Secretariat (28 page)

Angle Light raced into the far turn and started sweeping around the bend for home. No one had moved to him down the backside, and he was still running very easily under Vasquez, who was sitting as still as a statue on his back. Velasquez waited for the red horse. And Turcotte, growing desperate as the horses made the turn, knowing that time was running out, cocked his whip, reached back, and strapped the colt. He was empty as a jug.

Angle Light raced to the three-eighths pole still a length and a half on the lead, and he was still drumrolling to the beat of twelve. They were midway of the turn, with only 660 yards to go. Velasquez, having waited long enough, decided to wait no longer. He roused Sham and asked him to move to Angle Light, who dashed past the three-eighths pole in 1:12
1
/
5
for six furlongs, almost a perfect twelve-clip. For an instant Sham closed the gap. But Vasquez, who had yet to ask Angle Light to run for him, let out a notch. Responding to him, Angle Light eased away from Sham. Turcotte, meanwhile, was pasting Secretariat around the turn for home, lashing into him with the whip. He was going nowhere. Velasquez went to the whip, too. Now Angle Light came into the straight more than a length in front of Sham. The Wood Memorial had begun.

At one point, as the horses made the turn, jockeys Larry Adams on Expropriate and Chuck Baltazar on Leo’s Pisces were drifting to last. Secretariat came past them on the outside, then edged away from them. Seeing Turcotte in trouble, Adams yelled to Baltazar, “Hey, Chuck, look at him. He ain’t gonna make it today!”

“It don’t look like it!” Baltazar hollered back.

In the box seats came the echo. Seth Hancock told Keck, “He ain’t gonna make it today, Mr. Keck.” The two men suddenly left the box, off to catch separate planes, and Hancock watched the stretch drive over his shoulder, heading toward the door.

What he saw was Sham moving to Angle Light at the top of the stretch.

There Vasquez went to work on Whittaker’s bay, urging him to ease away from Sham again. Driving to the eighth pole, he had almost two lengths on Sham. Velasquez rode furiously, pushing and bouncing him down the lane, while Vasquez did the huck-a-buck on Angle Light to keep him on the lead, shoving and driving the colt toward the eighth pole. The crowd moiled frantically. Secretariat was fourth on the outside passing the eighth pole, a full two lengths behind Sham. He was gaining only slowly, struggling with Step Nicely for third. The big money bettors who came for Secretariat had only Angle Light in the final 200 yards.

He was tiring through that final furlong, beginning to feel the twelves. He had run the mile in 1:36
4
/
5
, and he was still a length and a half in front of Sham. For all he was doing, Velasquez couldn’t cut Vasquez’s lead through the whole of the upper straight. Then suddenly he began. Passing the eighth pole, Sham gained on Angle Light, each stride cutting into Angle Light’s lead. Sham sliced it to a length, then three-quarters of a length, then a half, then a neck. Vasquez pushed Angle Light. He rode with the horse, using his weight and strength in rhythm with him. He did everything but jump off. Still Sham came to him. But Angle Light hung on. Twenty yards from the wire, heads were bobbing almost together, and Sham was gaining with each jump, though he was tiring now himself. Just as he was come to swallow Angle Light, the wire flashed by.

Angle Light won it by a head. Sham was second. Secretariat was third, four lengths behind Sham and a half length in front of Step Nicely.

“Oh, my God! What have I done now?” Edwin Whittaker said, as the horses hit the wire.

“What do you mean?” asked Jack Wainberg, a friend of Whittaker’s.

“I just buggered up the Kentucky Derby,” Whittaker said.

Chapter 23

In the box seats, Lucien Laurin looked around toward Penny saying, “Who won it?”

“You won it,” she yelled.

“Angle Light,” someone called to Laurin. “Angle Light won it.”

“Angle Light?” It was a howl of incredulity, and the expression he wore said all the rest, that he’d just won the Wood Memorial but with the wrong horse, that he’d won it with a horse he’d been insisting to Penny and everyone could not and would not beat Secretariat. Down the aisle between the box seats now, strolling toward Laurin, his white hair climbing in waves above his spectacles, came fifty-nine-year-old Edwin Whittaker. He was the center of triumph in a spectacle of gloom. Whittaker never really expected or believed that Angle Light would ever beat Secretariat. It seemed simply beyond hope. In most any other barn Angle Light would have been the big Derby horse, but in Laurin’s barn the colt was but a second-string stablemate of the most publicized and illustrious horse in America. Whittaker understood that. He was simply pleased that Laurin had brought the horse as far as he had, further than any other trainer had ever brought a horse for him. Angle Light was a contender. Actually, Whittaker did harbor one strong hope whenever Angle Light raced against Secretariat, one more poignant than any illusory dream he might have had of victory, that
maybe
Angle Light might stand up to him.

Penny saw him coming toward her, and she took a breath, as if to inflate her cheeks with a smile, and reached out saying, “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” said Whittaker. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad for you,” she said.

Penny Tweedy never liked Whittaker, but she would keep up all the appearances of gentility and gracious good-sportsmanship. Inside she was growing furious with Laurin, and at one point leaned over the railing of the box seat and said to him, “You and I have got to talk.”

Whittaker felt sorry for Laurin, and he didn’t want to cause him further anguish in public.

Laurin, his features grimly set, moved off on the long walk down the stairs and across the formal apron to the winner’s circle ceremony. Whittaker’s head rose and dipped as he walked along, acknowledging the salutations.

Crowds of people had gathered by the paddock fence. Many of them had come expecting to witness the flight of superhorse—Pegasus redivivus, a Man o’ War, a Gladiateur. They did not like what they had seen. That Angle Light had saved the hour for those who bet heavily on Secretariat, that no one who bet on the red horse actually lost money on the Wood, didn’t make any difference. Their expectations souring to bitter disappointment, they turned their derision on Laurin, Turcotte, and the red horse, who was galloping back to the unsaddling area as Laurin and Whittaker walked across the circle.

