 20 years old, a newlywed. Though he loves her dearly, they are only vaguely in touch. He has seen her about three times since his second wife took off for Texas when the baby, Hailey, was about two years old. Before Hailey’s mom, Jack had another wife, whom he never mentions. “A starter wife. You have to get that out of the way” is as close to a description as he comes. Hailey has the same round, creaseless eyes as Jack, and her hair, though it changes often, seems to be the same color as his was. “I saw pictures of her and her husband on Facebook,” I offer, “She’s pretty.”
“Huh. She would be if she wasn’t ho’d up.” Jack is both a vigilant guard of young women’s honor and something of a dirty old man. Both of his wives were lithe horsewomen, and April is undeniably gorgeous. As a straight man in a field dominated by women, Jack has taken full advantage of his position. In April’s words, “Jack is compassionate and romantic and talented. He’s an artist and a musician, He’s a horseman and a gentle animal lover. He was my best friend!” And that’s coming from his ex-girlfriend. But April is married now, with a baby, and he is not adapting well to his age. “I’m celibate, not necessarily by choice. But, you know, these days I wouldn’t be with any woman that would have me.” He lights another cigarette, and we begin to walk towards the jumpers ring.
When Jack’s mother was six months pregnant, she won big money in a horseshow class called “Down and Out”—knock down a pole on a jump and you’re out; whoever jumps the highest wins. Then she gave birth to him on August 22, 1950, in Connecticut. Shortly after, their house burned down. His father, a renowned horseman and trader, threw up a partition at the end of their barn and they moved in. Until he was in seventh grade, one stall was little Jackie’s room, and the other was his parents’. When he was five or six his pony died, and, heartbroken, he didn’t ride again until he was ten. That year, on a business outing with his father, he was made to get on a “great big horse. I couldn’t steer it, couldn’t make it do anything. It even reared up and hit me in the head – knocked me out – and when I came to my dad said, ‘That’s your horse,’ and I cried.” The young horse came to be known as The Colt. They showed a bit, casually, until Jack won his first blue ribbon at the age of thirteen. After his first taste of winning, he was unstoppable. With just six months left in the season, he became a champion that same year.
By the age of 15, Jack had been on a long winning streak, but he kept falling just short of the three medals needed to qualify for the championships in Madison Square Garden. In 1965, with two medals and many points under his belt, it came down to the last class of the last show of the season. Jack just barely came in second. He was disappointed. But then a letter came – the girl who had edged him out hadn’t paid her dues to the horseshow association and was ineligible to compete. Jackie was in. He and his dad trucked down to New York City where he took home seventh place in one of the biggest competitions in the country. He returned to the show four more times.
By the time he was twenty, Jack was fed up. The American Olympic team was a fixed squad of riders, and though he brushed shoulders with them at shows, a place never opened up for him. He was tired of the riders with more money winning just because they had more money. Everybody knew him on the East Coast circuit, he was Jackie, and his father remained Jack Rockwell. He had finished college, but had no plans to get an office job. He had hung with the bands at Woodstock, and he decided he would leave the horse world and become a rock star. He had a gig with a band all lined up, but his last obligation as a horseman was to judge a horseshow at a friend’s barn. He went down to New Jersey. He scrapped his plans to leave the next day when he met Leslie, who would become his first wife.
By 1973 the tumultuous relationship had already died twice. Jack responded to a want ad for a head trainer position in Wisconsin. When he arrived, he discovered he was working for a fledgling barn. The owners were determined to give the current monopoly holders a run for their money. “They took me to a show to show me how things were there, and I watched them and thought ‘Oh, this is going to be fun.’” He competed in the next show. “It was the first time nobody knew who I was.” He left everyone stunned. The girl accustomed to being champion actually started walking towards the podium before she realized he had beaten her. Within six months, Jack had established one of his students as the new champion.
Still young eager to make a name for himself, Jack moved to California. He had easily impressed Wisconsin, with its relatively smalltime operation, and repeated his success at a barn near L.A. He got himself hired at a barn after passing what is, for a trainer, the ultimate test: “They brought out this horse that should have been named Widowmaker, and, of course, I rode it well, and their jaws dropped. They said, ‘We didn’t know that horse could go like that!’” He repeated his training success there. He was poised to take over the barn but opted out. In 1979, he left.
As he started his return to the East Coast, he realized it was perhaps the only time in his life when he would have no obligations to anyone. He spent 40 days in the wilderness. Sort of like Jesus, sort of like a Native American, he proved to himself he could do it. Did it change him? “I’ll never eat another squirrel.”
When he got back to the East Coast, he didn’t stay long. He took a job in New Orleans, another underdog rivalry success story ensued. He moved around a bit more. He met his second wife in Jackson and they moved back to New Orleans. In 1990, Hailey was born, and sometime around 1994, she and her mom were gone. Jack moved up and down River Road, training at at least ten different barns during this time. He was set to take over the barn at City Park, but was edged out by a man named Jerome Robinson, who, too fat to walk, patrolled the grounds in a golf cart and employed convicts with no horse experience as grooms to his overworked horses.
Jack started building his own barn. On a wooded piece of land leased from a chemical storage facility called iMTT, he burned trees and built a ten-stall barn, a four acre paddock a small training ring, and a full sized show ring in the back. He built himself a shack next to the barn from which he and his faithful dog, Sydney, would emerge bleary-eyed and red-faced late in the morning from “The Unabomber Shack,” as April calls it; “When I met him, he was waiting to die.” April started bringing Courtney out to ride with Jack in 2001. He was giving her a lesson in the ring surrounded by woods the day I met him in March 2002.
