Secretariat (24 page)

Turcotte, jumping off Secretariat, told Lucien about the hole opening and then closing in midstretch. “Woodhouse, that son of a bitch, he came out and closed the gap. He hit his horse left-handed and came over on me.” Turcotte headed downstairs to change, his mouth crusted with part of the turn for home. Down in the jockeys’ room, Woodhouse was telling about hearing Turcotte’s voice at the three-sixteenths pole. “I heard Ronnie yellin’ for racin’ room, for some help. He was in trouble. He yelled my name, but I ain’t goin’ to give him no money . . .”

Then over the loudspeaker, as Turcotte and Moseley waited, Dave Johnson announced that the foul had been disallowed, that Secretariat had won the Bay Shore—officially.

But Turcotte knew he had almost blown the Bay Shore foolishly. “I realized I had made a mistake, taking excessive chances on the rail instead of using the horse to go around,” he said later. “I was stupid to take the chance when I was on Secretariat, stupid because he was the same Secretariat I knew as a two-year-old. As it turned out, I should have gone around.”

He didn’t go around, and it became the longest seven furlongs of his life. “I never thought six million bucks could be so heavy,” he said.

But the colt was back and running in his old form, and now Lucien moved to crank him up again, this time for the $50,000-added Gotham Stakes, over one mile at Aqueduct April 7. After the Gotham Stakes, if all went well, came the $114,900 Wood Memorial at one and one-eighth miles at Aqueduct, and after that the Kentucky Derby at one and a quarter miles on May 5. Secretariat had made it through the winter with his speed intact, his late charge and his instincts as an alley fighter still alive.

Charles Hatton was back, too, watching Secretariat smash through the Bay Shore field like O. J. Simpson plunging the line, like a hawk scattering a barnyard of chickens. Sitting down to compose his March 20 column, Charlie wrote: “Confronted with a seemingly impenetrable wall of horses, he came smashing through like Kung Fu.”

Chapter 21

I don’t know if you can print this, but I call him sexy.

Penny Tweedy

A light rain fell through the morning of April Fools’ Day, Sunday, rapping on the roof of Barn 5. The lights inside the shed were dim, plunging the figures, the horses, and the men with them, into shapes that wavered ghostlike in the blue-gray air.

The rain drew pungent aromas from the bales stacked in the loft above the stalls—of clover, timothy hay, and straw. It danced off the shingles, forming puddles in the yard, and ran in rivulets down the windowpanes that lined the shed row walls. Grooms moved in and out of straw-bed stalls, sticking and probing the blades of forks for mats of urine and manure. Hot walkers cooled out horses by walking them around the indoor shed. The shed was a row of nineteen box stalls looped by a walking path ten feet wide. The hot walkers, moving counterclockwise, circled it every two or three minutes. They led files of horses by chain and leather lead shanks—one man at the head of each horse—talking to the horses, sipping coffee, smoking, looking up at the clock. They would earn enough for grub and cigarettes, perhaps enough to bet the double, perhaps not. A radio played faintly and a pregnant cat padded from stall to stall, sniffing at one, then moving on.

“She was raped at Hialeah by the old Tom,” Eddie Sweat said sadly. “I tried to stop it but I was too late.”

At either end of the shed sets of horses stepped to and from the racetrack, their metal shoes clicking down the paths and paved roads that wound loosely among the barns of the stable area. It was nearing midmorning, according to the clock by the feed room door, and inside the work went on. Leaving the rear of Stall 7, Secretariat appeared momentarily at his open doorway, thrusting his head outside, his ears forward, and for several minutes stared across the aisle toward the windows blurred by the rain. Then he sank back again, his head receding very slowly.

