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An appreciation, by T.D. Thornton
In the mid-1960s, Rocco Gabriella started his career as a jockey by literally standing on his head to try and make it into the winner’s circle. He didn’t get his photo taken there all that many times during a two-decade career that largely played out in and around his beloved hometown of Philadelphia. But his flair for showmanship and a drive do just about anything to put a smile on the faces of his fellow racetrackers, to help those in need, and to take chances on just-for-fun endeavors fueled by nothing more than his unbridled optimism stood out, even in a sport that has never lacked for characters.
Gabriella died last week at age 82 at his home in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where he and his wife, Deatra, had retired two decades ago. His only son, Michael Gabriella, told TDN in a Monday phone interview that after a 2021 fall caused a brain bleed, Gabriella suffered a series of strokes that led to his demise. He passed peacefully Jan. 6 surrounded by his extended family, with Michael holding his hand.
“He was always looking for ways to bring joy,” Michael Gabriella said. “He didn’t go the track just to collect a paycheck.”
Richard Orbann, a retired racetrack executive, came up through the officiating ranks with Gabriella in the 1980s after Gabriella had hung up his tack. Orbann was the clerk of scales at Philadelphia Park and Gabriella was his assistant. When Orbann rose through the ranks and become president of Garden State Park, Gabriella took over in the jockeys’ room.
Gabriella, who started singing at age five when the nuns at his Catholic school had him stand up in front of the class to demonstrate hymns to classmates with his pitch-perfect voice, had often filled the jockeys’ rooms at tracks in the mid-Atlantic with song. Over the years he belted out everything from Motown to oldies to pop rock, just like he did when he performed crooning solo in talent contests, or at parties with his four-piece band, Dead Heat.
“Rocco was a very interesting and very talented guy, and he was a guy with a good soul,” Orbann told TDN. “Everybody liked Rocco, is the best way to put it.
“He was an amazing singer,” Orbann said. “He sang professionally in nightclubs, and had two or three CDs out. He had a Frankie Valli kind of a voice.”
Born and raised in South Philly, Gabriella at first embarked upon a career as a plumber’s apprentice. But he gave it up in his early 20s after hearing so many people say his muscular, 104-pound, 5’2″ frame would be better suited to riding racehorses.
An established jockey who lived in his neighborhood, Kevin Daly, helped to influence his decision. Gabriella hatched a plan to head to New Orleans for a winter to learn hotwalking and then exercise riding. Because he was broke, he had to ride the entire way down in the back of a horse van, and slept in the stables until he got his first paycheck.
“When I decided to become a jockey, I wanted to prove to my bigger friends that I could do as much or even more than they could,” Gabriella said in a 1973 interview with the Courier-Post of Camden, New Jersey.
Gabriella returned to Philly and won his first race Oct. 5, 1965, at Atlantic City. He then ventured north to New England, where he was a leading apprentice at Suffolk Downs and Rockingham Park.
On the opening day of the spring 1966 meet at Suffolk, the Boston Globe reported that Gabriella “startled the other jockeys and valets in the jocks’ room [when] he stood on his head for 10 minutes” before the first race.
“This is yoga. It’s the art of relaxation,” Gabriella explained. “It eases the tension in your body. You’re supposed to be able to stand on your head as you stand on your two feet. The blood doesn’t circulate in the brain naturally. It has to be pumped there. That’s why you have tension.”
The Globe reported with a touch of skepticism that, “The others weren’t convinced even though Gabriella won the only race he rode that day.”
Within a few months though, the 24-year-old rookie had converted at least a few of his fellow reinsmen. One was the more experienced jockey John Giovanni, who had fractured spine and was nearly paralyzed in a spill around the same time Gabriella was getting started. The apprentice showed the journeyman a few yoga positions to help with strength and flexibility, and Giovanni later publicly credited Gabriella for providing “excellent therapy” to speed his recovery.
A year later, Gabriella got married and decided to move to California to try his luck on a more competitive circuit. But four weeks into the venture, he, too, broke his back. During his time recuperating, Gabriella got homesick, so he and Deatra returned home from Santa Anita Park.
In the early 1970s, Gabriella was based at Liberty Bell in Philly and the nearby New Jersey tracks. But he accepted long-shot mounts wherever they were offered, riding at now-defunct Thoroughbred venues like Commodore Downs, Pocono Downs, Dover Downs and the Marshfield Fair.
