Secretariat (22 page)

It is the second time Seth has spoken to Galbreath about buying a share, and Galbreath is telling Seth that Roberto and Good Counsel are at stud and he still has Graustark at Darby Dan and he already has enough stallions for his mares.

Then he adds, “But I’ll do it for you.”

Seth backs off. He does not want to be his daddy’s son at Claiborne Farm. “No, Mr. Galbreath, thank you but I don’t need the help; I just thought I would give you an opportunity for a share.”

Calling back Fasig-Tipton, Seth reaches Larry Ensor—John Finney is out of the office—and tells Ensor that the Gilman Paper Company owns the final share in Secretariat.

At the moment, at least, Seth believes the job is done. He tells a reporter from the
Daily Racing Form
that the syndication of Secretariat, for a world-record $6,080,000, has been completed in thirty-two shares. And the next day, Tuesday, the
Racing Form
prints a brief announcement of that, though it reveals nothing of the makeup of the syndicate. Sitting in his office at Aqueduct, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt sees the story, and he wishes he had been invited to buy a share. For months Vanderbilt has been one of Secretariat’s most ardent cheerleaders, telling people that the colt was the finest racehorse he has seen since Native Dancer. Now he has been left out of the syndication, hasn’t even been called to join the syndicate. He was never close to Claiborne, so Vanderbilt calls Kenny Noe, Jr., the racing secretary for the New York Racing Association and asks him to contact the Meadow Stable. He wants it to be known that he would buy a share in Secretariat if one became available, if there were any vacancies. He does not want to contact Penny personally because he does not want to put her in the position of having to say no.

It is an enormous syndicate, and the weights of it are still settling when word of Vanderbilt’s interest reaches Hancock. Vanderbilt knows someone might drop out at the last minute, if not through second thoughts, at least through something else. And so it happens, as if magically for the breeder of Miss Disco.

Hugo Morriss, the English breeder, has tried to make his 10 percent down payment of $19,000, but the English government has refused to allow him to send the money out of England. The deal involves a large foreign investment, and the government refuses to permit it. So Seth has a sudden and unexpected vacancy on his syndicate. And he has the name of Alfred Vanderbilt in front of him. So he calls Vanderbilt and asks him if he still wants the share.

Alfred says, “Sure.”

Vanderbilt was shareholder twenty-eight. With him, Hancock was done.

In four days he had sold the most expensive animal in history, disposing of the available twenty-eight of thirty-two shares for $5.32 million in what was the most ambitious solicitation of its kind on record. If the lay reader of the sports pages didn’t do double flips at breakfast over Secretariat’s record-breaking victory in the Laurel Futurity, he set down his spoon seeing that America’s Horse of the Year, still heading for the Kentucky Derby, had already been sold for more than $6 million as a stud horse. And he was still a virgin. To the initiated Jets, Blackhawks, or Lakers booster, Secretariat must have seemed the reductio ad absurdum of the bonus-baby mentality—the strong, silent farm boy who signed for $6 million before anyone even knew if he could play.

The syndication story played prominently in a number of major American newspapers, and reporters and columnists diligently mined and explored the stalagmites and stalactites of this engaging phenomenon. They wrote about his height, his beam, his physique, his power, his burst of speed, his record, his sire and his dam, his training, his diet, his state of celibacy, his eventual love life on the farm, his value exceeding $325 an ounce—more than three times the value of gold—his jockey, his groom, his owner, his trainer, and his chances of winning the Triple Crown. It is a rite of spring among journalists to seek and write about the favorite for the Triple Crown, a subject that has grown into a body of mythology for turfwriters. For journalists who had loved and written of the sport since 1948, who had seen endless combinations of horses beat each other year after year in the Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes, covering racing was like being involved in a marriage that had never been fully consummated. It had been a quarter of a century since Citation won the Triple Crown. Twenty-five years!

“God, don’t mention the Triple Crown to me,” Lucien told
Newsday
columnist Ed Comerford in Florida. “I hate that, especially when these people say he’s got it in the bag. I’ll tell you something that might surprise you. I’ll be glad when I get done with him. It worries me the way they talk about him going back to Man o’ War. He’s such a handsome horse. Everyone falls in love with him. That’s the whole deal. But he hasn’t done any more than Riva Ridge.”

