Secretariat (25 page)

Sweat shouted finally, turning his head and glaring at the colt, who pricked his ears and nickered back.

Lucien was back at Belmont Park the following morning, April 2, planning his moves and taking time to watch Secretariat roll in his stall and kick his feet in the air. Lucien was now measuring each step to the Triple Crown, considering all the possibilities, anticipating and adjusting to and for whatever might affect the health, happiness, well-being, and peace of mind of the red horse. The stress on Laurin fluctuated, alternately easing and intensifying in these closing weeks.

A serious cold or illness on the eve of a major prep race for the Kentucky Derby could force a change in plan, throwing off the schedule leading to Louisville. The New York series, if followed as Laurin planned to follow it, would not leave a horse unfit at Churchill Downs on Derby Day—not for lack of racing. The Swift was six furlongs, the Bay Shore was seven, the Gotham eight, and the Wood Memorial nine. One race led naturally to the next, building a horse’s conditioning. A cold, forcing Laurin to suspend important training or to bypass one of the races, would then require him to improvise and try to make up for time lost. That was a dangerous game. The Derby was May 5, less than a month after the Gotham Stakes, and it left little time to lose. Laurin had to work and race Secretariat to reach a physical peak for the Derby, then hope he could sustain that for both the Preakness and the Belmont stakes. He was involved in an orchestration of the horse’s energies, a heightening and intensifying of them.

On the morning of March 23, he sent Secretariat through a half-mile workout in 0:48. It pleased him momentarily. Back at the barn, he was at the door of the shed when Secretariat walked past. Then the red horse coughed once, twice, hollowly. Laurin did a double take. Turning, he said something to a stable worker, who told him that the colt had been coughing off and on for about five days.

No one had told him of this, and that morning he’d worked the horse a half at a twelve-clip. Laurin was beside himself, twirling once around, pointing his finger in the air, raising his voice and saying, “I want to know every time he farts!”

His regular veterinarian, Mike Gerard, stopped by the office later that morning and said there was a cough going around. He then suggested something for it, and Lucien jumped as if a gun had gone off behind him.

“No shots!” he said. “I don’t want no shots for him, Mike.
No shots!
”

The cough disappeared that week, on its own, and Lucien had Secretariat out blazing a mile in 1:35
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on March 28, five days later, galloping out an extra eighth of a mile in 0:13
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for a full mile and an eighth in 1:48
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, sensational time even on that fast Belmont track. The 1:48
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was time that equaled the Wood Memorial Stakes record set by Bold Ruler in 1957. Three days later Laurin was in Louisiana for Angle Light’s race at the Fair Grounds. Two days later, on April 3, he was supervising Secretariat’s final workout for the Gotham Stakes, but it fell short of his hopes. Thirteen seconds into the move, Turcotte and Secretariat were running past the half-mile pole. Laurin caught the next eighth in 0:13, for a quarter in 0:26.

“That’s too slow,” Lucien said. Secretariat had breezed through the first three furlongs in 0:39, a thirteen-clip, hardly enough to draw from him a deep breath.

They picked up speed through the lane, running the fourth eighth in 0:12
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.

“Now he’s letting him fly,” said Laurin. The colt went the final eighth in 0:11
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, going the five-eighths in 1:03, the final quarter in 0:24. Lucien didn’t appear pleased. Shrugging, he sighed, and headed back to the barn to gather with newsmen. There were just four days to the Gotham, and the name Secretariat was stirring interest in the media. A television crew was in the yard, for the first time, as well as the newspaper reporters. The slow workout drew only mild notice. The red horse, not the workout, was the event that they came to see.

“What about these advance notices that he’s a superhorse?” the TV man asked Laurin, who answered without hesitation, “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a superhorse. But he has done everything beautiful.”

Around the walking ring outdoors, with Turcotte on his back, walked Riva Ridge, still months away from the races. Secretariat, walking inside the shed, was cooling out.

“What chance does Secretariat have in the Triple Crown?”

Seeing Riva Ridge, Laurin said, “Last year I thought
he
had the shot of his life. This horse has a good chance. You never know from one day to another, to be honest with you.” Nearby, Penny was talking to someone of the pressures they had felt in the Bay Shore Stakes—since that was the horse’s first start—and then was trying to explain what Lucien had in mind with the red horse. As usual, she was articulate and informative. “He’s aiming the horse to reach his peak for the Triple Crown,” she said. At one point, looking at Riva Ridge, she told a reporter, “There’s a
real
Derby winner.” He was still her golden boy.