Into the shed, walking from his office across the yard, came Henny Hoeffner. He was striding hastily about his morning work, as if shooing the morning from one moment to the next, harnessing and organizing time and motion on the clipboard he was holding in his hand. Rain dripped off the brim of his hat, a blue golf hat with a wrap-around brim. Hoeffner was Lucien’s assistant trainer, second in charge, the man who conditioned and supervised the stable of horses in Lucien’s absences, which had become frequent in the last few years. Riva Ridge and Secretariat had already spent weeks out of town—at tracks in Kentucky, New Jersey, California, and Maryland—and Laurin went with them.

In fact Laurin hadn’t been at Belmont Park for at least two days. He was still in New Orleans, at the Fair Grounds, where he had saddled Ed Whittaker’s Angle Light on Saturday for the $50,000 Louisiana Derby at one and one-eighth miles. The bay came to the eighth pole two lengths in front, but he weakened in the final yards and finished third, beaten a length by Leo’s Pisces. Lucien would return soon to resume supervising the training of the red horse. Now work went on without him, in a tempo as casual as the comings and goings of the horses.

“Okay, Ed Sweat, get the big horse ready. He’ll be goin’ out next,” said Henny Hoeffner.

For Edward (Shorty) Sweat, April 1 would be a morning of established rhythms, too, cadences to which he’d grown accustomed in the years of his life since leaving school in his sophomore year and finding work with Lucien Laurin.

Sweat was born on August 30, 1938, in a small farmhouse on a fifteen-acre farm in Holly Hill, not far from the coast of South Carolina, the sixth of nine children of Mary and David Sweat. They were a poor black family of tenant farmers, mostly, though David Sweat had a reputation as a crack shot, a backwoodsman, and a hunter of small game: squirrel, rabbits, possum.

Ed started early to help support the family, working after grade school on surrounding farms, picking cotton at twenty-five cents a day, digging sweet potatoes and harvesting corn and soybeans and watermelon. At the age of eight he was doing a man’s work.

As a child he took an interest in horses. On the school bus he would pass the thoroughbred horse farm down the road owned by Lucien Laurin. He ran a thoroughbred training center, and Sweat asked for and got a job from him. He walked the two and a half miles to work. Eddie started by digging fence holes and planting fences, making fifteen dollars a week. By 1955 he was walking hots and grooming horses on the farm, beginning as Turcotte began up north, as most grooms and jockeys begin. Sweat tried to ride, too, but already he was too heavy for a life as an exercise boy: he was nearing 170 pounds. The plowing and the laying of fences had left him with no weight to lose. As a groom he learned fast. Those who saw him work would say he had what southern blacks call mother wit—like Yankee ingenuity, a quick and ready insight into the best and most efficient way of doing any job. Peers respected Sweat. He was serious about his work, manifestly reliable and responsible. Within three years after Laurin took him to the racetrack, he had developed into his ablest and most trusted groom. He rubbed and cared for most of Laurin’s finest stock, and he learned how to handle the van. Thus he became the stable’s chief van driver, too, chauffeuring the horses cross country—to Detroit, Chicago, New England, and New Jersey.

For Sweat April 1 was among the last days of ease, ordered calm, and small certainties—more than a month before the beginning of the Triple Crown. He had already felt the tension on the day of the sensational workout prior to the Bay Shore. And April 1 began the week of the Gotham Stakes, the final month of preparation. The Wood would be run April 21. Then he would be off for Louisville, if all went well enough, and for weeks nothing would be the same again.

There was a heady excitement about running a racehorse in the three most celebrated races in America. It was racing as spectacle, and those in it were a part of it. If Secretariat won at Churchill Downs, Sweat would probably be the first groom in history to win two Kentucky Derbies, certainly the first to win two consecutive runnings of the race. Yet, considering his chances, he remained skeptical. Like many others, Sweat was suspicious of the Bold Ruler blood that ran in Secretariat. He was uncertain whether Secretariat could carry his speed a mile and a quarter in May, but there was nothing he could do about it, and Sweat never seemed one to worry about things over which he had no control. Yet he did do one thing to ward off the devil. Racetrackers are creatures of superstition: Sweat owned a khaki hat with a wraparound brim and a flat top, and in time he decided he would wear it whenever he took the red horse to the post. He had worn it in the Bay Shore Stakes, first of all, and decided he would wear it in the Gotham, too.

