"I've experienced racing from the hooves up, rage from the inside
out and redemption from heaven down," says author Eddie Donnally,
an ordained minister, endorsed chaplain and the only former jockey
to win an Eclipse Award for Outstanding Newspaper Writing. An
electric jockey with a juice machine, he rode on racing's
undercard, lived inside its underbelly and became a part of its
underworld. From constant bulimia, broken bones and betrayal of
Boston's infamous Winter Hill Gang, he depicts an unseen side of
Thoroughbred racing. Yet the five tons of his sweat that
disappeared down "hot box" drains was nothing compared to his
struggles with sibling sexual trauma, same-sex promiscuity and an
addiction to crack cocaine that in seven months took him from
sports writing and TV show hosting to grooming horses on a track's
backstretch. "I still dream of having a racehorse between my knees
and love the people in horse racing." he says. "But it was time to
tell my truth about it. Seconds after a race fixing gangster
slugged me, a pro hit man told me that he planned to kill me and
put my naked body on Boston's Suffolk Downs backstretch as a
warning to other jockeys." Starting in 1962, he rode for 19-years
in some 10,000 races, winning over 1,000. Arrested for Sports
Bribery in 1979 for a fixed race he won in 1974, he was forced to
fend off the FBI who pressured him to collaborate their star
witness's testimony, as well as Boston's Winter Hill Gang members
who would kill him if he did. Still, in 1980 he became a track
publicity director and for seven years wrote horse racing for the
Dallas Morning News. But a suicide attempt, a bipolar diagnosis and
stays in two psyche wards were brief stops on a journey of self
destruction that eventually landed him in jail. After God's
Shekinah Glory lit up his holding cell in 1996, he moved to the Los
Angeles Dream Center, the former Queen of Angels Hospital turned
city of refugee for the homeless and hopeless. Less than five years
after leaving jail, he became a licensed Foursquare Minister and
then Development Director for Race Track Chaplaincy of America,
which places chaplains at horse tracks. In 2009 he returned to
seminary, earned a Doctorate of Ministry and after a 16-month
hospital residency works as a chaplain at a hospice and two
hospitals near Clearwater, FL where he lives with his wife Sandi.
"As a jockey, I used highly illegal, hand-held electrical prods on
horses in races. I threw up ten times a day to make weight, sweated
off tons and broke 13 bones. I acted out as a bisexual, manic
depressive, crack cocaine addicted sportswriter. Even today when I
read what I wrote about the literally insane life I lived, the same
old shivers ripple up my spine. Only though a series of God's
miracles am I'm still alive to tell it at all." "I rode
Revelation's pale horse from hell and one day I'll ride across
heaven following Jesus on Revelation's other white horse." In
conjunction with the book, he is writing a blog, "Recovery in
Racing," which profiles horse racing's best known members of its
recovering community. Check out the book's website,
www.Ridethewhitehorse.org Contact him at Ridethewhitehorse1@gmail.
com
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