Although he rarely ranked at the top of any track’s win standings (his career predated statistics now available on Equibase), Gabriella did evolve into a go-to jockey whenever reporters wanted a good quote or an entertaining story.
For Halloween in 1971, the clean-shaven Gabriella grew a long, full beard so his costume as a whirling dervish would look authentic. When he kept the mass of facial hair long into 1972, he joked in a Philadelphia Daily News article that its purpose would serve him well if he ever had to shave it to drop a few pounds to make riding weight.
Based on numerous newspaper clippings from that era, even after a decade of riding, Gabriella still got more ink for his yoga than he did for winning races. Although he gamely fielded questions from reporters who didn’t understand the practice decades before yoga went mainstream, Gabriella seemed to sense he was getting pigeonholed as a novelty for standing on his head.
When Gabriella opened up about other aspects of his life, turf writers began to get curious about what they regarded as non-traditional interests for a racetracker, like the jockey’s voracious library habit and his penchant for watching documentary films.
“I find myself reading a lot of information books,” Gabriella told the Hackensack Record. “I just read Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, which was very interesting. He says the world is becoming an information world. I don’t want to become stagnated in my thinking. I want to look to the future.”
Gabriella was ahead of his time with that choice. The Third Wave was a landmark book written nearly a half-century ago that correctly predicted how the planet would transition from centuries of being agriculture- and industry-based to the data-driven societies that dominate our daily lives today.
“I don’t want the label ‘pinhead,’” Gabriella said by way of explaining his numerous off-track interests.
Gabriella was a member American Society of Inventors. He always seemed to have ideas for in-the-pipeline patents, but the only one that came close to fruition was a “novelty gift” that he told one interviewer had made him “a little money.”
Gabriella also liked to box, and although he never fought professionally, he was a sparring partner for others in the lower weight classes who did. He even managed to make that pastime mesh with his interest in show biz and all things Philly: He acted as a stand-in for Rocky Balboa’s son in one of the Rocky films (although Michael said his dad’s appearances did not make the final cut).
Over the decades, injuries took their toll.
“My dad broke his back, twice,” his son said. “And his collarbone. And his wrist. He had to have knee surgery from all the running he had to do to lose weight. He had six concussions. Multiple hernias. And one time, in addition to him falling off of horses, a horse tried to jump over his car one morning and totaled it. Luckily, it didn’t land on him.”
Michael Gabriella said those injuries were the reason that later in his life, his father never turned down a request to perform as entertainment at charity fundraisers that benefitted causes like the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund.
By 1983, when Gabriella was 41, good mounts were difficult to come by. He wound up his career as the “house jockey” at the Meadowlands and Garden State, getting paid a modest fee to stay late each racing night until the last race was over just in case another rider got hurt and a substitute jockey was needed so the track wouldn’t lose betting handle by having to scratch the mount.
In 2004, while working as the scales clerk at Philadelphia Park, a local horse was improbably on the cusp of winning the Triple Crown. Gabriella co-wrote and performed a song titled “The Legend of Smarty Jones.” The bluesy number got quite a bit of local airplay in the weeks leading up to the colt’s near-miss, one-length loss in the GI Belmont Stakes.
Although he had once told an interviewer that he would probably remain at the racetrack until he died, Gabriella retired to South Carolina in the mid-2000s. But before he could settle in and relax, his son said he almost did die after contracting a potentially fatal (and then little-known) autoimmune disease. He was failing fast and down to 90 pounds before a doctor came up with the correct diagnosis and initiated treatments that saved his life.
“He had to go through chemotherapy, lost his hair, and came out of remission twice,” Michael Gabriella said. “But he always powered through and made it.”
The retired jockey didn’t exactly take it easy once he bounced back. Gabriella landed a regular gig singing in a supper club, and even tried out for the reality television music competition X Factor.
“He did this in his 60s, ever the optimist,” his son told TDN. “He made it through three rounds. Never made it on TV, but he didn’t get turned away at the door, either.”
Even as far back as four decades ago, Gabriella knew that the racetrack had provided him with a full and interesting way of life and a second family.
“I won a small stakes and had a couple of seconds in stakes races.” Gabriella told the Courier-Post shortly after retiring from riding in 1986.. “I never really had any nice horses. I rode a lot of claimers. I didn’t really get any big stakes or anything. I guess I was never that much of a success as a rider. But I made a living at it, and I made a good living.”