Eddie Sweat slipped into Stall 7, a brush and a rub rag in his hands, and began the practice of his artistry, raising his arms and putting himself in motion, gyrating slightly as he cleaned the colt. His hands worked as those of a schooled boxer on the small bag, sweeping and flicking rhythmically up and down the coat, the rub rag following the jab of the brush, the brush following the rub of the rag, the rag flapping and the brush skipping off in quick, clean strokes. First he drew the brush across the back, sending dust in the air, then polished off with the rag, all the while moving around the horse and working his hands together, in unison, the implements complementing one another, and all the while talking inflectively as Secretariat kicked and frowned in protest, curled his lip and shoved.

“Stop it now! C’mon, Red. C’mon, Red. I’m gonna brush you now. Come over here, Red. You’re steppin’ on my toes. What’s the matter with you? You tryin’ to put a foot in my pocket? You’ve got to stand there now! I got to get you ready. C’mon. I want to brush you off a little bit.”

The horse did a two-step with his hindlegs, swinging to the left toward Sweat, and then he whisked his tail and twisted his neck, closing his eyes and flipping his nose in the air, and from the stall Sweat’s voice seemed reproachful. Secretariat bowed his neck, reached over and nipped at the brush in Sweat’s hand, grabbing the bristles of the brush between his teeth, then turned to face motionlessly out the door, as if pacified. Then, Sweat took the brush from the horse’s mouth and swung into work again. It was nearing time for Secretariat to gallop. Horses were coming back in sets from the racetrack now, coats slicked by the rain, which was still falling lightly.

There was heightened activity now around his stall. Jim Gaffney appeared with the saddle he had engraved with the name “Secretariat,” the pommel pad his mother had knitted for the colt, and the blue girth and the blue saddlecloth. Sweat went to the rear of the stall and tied the horse’s tail in a knot, as he had tied it in a knot for the Bay Shore. The two men moved in and out of the stall quickly, efficiently.

Gaffney picked up the saddle and lifted it carefully over Secretariat’s back. “When I first put this girth on him, it used to tighten up to here,” he said, showing a worn hole in the leather strap. “Now you’ve got to drop it two holes just to get it around him.” His barrel, already enormous, was still expanding. In fact, his size had been the subject of some comment following the Bay Shore Stakes. In his March 27 column, Charles Hatton had printed a set of statistics comparing the sizes of Secretariat, Man o’ War, and Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox, three large animals:

Man o’ War—Height 16 hands, 1
5
/
8
inches;
girth 71 ¾ inches; weight, 1,050 pounds.

Gallant Fox—Height 16 hands, 1 inch;
girth, 73 inches; weight, 1,125 pounds.

Secretariat—Height, 16 hands, 2 inches;
girth, 75
1
/
5
inch; weight, 1,160 pounds.

Secretariat was larger than the other two horses in all particulars, and he’d not yet turned three by the calendar.

Gaffney drew up the cinch, tightening it, as Secretariat kicked again. “Hey, you big bum, stand there now!” said Sweat.

Then, the groom took a steel pick from his pocket and started moving from hoof to hoof on the colt, cleaning out the muck caught in the bottom of his hooves. Finally they led the colt to the gap in the fence on the west side of the yard. It was still raining. Water ran off Henny’s hat.

“Jimmy, gallop him once around and then jog him all the way back. Don’t wait out there.”

Trainers, waiting by the gap in the fence, saw Secretariat coming and studied him as he stopped and looked at the racetrack. The gap was by the clubhouse turn, the first turn, at Belmont Park, where the horses in the mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes still had more than a mile and a quarter to run. Horses drilled by through the mud. Trainer John Rigione called out to Hoeffner.