Furthermore: “I’m getting an ulcer.”

Finally: “I can’t sleep.”

Comerford was but one of a parade of journalists to visit Lucien and the red horse after the syndication. Among others was the inimitable Red Smith, who spent part of a morning watching groom Eddie Sweat turn a rub rag on the colt. Red, noting that the horse had filled out, duly reported his findings in a March 4 dispatch to
The New York Times:
“At three he is a strapping dude, magnificently muscled, giving him a sense of controlled power even in repose.”

From the beginning of the year through the syndication and the flight to New York, Secretariat had been working in the fashion of a Derby favorite, showing great gusts of speed at Hialeah. The splint cleared up in January, when Lucien started breezing him, and on January 22 Lucien told
Daily Racing Form
columnist Joe Hirsch, “He’s doing very nicely and is on schedule. As you know, we fired a splint in early December. That situation has cleared up perfectly, and he’s ready to go.”

He never did compete in Florida.

Less than three weeks later, on February 7, the colt drilled a brisk five-eighths in 0:58
3
/
5
, more than a second under a twelve-clip, and galloped out in 1:12.

Three days later, the Chenery family convened its meeting in Tucson, and it was decided there to syndicate the colt and not to take the risk of racing him until it was done. Lucien continued putting the horse through heavy training in the morning hours.

On February 12, he zipped through a brilliant six-furlong drill in 1:11
2
/
5
. Five days later the colt went seven-eighths in 1:25
2
/
5
, another fast move. Six days later, on the day the process of syndication began, he went another seven-eighths in 1:26. Five days later he worked seven-eighths in 1:23
2
/
5
, his farthest and fastest move of the year.

He was coming to the new year with the wind at his back.

Penny had already told Joe Hirsch that the colt could not be ready for the mile and an eighth of the $100,000 Flamingo Stakes March 3, but after the syndication was announced February 26, she shifted direction. She called Lucien, told him the syndicate was wrapped up, and asked him to run the red horse in the race, the nation’s first major three-year-old event.

“Penny,” Lucien protested, “I can’t get him ready.”

She insisted. But so did he. Finally she gave in, unable to budge him.

“I still say that
that
stubborn man wanted his share and wanted to make sure he was syndicated before he would risk racing him.”

“No,” Lucien said later, “I couldn’t get him ready.”

He was suddenly the trainer of the world’s most valuable racehorse, and there were a number of investors, shareholders in the colt, who were wondering already how the colt was doing, what Lucien planned to do with him now. He was preparing to send the horse north to New York one day when he received his first telephone call from Seth, who asked Lucien about the horse. Lucien spoke to him, not knowing at the time about the “rule,” as Penny called it, governing his relationship with members of the Secretariat syndicate. The rule was that it was no one’s damn business what Lucien was doing with him, that the syndicate was not supposed to take an active interest in the horse’s program.

The second time Seth called, Penny happened to be at the barn at Hialeah, and when she heard who was calling Lucien she asked to speak with him.

“Seth, the arrangement is that the horse races under my direction, the contract specifies that he will race under my direction until November 15 and that there will be no interference from the syndicate.”

“Well, ma’am, there were some people, myself included, who didn’t feel you used good judgment taking Riva Ridge to Hollywood Park last year, and we’d sure hate to see you do something like that to Secretariat.”

Penny admired his bluntness. “I would hate to see me do it, too,” she said. “In retrospect, I think going to California
was
hard on him. But if I decided to, I would have the right to do the same thing with Secretariat.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The new year had begun.

Chapter 20

At seven-thirty in the morning on Long Island, among the chilled breaths and overcoats at Belmont Park, Secretariat first took shape gliding through the churchlike dimness of Barn 5.

The metal lids of cameras’ eyes blinked once, then successively, as the shape expanded toward the center of the paddock, while reporters scribbled notes on pads. Penny Tweedy, standing next to Lucien Laurin, said brightly, “He looks wonderful, Lucien. And he feels good, too. He’s got a hump in his back.”

