Originally posted 08/14/2007 11:29:53 AM
By Mark Mulholland
News Channel 13 - WNYT
For years, he was the best.
Jerry Bailey won every major race there is, at least once. But for a time, Bailey's career, and his life was in a downward spiral. Jerry Bailey is an Alcoholic.
His drink of choice...
"Whatever was around," Bailey says.
The alcoholism hurt his riding, he'd sneak shots of booze in the morning to keep from trembling.
"I was never falling down drunk, but I always had alchol in my system, and eventually it would've taken me completely down and it's only by the grace of god that I didn't kill myself or somebody else out there," Bailey says.
But in 1989, After 15 years of heavy drinking, the 32 year-old Bailey, worried that he was about to lose his wife of three years. So just like that, he decided to get sober.
"It came to a point where if I wanted to have a family and stay married, I had to make a choice, I had my last drink of Alcohol on January 15, 1989," the Hall of Fame jockey says.
He went to rehab and joined Alcholics Anonymous, all the while concealing his disease from the owners and trainers who'd hire him. And his career, once stuck in the middle of the pack, took off.
Over the next few years, Bailey stayed away from the events and the parties that he associated with drinking. The spa meet was the hardest.
"Saratoga was particularly difficult, it wasn't the 24 days, it was the 24 nights," Bailey says.
Now 18 years after his last drink, the temptations are a little easier to avoid, but Bailey says he's never far away from his support system.
"The only reason I'm able to be around alcohol now when it comes my way and be fine with it, is because I sill on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, talk to other recovering people and it makes me remember where I was at a certain point in my life and I don't want to go back there," Bailey says.
As he was honored for his recovery in Saratoga Monday night, Bailey wanted to share the message that helped him turn his life around.
"If you're suffering, and you're in the depths of an addiction, there is help out there, if you just reach out," Bailey says.
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