Jack has won a lot of horseshows. He has been State Champion of Connecticut, Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He has negotiated deals trading expensive horses for very rich people. He has won eight or nine thousand dollars in a weekend – while this would be a high point in most people’s lives he’s done it so many times that he has trouble remembering exact amounts or dates. Once, for someone’s Silver Anniversary, he put together a full serving set for 12 people from all of the gravy boats, spoons, plates, cups, and tureens he had won. Last fall, he came out of retirement because there was a laptop up for grabs. “All it ever does is say ‘loading’ or ‘please wait.’” He doesn’t compete too much anymore because as he puts it, “If I win people say it’s like taking candy from babies; if I lose then it’s like, ‘Haha, we beat you.’”
Jack does not advertise himself. This is the result of a combination of his vast amount of success, distaste for superficial details and being “one of the laziest people you’ll ever meet,” as he told April. “I’m a sportsman,” he says. He’s certainly not a businessman. Students graduate and move away, and some years there are almost none. This sometimes hand-to-mouth existence has further negative repercussions for Jack’s business. He does most of his repairs and grooming himself. The father of one equestrian, who visited Jack’s Rivendell when it was located in St. Rose, proclaimed it a mess and refused to send his daughter there outright. He was not the first.
Jack faced a similar struggle over the years with the father of his star pupil, Courtney. As we walk from the hunters to the jumpers rings he fills me in on their parting. Between 2003 and 2009, he says, Courtney was a champion 27 times --“and that’s a conservative estimate.” Every single time Courtney rode her thoroughbred, Wilson, to victory, Jack had everything to do with it. Not only did Courtney take lessons from him almost daily, but her father bought Wilson at Jack’s insistence. Courtney showed often, which brought in large commissions for Jack, though they were much smaller than what other, less qualified, trainers charge. When he couldn’t afford a hotel room at shows, he’d sleep in a hammock in the barn. Courtney’s father, who has attained nouveau-riche status with his business selling prosthetic limbs, never warmed up to Jack. He always wanted Courtney to ride in a fancier barn, somewhere more reflective of his new status.
Wilson was getting older and last year the time came to buy Courtney a new horse. They scoured the country and found a beautiful warm-blood that jumped great in the practice ring with its owner. “So we bought it. Well, we get the thing home, and, turns out, we can’t get it to jump! They straight up lied to us. Of course, I had made sure they put it in the contract that we could return it if we found out something like that, so we took it back. “ Courtney’s father took this tense time and relocated her, along with a new horse, which he had accepted, sight unseen, from the same people who had sold them the non-jumper, to ride with a Moroccan man in Lafayette. The new horse had splayed feet. Without Jack’s guidance, the second horse was disposed of and a third horse was purchased for Courtney. “I saw its name is ‘Double Dollar,’ so I guess they lost everything they put in on the first two. So this guy watches Courtney ride, and tells her father she’s a mess, she’ll have to learn how to ride all over again, and the father eats this stuff up! Now he’s financing [the other trainer’s] whole operation. He’s a nouveau-riche guy. He has to work for his money. What’s going to happen, in this economy, if his business goes down?”
His story has been interrupted by people in golf carts calling out to Jack as we walk to the jumpers ring. He may have a few enemies on the horse show circuit, but he has far more friends and many admirers. As we arrive at the jumpers area, he points to some large, thicker horses (warm bloods) with tasseled fabric hanging down between their eyes à la Arabian Nights. Fancy.
The rider Jack is going to coach now is a man named Jeff Kaston. A successful diamond merchant with two grown children, Jeff married a New Orleans girl, which prompted him to permanently relocate from New York. We meet him in the warm-up ring before he goes into a money class. It costs money to enter any class in a horse show, as well as to register, to board the horses, to pay the trainer for his on-site coaching, as well as to transport the horses unless, like Jeff, you have your own trailer. Without unlimited funds, the sport is hardly worth participating in—unless you plan to win some money, which Jeff does.
In jumpers, no one cares what the horse or the rider look like. The object is to get over all the jumps in a course within the time allowed and without the horse knocking anything as it goes over. Jeff’s new horse, Maccabee, is an enormous dark brown gelding. The warm-up jump is about 3’4” and Jack has them go over it three times before they enter the ring. Jack is counting the steps on the approach in his head, nodding in time as we stand inches from the right side of the jump. The first is a close spot, though Jack saw this coming and urged Jeff to “woah, woah” as he approached it. The second and third are perfect, before the horse gets tired or forgets what it has just done so well, Jack sends them into the ring.
Instead of choosing a spot in the stands, as he did while watching his last pupil, Jack heads for a small hill at the other end of the show ring, to get a perspective on all of the jumps. “I smoke 40 cigarettes a day,” he says as he pulls out another. He opens his mouth, revealing most of his bottom row of teeth is missing. He squints down at the ring, watching Jeff and Maccabee.
Jeff and Maccabee were unsuccessful that day. The barn Jack built was torn down in 2004 as the chemical plant expanded. He left the remodeled plantation for a barn dotted with strange people’s trailers and their starving horses. I will meet him in this place the next week, and he will sit with me and tell me all that he has accomplished until three new students drive up, happy to be there, and he is happy to see them. They will sit and listen to him, too, but then they will squeeze their horses’ sides and ride off. They will learn that anything can be ridden; they will learn to respect their animals, and when one of them wins a blue ribbon, maybe some money, Jack will hope that it inspires the same lust for success in them as it did in him. Until then, he will celebrate their small victories – the first time a horse jumps without bucking, mastering the flying lead change. With April gone, I was afraid he would again be waiting to die. He probably never stopped on some level, but while he waits, Jack is always ready for success, even if it’s private.