Everyone watched a moment as groom Eddie Sweat led him round the walking ring adjacent to the barn. Whether by inference or action, the red horse seemed not so much to walk as to drift through the silver light. His shoulders fluted where the ligaments tied his bones together, his neck and quarters lined in packs of muscle over which his coat seemed drawn too tight—perhaps a half size too small, as if he were outgrowing it—while his neck was bowed and his chin drawn up strict beneath its mass, and there was a trace of white around the outskirts of his eyes. Lucien, looking him up and down, carefully, walked over to Ron Turcotte, who was waiting to get on the colt.

It was March 14. For Laurin, Turcotte, and Penny Tweedy, the four-month wait was almost ended.

The red horse hadn’t run since the Garden State Stakes in mid-November, and now he was just three days away from his first start as a three-year-old. He was to race five other colts in the $25,000-added Bay Shore Stakes at Aqueduct March 17, Saturday, a seven-furlong sprint. There was less than half an hour to his final major workout for the Bay Shore. Most of the serious roadwork had been done in Florida, where Lucien had been building a deep foundation, called “bottom,” on the horse’s physical condition. Since that last seven-furlong work, Secretariat had gone a mile in 1:40
3
/
5
on March 7. He walked for his exercise the next day, as he always did after he worked, and galloped the next. On March 10, he was flown from Miami to Queens, vanned to the stable area at Belmont Park, and bedded down in Stall 7, his permanent home in Barn 5 for the remainder of the year. Riva Ridge, and ten other horses, came with him on the two-and-a-half-hour flight north. At Belmont Park, he walked the next day, then galloped two days in a row. Now he was ready for the final drill.

The schedule called for speed, and Lucien decided to send him out under Turcotte for a three-eighths-of-a-mile sprint over the blazing fast main track at Belmont Park. A short, fast sprint on the eve of a race is known as a “blowout” or “sharpener” among horsemen; others refer to it as a “zinger,” backstretch slang connoting a work designed to hone a horse’s speed.

Secretariat thrived on such speed work three days before a race, as it turned out, and the faster the better.

In a moment Turcotte was astride him, tucking a whip under his arm, fitting his feet into the stirrup irons, and gathering up the leather of the reins. A security policeman stopped traffic as the red horse headed across an access road leading through the stable area.

“That him?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s him,” someone said.

Moving for the racetrack near the clocker’s shed, Secretariat came to within twenty yards of the gap and stopped, pricking his ears, raising his head, and staring, motionlessly, toward the racetrack. Horses galloped past, singly and in sets, and he watched the movement, listened to the hooves slapping and the sound of riders’ voices.

Turcotte let him look, then clucked to him. The big horse strode off without hesitation, through the gap in the fence, turned, and galloped away. Penny, Lucien, and Penny’s personal secretary, Ellie Disston, made off toward the ground-level ramp near the finish line. Lucien took out his gold watch, the one presented to him for Riva Ridge’s victory in the Kentucky Derby a year ago, and looked across the track for the red horse.

Far across the racetrack infield, Secretariat turned and galloped into the backstretch. Turcotte was standing in the irons. The figures moved slowly around the mile-and-a-half oval toward the far turn, bouncing on the outside as horses raced past them on the rail. As Secretariat circled the far turn, galloping slowly, Turcotte drew him to a halt. The three-eighths pole was just ahead. Ron let the red horse walk, looked around for traffic a moment, and then clucked to him, urging him again into a gallop.

Nearing the three-eighths pole, 660 yards from the finish line, Turcotte reached down and grabbed the lines, dropping to a crouch. Secretariat accelerated suddenly, pounding at a dead run past the pole, still picking up speed, gathering momentum, as he raced around the turn for home and leveled out. Lucien snapped his watch as the red horse drove past the quarter pole. He glanced at it, saying nothing, swallowing. Toward the three-sixteenths pole, racing through the stretch, Secretariat reached out his forelegs and folded them into the racetrack as he made the straight, passed the eighth pole, passed the sixteenth pole, and raced for the wire. Turcotte’s jacket was billowing out like a parachute behind, and the colt’s ears were pinned flat. They drove under the wire, Turcotte standing up, his hands resting on the colt’s neck. Lucien clicked the watch. He looked at the dial.

“Oh my God,” he said.

“What’s wrong, Lucien?” someone asked.

