Isaac Murphy: The Greatest Jockey Who Ever Rode

On an afternoon in May of eighteen ninety-one, a jockey named Isaac Murphy rode a horse called Kingman into the winner's circle at Churchill Downs. It was his third Kentucky Derby victory, achieved over a span of seven years. No jockey in the history of the race had won three times.

Murphy had done it while riding against the best horses and the best jockeys in the country, under the full pressure of a sports world that was, even then, beginning to push Black men out of the profession that had once been largely their domain. Murphy was born in eighteen sixty-one in Fayette County, the son of a man who enlisted in the Union Army and died of disease at an army hospital camp during the Civil War. He began riding professionally as a teenager and compiled statistics that seem impossible even now.

His career winning percentage, the proportion of races he entered that he won, is estimated at between thirty-four and forty-four percent. In an era when a winning percentage of twenty percent was considered excellent, Murphy won, by his own count, better than two of every five races he entered. He had a reputation for riding with his head rather than his whip.

He could judge the pace of a race with an internal clock that other jockeys marveled at. He knew when to hold a horse back and when to let it go, and he was rarely wrong. He also had a reputation for absolute honesty, at a time when race-fixing was endemic, Murphy was known as a rider who could not be bought.

He died in Lexington in eighteen ninety-six, at thirty-five years old, of heart failure, his health ravaged by the brutal practice of weight reduction required of jockeys. He was buried in the city, and his grave was later moved to the Kentucky Horse Park, where it rests today beneath a bronze sculpture, returned, at last, to the company of the animals that made him legendary.