“A horse has to prove himself,” Laurin was saying. “They’re going back years when they compare him with Man o’ War.”

“Can you compare Secretariat’s temperament with Riva Ridge’s?” someone asked him.

“They’re both very intelligent horses.”

“Why does Secretariat insist on coming from the backstretch to win?”

“Horses are different. Riva Ridge was a frontrunner, and this horse comes from behind.”

“Aside from the bloodlines, what makes Secretariat great?”

“I wish to God I knew.”

The media were moving in. And so, too, were the odds makers, bringing Delphi to Reno, Nevada. Later in the morning, Laurin came into the office kitchen wearing an overcoat speckled here and there with mud, pulled it off and walked to the stove. Turcotte, his coffee cup half filled, smoking a cigarette, sat intently reading the front page of the
Daily Racing Form
, specifically a one-column story headlined: “Secretariat Even Money for Derby.”

So the odds makers were at work again. Five days earlier, on March 28, the
Form
had carried a story saying that the Reno Turf Club had made Secretariat the 6–5 choice to win the ninety-ninth running of the Kentucky Derby. Now they had shaved him another point, making him even money.

Turcotte read the last paragraph of the story aloud: “As an added fillip, North Swanson, operator of the Future Book, posted Secretariat at 5–2 to capture the Triple Crown—the Derby, Preakness and Belmont stakes.”

There was a silence in the room.

“Jesus Christ,” Laurin said. “Can you imagine 5–2 to win the Triple Crown?” His words measured, he added, “I wouldn’t bet him if he were 10–1. I wouldn’t bet $2. No . . . sir!”

Lucien walked toward the door, as if the thought were gradually dawning in its entirety on him: he was the trainer of a son of Bold Ruler who was worth $6.08 million as a stud horse, who had never run farther than a mile and a sixteenth, who was 6–5 to win the one-and-a-quarter-mile Kentucky Derby and 5–2 to sweep the Triple Crown, including the one-and-a-half-mile Belmont Stakes.

The red horse walked the next day, Wednesday, and Gaffney galloped him Thursday and Friday, letting him stretch out through the lane the day before the race. Hopping off, heading into the tack room, Gaffney said, “I let him gallop out a little through the stretch to blow him out for the race tomorrow. He’ll win. I don’t know who could beat him. He’s absolutely super. That track is going to be lightning fast. If he gets rollin’ and no one gets in his way, he could shoot for a record.” Gaffney entered the tack room. Cleaning off the saddle, he said, “You haven’t seen the best of Secretariat yet. Believe me. I think he’s much better now than he was for the Bay Shore. He’s just gettin’ sharp and good. I have known him a year this month, and I know him like a book.”

Secretariat, with a hot walker at his head, turned the corner at the top of the shed and moved powerfully down the aisle past the stalls. Ed Sweat, standing at the door of the colt’s stall, watched him pass, leaning on the fork. “He trained real good for this race. He’s edgy. The Ridge was the same way when he was two and three. But The Ridge has settled down quite a bit. He’s already been through the hard campaign.”

Eddie Sweat was awake before five the next morning, and he was at the barn by 5:30, pulling up to the shed in his car, buying his usual cup of regular coffee, and walking down the shed in the half dark.

Sweat ducked inside the stall and checked the feed tub and the pail. All was as he wanted it. The colt had been fed several quarts of dry oats at three o’clock that morning, and he had finished it, always a sign of good health. Then Sweat cleaned the stall, and so tipped off the red horse that the day would not be an ordinary one—that, in fact, it would be a racing day: he didn’t replace the dirty straw with fresh.

“He knows what’s happening now,” Sweat said later that morning. “He ain’t got no hay in the back and he ain’t got no fresh straw in the stall. I didn’t change it this morning. I never do on a day he runs. He won’t eat dirty straw. He’s a smart rascal. He knows what’s happening. Look at him. He’s quiet now. He don’t want to be bothered.” As always on a day he raced, Secretariat hung morosely about the back of the stall.

Outside the sun was up, dappling the ground in shadows. The pregnant cat was lying on a red and black trunk inside the tack room. The morning had an edge to it: the colt was running that day. The front page of the
Racing Form
read: “Secretariat 1–5 in Big A’s Gotham.”