“He went 0:33
3
/
5
.” For a moment he said nothing more. The time was sensational, faster than a twelve-clip by :02
3
/
5
of a second, even over the Belmont track. It is unusual for horses to break 0:34 in a three-furlong workout. Lucien continued to watch in silence as Turcotte pulled the red horse up toward and around the bend, trying to bring the youngster to a walk. The two galloped past the pole a quarter mile beyond the wire. “He must have pulled up five-eighths in a minute,” Lucien said quietly. To check his clocking of the work, he headed straight for the racetrack telephone inside the vacant ticket-sellers’ booth of the clubhouse. The phone reaches the clocker’s shed upstairs, on the roof of the grandstand. There, clocker Jules Watson, for one, times all the workouts on the main track at Belmont. Lucien slipped inside and called him.

“Hello there, Jules. How fast did you get him?”

There was a pause, which lengthened like a shadow on Lucien’s face, and then, “Thirty-two and three-fifths? Right. Up in forty-four and four-fifths?”

Lucien’s clocking, fast as it was, was a full second slower than Watson’s official time, which other clockers quickly confirmed as accurate. Lucien took down the fractions by eighths, then read them back slowly to Watson: “Eleven and one-fifth, twenty-one and four-fifths, thirty-two and three-fifths.”

It was startling. The colt had sped through the second eighth in 0:10
3
/
5
, the third eighth in 0:10
4
/
5
.

Off the phone, Lucien announced, “Thirty-two and three-. . . .”

“Well,” said Penny. “That ought to open his pipes.”

It was almost eight o’clock when Secretariat came off the racetrack and headed for the barn. By 8:15 the news had already spread throughout the stable area, and it was setting off flights of hyperbole and incredulity among the armies of swipes and clockers, trainers and outriders and hot walkers on shed row.

Turcotte, off Secretariat and up on another horse, was heading back to the racetrack when syndicate member Alfred Vanderbilt spotted him.

“Say, Ron,” Alfred called, “I heard you burned up the racetrack this morning.”

“No, I just dried it out a little.”

A stable area is an open classroom without partitions, and news moves very quickly through it. The word reached the wooden clocker’s shed at the training track—someone yelled it through the window. In seconds pony boys and exercise boys were taking it with them at a gallop around the racetrack, back to their barns, spreading and respreading it to grooms and jockeys’ agents, who hustled it word of mouth.

The workout seemed to set a tempo for the rest of the morning at Barn 5, where Lucien and Penny spent time talking amiably to the press. Eddie Sweat slipped quickly in and out of Secretariat’s stall, pitchfork in hand, and stable workers talked about the move, and Jimmy Gaffney walked the colt around the barn to cool him off.

Gradually the morning wound down and in the office by the barn, Lucien hung up the telephone, rubbed his eyes, and sat for a moment on the chair by the desk near the office door.

“I’m amazed,” he said. “I wanted him to work fast but I don’t know if I wanted him to work that fast.” So the work had given him some pause. It was designed to hone the edges, not break them off. “For him it was just a blowout. It makes a difference if he comes back with his head between his legs. But he didn’t. For him it was a blowout.”

Then Lucien went out the door and down the staircase toward the shed. “I want to see if he’s done eatin’,” Lucien said. He walked briskly up the aisle four stalls down. Approaching, he saw Eddie Sweat.

“How’s he doin’, Mr. Sweat?”

“He’s okay, boss.”

Lucien ducked under the blue and white webbing, peeked over the top of the feed tub, and ducked out again, grinning. Standing at the back of the stall, Secretariat regarded Lucien suspiciously, raising his head as Laurin came and went.

“If that work had bothered him, he’d have backed off his feed. Look, he licked the tub. You come by tomorrow and he’ll be jumpin’ sky high. We’ll have to put the saddle and bridle on him and put a boy on his back. That’s the only way we can quiet him down. Put the tack on him and let him think he’s goin’ to the racetrack.”

Yet the work gave Lucien some reason for concern: he was wondering whether the colt had made the change from two to three. “Our three-year-olds sometimes don’t come back as good as they were.” He would not know for sure until the Bay Shore. A workout is no definitive guide. Only a race, and the competitive instincts in a horse it draws upon, is the true measure of form, the only way of determining whether Secretariat brought everything with him over the new year.

“He knows he’s back in business,” Lucien said. “I’m dyin’ to get that first one over with Saturday.”

