Black female jockey reborn after being homeless
'Whether I win or lose, personally I feel like I've already won,' Harris says


CICERO, Ill. - The final race of the season had just ended and Sylvia Harris was beaming.

She patted Lively Moment on the back and kept smiling, kept praising the thoroughbred after finishing 11th of 12.

Harris felt like a winner, though. She does whenever she's in the saddle

A 40-year-old rookie who happens to be African American, Harris is a rarity in the world of horse racing, but there's more to her story.

It really is about redemption, about finding midlife salvation instead of a midlife crisis.

It's about someone who escaped the clutches of manic-depression, before it squeezed the life out of her.

It's about healing, strengthening familial bonds that nearly crumbled under the burden of turmoil. It's about a woman who was homeless finding salvation — and a place to call home — through her love of horses.

And it's a story that Sylvia Harris hopes educates and inspires.

The New York Times has featured her. "Good Morning America'' visited and plans to air her story. The "Today Show'' called. "Inside Edition,'' too.

She's attracting quite a bit of attention for someone who has won just three races on long shots this season at Hawthorne Race Course, the 116-year-old track in an industrial area near Midway Airport.

"Whether I win or lose, personally I feel like I've already won,'' Harris says Sunday night after the final race of the track's season.

There were times when she felt like anything but a winner.

Setbacks seemed to follow every step forward, sending her life back into chaos just when it seemed like she was finding stability.

On the surface, Harris seemed to have that growing up in Santa Rosa, Calif.

There were piano lessons, clarinet lessons, dance lessons. She starred in track and field through high school.

Her family had dogs and cats and birds, and even a boa constrictor, but no horse — no matter how hard Harris lobbied.

But beneath the happy exterior, trouble was lurking.

Her mom Evaliene had such severe Crohn's disease, an inflammation of the digestive tract lining, that she was discharged from the Army and several times nearly died. Her dad, Edward Sr., an Army staff sergeant who served in Korea and Vietnam, drank. Their marriage ended in a divorce that Sylvia believes triggered her manic-depression.

"Maybe there was something there before, but I didn't see it until after her dad and I divorced,'' Evaliene Harris says.

It caught her ex-husband off guard, too.

I had moved to Virginia and I wasn't aware of the problems,'' Edward Sr. says. "That stuff floored me.''

Sylvia was 19 and a student at Santa Rosa Junior College when she was first afflicted.

Suddenly, even though she rarely put a pen to paper, she stayed up writing poetry for two or three days in a row and experienced such severe delusions that she wound up in a hospital. It was the start of a vicious circle.

She would have a manic bout that would land her in the hospital for a few days, followed by periods of stability.

In the early 1990s, she was living in Northern California with her young daughter Atlanta and son Rory and their father. She wanted to marry, he didn't. One day, she left for Los Angeles thinking she would become an actress and eventually share custody of the children, who were with their father.

Instead, she had a fling with another man and "at the end of it, he's back in Spain and I'm pregnant'' with son Toshi.

Harris went back up north in 1993, moved in with her three children and the next two years seemed "perfect.'' Except she got sick from her medication, leading to a custody battle with her older children's father and a major breakdown.

Edward Sr. helped her move to Virginia with Toshi, and she wound up spending three months at Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Staunton, Va.

Another stable period followed. And then, another setback.

She had enrolled at Full Sail Academy, a media arts college in Orlando, Fla., in 1999, hoping for a career in the entertainment industry. Instead, she hit another low.

This time, she left the keys in her car while she went into a convenience store to get directions. When she returned, the Jeep Wrangler her father had financed was gone.

Without a car, she couldn't get to work. And without a job, she couldn't pay rent.

Toshi wound up in foster care and Harris wound up homeless, sleeping on the streets and in abandoned cars.

Her life changed when a minister at a soup kitchen asked what she would like to do. Harris' response: work with horses. The minister left, came back and within about 20 minutes Harris was in a van headed to Ocala - the center of Florida's thoroughbred breeding industry - about an hour away.

From there, her life turned around. Slowly.


Black female jockey reborn after being homeless - Wire Services - Horses - MSNBC.com

She wound up at a rooming house and soon got her first job as a groom.

"It just reawakened all of the childhood memories and wants and dreams, and loving animals and wanting to be around horses,'' Harris says. "I wasn't thinking (about being a) rider at the time. I was just thinking, 'I don't care if I have to pick up their (manure), I just want to be around them.''

She did, in fact, clean the stalls. And she got fired three days into one of her first jobs because she wasn't fast enough.

She felt humiliated, but she laughs about it now: "I'm not even good enough to pick up (manure). Where do you go from there? Everything must be upward from there.''

She kept going from assignment to assignment, at times finding herself homeless again.

She was working at Ocala Breeders' Sales Company when a guy told her he started riding at 37 and won his first race at 42. That convinced her she could do it, too.

So she learned the skills, and in 2005 decided she was ready to race. She had seen an ad for a jockey at Marquis Downs in Saskatchewan, Canada, and headed north.

When she got to the border at North Portal, N.D., Harris found out her sponsor had not filed all the paperwork needed to work in Canada and that she had to go to the American consulate in Detroit. She says it would have cost $3,000 to $5,000 get a work visa, far more than the $80 she had in her pocket.

"Now, I've hit another wall,'' she says. "Maybe this isn't a good idea. It's causing me more stress than happiness.''

She wanted to turn to her father in Virginia, but she didn't want to tell him she was stuck again. Instead, she drove about nine hours to Canterbury Park near Minneapolis - the next closest track - only to find the office was closed for two days.

Her spirit was broken and Harris needed to fix it.

A convert to Buddhism, she knew of a temple in Chicago and figured she had enough gas and money to get there. A woman at the front desk mentioned that Arlington Park was about 20 minutes away.

The tracks in Chicago are among the most competitive in the nation, not an easy area for a female jockey in her late 30s looking for a start.

Mounts were hard to come by, and getting her license to race was a long, trying process.

She finally had her first pro race at Arlington in August, but she was still having trouble finding rides. And she was getting discouraged.

Harris caught a break at Hawthorne in early November, when trainer Charlie Bettis put her on Wildwood Pegasus - a horse with arthritic knees that other jockeys feared. They finished third that day, and Bettis kept her in the saddle.

Wildwood Pegasus won his next start on Dec. 1., giving Harris her first win, and they took first again a few weeks later.

"Everybody deserves a second chance in life,'' says Janell Bettis, Charlie's wife and assistant trainer. "A lot of people get fifth, sixth chances.''

And Harris is trying to make the most of hers.

In the past, she thought about killing herself but didn't act on it because of her religious beliefs. "It's just a basic tenet: You don't take the life of yourself or someone else,'' Harris says. "Otherwise, I would have put myself out of my misery a long time ago.''

Now, there's happiness.

The horses give her the focus and stability she needs, and the last year has "been beautiful.''

She has an apartment in the city, although she often stays at the track. Her relationships with her children are stronger than she would have imagined not too long ago. The two oldest live with their father in Ireland, while 14-year-old Toshi has been with Edward Sr. for about 12 years.

At times, Sylvia went months without contacting her parents. She still hasn't seen her mother in a few years, though they plan to get together soon.

"My faith in her never wavered,'' Evaliene says from her home in Simi Valley, Calif. "I figured it would take longer for her to get to a place where she could take care of herself.''

Sylvia Harris is doing that, finally. And she feels like a winner.