In the office, Laurin had just gotten off the telephone when Marshall Cassidy, the assistant track announcer, appeared at the door of the office. Cassidy bowed his head, as if reporting for duty, and said, “Lucien, I have a group of students with me from New York University who would like to see Secretariat. Is there any chance?”

“You know it’s not a good day,” said Lucien.

“Okay, if you don’t . . .” Cassidy started to leave.

“No, no. It’s okay,” said Lucien, who was always too nice to refuse a friend. “Just don’t let them stay too long.”

Cassidy made the formal introduction for the group of students: “This,” he said, “is Secretariat.”

There was a rush of murmurs.

Then a formal farewell and the group was gone. “I’ll never get my work done here,” said Sweat. “He wants to be left alone. Everybody’s coming by this morning.”

They were harbingers all. More and more was being said and written about the colt and the Kentucky Derby, even more now of the Triple Crown. It was a refreshing turn for those involved in the sport. Racing scandals had recently rocked political foundations in Illinois, ruining former governor Otto Kerner, while allegations of horse drugging had been made in a widely publicized congressional inquiry. Racing needed a hero, a symbol and a standard of the game as sport. It needed a horse to fire the imagination of the nonracing public, a winner of the Triple Crown—the most glamorous of racing’s accolades—and the red horse was nearing odds-on.

Near noon that morning of the Gotham, Laurin jumped into his car, zipped out of the stable area, and drove off to Aqueduct, about ten miles southwest of Belmont Park, to meet for an interview with television producer Tommy Roberts. He sped down the Cross Island Parkway like a jockey, pulled into Aqueduct, and came to a halt near the barns along the backstretch. There, waiting at the mouth of the chute, where it joins the backstretch of the Big A, were Roberts, cameramen, jockey Turcotte, and the old master, Eddie Arcaro.

“Hi, Eddie,” said Laurin, beaming.

“Hi, Lucius,” said Arcaro, who always called him Lucius.

The day was bright and blue at the seven-eighths pole of the racetrack, 220 yards down from the end of the chute, where the one-mile Gotham would begin later that afternoon. The conversation dwelled on Secretariat. Arcaro, known as old “Banana Nose” to every horseplayer who ever made a bet at old Aqueduct, old Jamaica, or old Belmont Park, looked snappy in the sunlight in his red pants and a striped sports coat and a tan that spoke of fairways and putting greens.

“Secretariat is one of the prettiest horses I ever saw,” Arcaro said. “In fact, going back in my memory, the only horse I ever saw any prettier was Eight-Thirty. Remember Eight-Thirty?” Turcotte shook his head, Laurin nodded, acknowledging the generation gap. “Eight-Thirty looked like a show horse,” said Arcaro.

He presided for the moment—articulate, informed, recalling the past with clarity and relish, talking about the 1948 Kentucky Derby and the Calumet Farm entry of Citation. He talked about Nashua, the brilliant son of Nasrullah on whom he had won the Preakness and Belmont stakes in 1955, and of Swaps, the colt who beat Nashua in the Kentucky Derby. “Oh, Swaps was a great horse,” said Arcaro. “I’ll never forget the Washington Park Handicap in Chicago. I was on Summer Tan and we went to the half-mile pole in 0:44
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, and around the turn I looked over at Swaps next to me and Shoemaker had Swaps’s neck bowed. I couldn’t believe it. And he looked like he was running easily. When I got off, Sherrill Ward—he was training Summer Tan—he said to me, ‘What the hell were you running so fast for so early?’ We’d done six furlongs in 1:07
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. I said to Sherrill that Swaps was next to me and his neck was bowed. Sherrill said, ‘No!’ I said, ‘We’ll go look at the films!’ Swaps was probably the worst managed horse in history. There is no telling how great Swaps would have been if he’d been managed right. No telling.”

“They scratched a good horse today, Step Nicely,” said Laurin at one point.

“If I had your horse, I wouldn’t worry about anyone,” said Arcaro.

“I don’t like all the talk of superhorse,” said Laurin. “I really don’t.”

Tommy Roberts organized the Arcaro and Turcotte filming. Roberts would ask a question about Citation and Secretariat; Arcaro would answer for Citation, Turcotte for Secretariat.