Dressed in a shiny blue trench coat, puffing a cigarette in a box seat, Lucien Laurin sat down and waited for the coming of the seventh. “I took a tranquilizer last night for the first time in my life,” he said, “and I slept like a baby. I figured, why should I be walking the floors all night?”

It was 3:42 in the afternoon, March 17, and the Bay Shore was less than an hour away. Lucien had the look of a doomed man. He was quiet, reflective, and considerate, as he always was, but the day was bearing down on him. He wore his anxiety visibly. Nearby, Penny was greeting friends, cool as the mint green coat she wore, Elizabeth Ham with her, arrayed in a bright red coat and a brown fur hat.

Heavy rains had fallen earlier in the day, turning Aqueduct into a mire, but by 4:15 the sun was out and the gulls were dipping and sailing overhead. Beyond the long chute that joined the backstretch, Eddie Sweat was walking with Secretariat down a pathway toward the paddock. The sixth race had just ended, and Lucien made his way slowly down the winding staircase to the saddling area. The crowd was moving in front and behind him, the bettors draped across the paddock fences, owners and trainers looking on. Walter Salmon, for whom Seth had waited through his longest day, was there. So was Vanderbilt, and Eddie Arcaro, the master horseman of his time, winner of five Kentucky Derbies, two Triple Crowns with Whirlaway and Citation, the rider of Bold Ruler. They all gathered—some forty owners and trainers and visitors.

Trainer Johnny Campo, the man who had bounced all his finest two-year-olds off Secretariat the year before, was in the doorway leading from the tunnel to the paddock when Secretariat walked by.

“Look how big he got,” said Johnny, shaking his head.

Suddenly, through the large doorway beneath the clubhouse, Sweat and Secretariat appeared, turning into the paddock amid whispering. The horse had grown up and filled out, in height by an inch and a quarter from the ground to the withers since September, from 5 feet 4.75 inches to 5 feet 6 inches, and measuring a massive 78 inches now around the belly. He weighed 1154 pounds, at least 200 pounds heavier than the average thoroughbred.

“Here we is,” muttered Eddie Sweat. “Here we is.” The groom turned the colt into a saddling stall, bringing him around to face the front, while Henny and Lucien moved closer. No one was at ease, not even Secretariat, who was usually the calmest of them all. Standing there, Secretariat defecated, emitting washy feces, and Lucien turned to Henny and said, “He’s a little loose. I hope he’s all right.”

“He’ll be okay,” said Henny. “He’s probably just a little anxious, a little nervous, heh?”

Secretariat, his head up and brown eyes luminously large, shifted the bulk of his body from left to right as he waited there. Once he raised a hindleg and lashed it into the dirt floor, chopping up cinders and spraying them against the wooden boards behind. Sweat spoke quietly to him.

“Easy now, Red.”

Arcaro walked to the stall and looked in on him.

“He’s got to get going,” Lucien told Arcaro. “He’s getting awfully on edge right now. He’s like a fighter.” Once again the red horse shifted his feet. Dipping his head, he rolled and chewed at the bit in his mouth, biting into it. Arcaro seemed intrigued. He walked to the left side of Secretariat, stood back and looked him over for a long minute, his eyes flicking over the hindlegs, the quarters, up along the back and neck and shoulders, then to the head.

“God, he’s a grand lookin’ son of a bitch,” said Arcaro.

Lucien beamed, nodding. “Isn’t he, though?”

“He’s too good-lookin’ to run!” Arcaro said.

From the tunnel leading to the jockeys’ room, holding a whip in one hand while adjusting the leather number strapped to his arm, Ron Turcotte emerged wearing the blue and white blocks of the Meadow Stable. He was chewing gum, and he appeared resigned. He walked directly to Lucien and the two men huddled.

Ron Turcotte had not felt such pressure since he started riding thoroughbreds at age nineteen, after he hitchhiked from Toronto to nearby Woodbine Race Course. Someone picked him up at the stable gate and deposited him that morning at the barn of Edward Plunkett Taylor’s Windfield Farm. He walked in and got a job working as a hot walker for a month, cooling out horses after exercise, then grooming for a time. He finally went to Taylor’s farm and learned to break yearlings under tack. He was on his way to becoming one of America’s leading riders, but he had had an unlikely beginning.