Remembering Ronnie Franklin’s Promise and Tragic Fall from Grace

March 14, 2018 Michael Olesker

The "private office" of Daniel Brozowsky, aka "Nookie the Bookie," was reportedly a sidewalk phone booth around Hayward and Park Heights avenues, near Pimlico Race Course.

On chilly days like this, Pimlico Race Course can seem ghostly and abandoned on its own merits. But now there’s a new spirit haunting the place, with the death the other day of Ronnie Franklin.

Franklin was 58 when lung cancer beat him. But his sudden fall from grace started just as his thoroughbred horse racing legend seemed to be taking off.

He was a 19-year-old high school dropout from Dundalk who wandered over to Pimlico one day and became an apprentice jockey. In 1979, sitting atop the great Spectacular Bid, Franklin won the Kentucky Derby. Then, he won the Preakness. He was the nobody-miraculously-turned-hometown-hero. In the Belmont Stakes, an exhausted Bid finished third.

But then a week later, just as Franklin seemed to be sitting atop the world, he was arrested on a parking lot at Disneyland and charged with possession of cocaine. It was the beginning of a lifetime public struggle with substance abuse.

Or as Racing Post put it this week, Franklin “spiraled into a shocking fall from grace, never riding another Grade 1 winner and suffering a well-documented drug addiction.”

Franklin rode plenty of winners over the following years, but he never won another big-time race. Across the years, he was repeatedly denied licenses from state commissions because of substance abuse problems. In 1992, in his hometown, the Maryland Jockey Club revoked his license.

The kid who’d won the Eclipse Award in 1979 as the nation’s outstanding apprentice jockey – the kid who’d won 262 races in his first year – finished his career working with horses in California. A decade ago, he was diagnosed with cancer and returned to Baltimore for treatment.

In a week when President Donald Trump suggests the death penalty for drug dealers, and the nation wrestles with an opioid crisis in which overdoses have tripled over the last decade, Ronnie Franklin’s tortured life puts a human face to the raw numbers.

But his death carries another haunting as well. Baltimoreans wonder about the future of thoroughbred horse racing, long ago regarded as one of America’s premier sports but now struggling for financial help and cultural relevance. And we wonder, too, about the future of Northwest Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course, with its ghostly feel on wintry days like this, and now haunted anew by the death of Ronnie Franklin.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.