The figures grew larger through the lane. Secretariat galloped by, Gaffney standing in the stirrups, the reins loose, talking to the colt. Around the turn, Gaffney pulled him up, turned him around, and jogged back toward the gap. He emerged through the gap in the rain. The horse was breathing lightly. His legs were splattered with mud, his body wet.

Secretariat danced back to the barn, on his toes, his neck arched and eyes glaring. Back at the barn Eddie Sweat was waiting for the colt with a bucket of hot water and a large sponge. Sweat put a blue blanket across Secretariat’s kidneys, then crouched at the colt’s side and moved from one leg to the other sponging the horse’s legs, one at a time. The colt didn’t like it, lifting his legs, menacingly, while he nibbled at Gaffney’s hand. Sweat washed the colt’s face, methodically, pressing the sponge on the forehead, letting the water drain down between the eyes and along the jowls. Then Sweat brought the sponge down between the eyes, over the wide spread of the brain pan, then over the eyes themselves, down the nose and around the lips, then into the nostrils. When he finished Sweat tossed a red wool blanket over the colt’s rump, back, and neck. Then he fastened the leather straps in front, drawing them closed, and went around to the back and untied the knot in Secretariat’s tail.

Gaffney led the colt away, serving now as a hot walker, and Eddie went to work. It was past nine, and the morning was leveling off. As Gaffney took the colt around the shed, Sweat picked up a fork and worked again inside Stall 7, dressing it up with fresh straw and thrashing the straw with the fork blades. Motes of straw dust rose from the floor. Sweat worked the fork lightly across his fingers, lifting and tossing the straw bed, turning from corner to wall to corner again in the fifteen-by-twenty-foot cubicle. Above him were two sprinklers attached to a pipe.

Now the rain was letting up. At nine-thirty Hoeffner turned into the shed, saw Gaffney leading Secretariat toward him up the aisle, and said, suspiciously, “Hey, Jimmy, is that pony botherin’ him?”

The pony, an Appaloosa named Billy Silver, was just becoming involved in his long and unrequited love affair with Secretariat. In back at the west end of the barn Billy Silver lived in a jerry-built wooden stall over which he could hang his head and sniff at horses and hot walkers angling past him.

Gaffney shuttled past again with Secretariat, who was walking docilely, his head down and neck straight. They had been walking about thirty-five minutes.

“One more time around, Jim,” said Sweat.

It was almost ten when Gaffney nosed Secretariat back into his stall. By then his bed had been made—a fresh, foot-deep mattress of golden straw—and the water bucket had been filled and hung inside. Sweat, with Gaffney holding Secretariat at the front of the open door, once again picked out the colt’s feet, which had collected cakes of sandy loam soil from the racetrack, brushing each foot, cleaning all around it. Then he dabbed a brush into a tin can filled with a dark, butterlike salve with a not unappealing odor. With the brush, he painted the salve around the hoof, as if lacquering it—hoof dressing, to keep the feet from drying out.

For the horses it was nearing early lunch. Secretariat had already eaten about four quarts of oats that morning, and now Sweat was cutting two gargantuan carrots into inch-thick discs. Meanwhile the feed man had just ladled four quarts of dry oats into the tub and a quart of sweet feed mixed with molasses. Sweat unclipped the tub from the wall across from Stall 7. It was feeding time, and the stable was alive with the nickers and whinnies of the famished. Heads stuck out of stalls, eyes rolling, nostrils flared and fluttering. Secretariat pawed lustily. He bobbed his head when Sweat approached him, crossing the aisle, and backed up as Eddie dipped beneath the webbing of the stall. Then he came forward, as Sweat straightened up in front of him and started to fasten the latches of the tub, holding it with both hands and trying to fasten it to the rings on the corner. Secretariat pressed forward, nudging into Sweat, pushing and leaning over his shoulder. Sweat fumbled with the latches. The horse pressed in again, edging into Sweat. The latches rattled on the tub.