Voices cried out.

“You bum, Turcotte. You got $6 million worth of horse and you ride him like manure.”

“Whatsah mattah, Ronnie, you fall asleep out there?”

“That’s the last time you’ll ever ride that horse.”

“Where are the stewards?” said another. “A 1–5 shot runs like he’s 50–1.”

Ed Sweat led Secretariat down the racetrack, back toward the receiving barn, his face expressionless amid the taunts and boos that followed him. Henny Hoeffner led Angle Light into the winner’s circle. Pictures were snapped, and Vasquez hopped off. Laurin walked immediately to Turcotte, who had just weighed out at the scale. Turcotte’s brow was furrowed, his eyes wide open as he talked to Laurin. He looked like a man who was genuinely amazed.

“He just didn’t fire,” Turcotte said. Turcotte walked across the paddock for the jockeys’ room, descending the staircase below a crowd of bettors that jeered him raucously.

Laurin, talking to reporters, said he couldn’t explain it. “Ronnie says the horse didn’t fire,” he said. “Didn’t have his usual punch. I think they lost the race on the turn, going wide. That and the slow pace.”

Awkwardly, somewhat sheepishly, Vasquez stood around a moment as if waiting to apologize to someone, to anyone, for winning the Wood. He had ridden brilliantly, with understanding and insight, engineering the most artful upset in New York racing in the last year. Vasquez reached out his hand to Laurin.

Sitting nearby on the bench in front of his locker, a towel wrapped around him, Turcotte was listening to Vasquez expound upon the race. “I always thought Angle Light was a good colt,” Turcotte said quietly. “Never as good as Secretariat, but a good colt. I always knew he was as good as those other horses.”

The race had plainly baffled and worried him, and he was trying to make sense of it.

What puzzled him was the colt’s uncharacteristic dullness throughout the race.

That afternoon and evening—in fact for the next several days—Turcotte would examine a whole range of explanations for Secretariat’s race in the Wood, turning each one over in his mind. He was reaching for something to hold on to, for some clue to explain the horse’s lethargy, for something that might make sense to him. He knew Secretariat well by then. He had ridden him in most all major workouts and in all races since the summer past, and the race in the Wood simply didn’t figure in any pattern that he knew. The Derby was only two weeks away, which left him no time to fool himself.

Turcotte considered that Secretariat, as a son of Bold Ruler, might be out of his depth in races beyond a mile, despite the colt’s rompings in the Laurel Futurity and Garden State Stakes and the records of the several Bold Rulers who had won at a mile and a quarter. It was known as the “invisible shield” theory, and it was trotted out whenever a Bold Ruler ran brilliantly in the sprints and then stopped at nine or ten furlongs, as if running into something unseen. Turcotte also rejected a correlative belief that Secretariat, as a scion of the temperamental Nasrullah tribe, resented being taken back and rated off the pace, finally refusing to run when Ron asked him. Bold Ruler had resented Arcaro’s exertions in the 1957 Kentucky Derby, and he came up sulking down the backside. Penny Tweedy, among others, came to believe this theory to explain away the Wood.

Turcotte summarily rejected it. Never had Secretariat shown any tendency to sulk. He was not a moody horse. In all those workouts and races, Turcotte could not recall any problems of temperament. Secretariat never quit, never spit out the bit and refused to run. In fact Turcotte had come to regard him as a kind of model of tractability. He could do anything with him. Several days before the Wood, recalling races on the colt, Turcotte said he thought he had ridden him poorly in the Garden State Stakes. He took him back sharply after the break, falling many lengths behind. Secretariat didn’t sulk then.

Why suddenly now?

It made no sense to him. The colt hadn’t given off what Turcotte regarded as a vital sign of a sulker: a resentful hardening of the neck and body muscles.

Nor had he acted sickly or weak. Nor had he been walking sore. He didn’t feel limp and tired. In fact, because Secretariat didn’t feel especially “short” or tired under him, Turcotte didn’t take too seriously those who blamed the slow workout. If the work had been inadequate, which it no doubt was, at least the colt would have made his run and then tired. But he didn’t even do that.

Reluctantly, for want of a more compelling explanation, Turcotte, who still didn’t know about the abscess, finally settled on the notion that the record-tying mile in the Gotham Stakes probably sapped more out of Secretariat than anyone had realized, dulling his edges severely.

The impact of the Wood was felt at once, and reaction to it ran from the anger of Pancho and Penny to the alarm and concern of syndicate members, even to a cause for hope among owners who’d been conceding the Derby to the dominant shape of Secretariat. All bets were off. The Wood threw open wide the Derby doors—buggered it up, as Whittaker said. But more, it colored the days leading to May 5, setting the frantic pace, dictating the tone of things at Churchill Downs, and heightening the tension born of the rivalry between Secretariat and Sham. The Derby had become a horse race.

Word of Secretariat’s defeat spread swiftly from Aqueduct that day—from New York to Kentucky and Texas and Ireland and France. Telephones started ringing that evening, and they continued ringing for weeks. Many of those who had invested $190,000 in the red horse were troubled deeply over the loss. Others were not.

Meanwhile, the Blue Grass country was rampant with rumors about Secretariat physically breaking down. The rumors said the colt was walking wide in front, a sign of bad knees, though walking wide was a characteristic of many Bold Rulers. They said he had bone chips on his knees, bad ankles, more splints hurting him, and bucked shins. The place was a nest of speculation and hearsay.

In the stable area at Belmont Park, where just a month ago news of that sensational workout swept among the sheds, the Wood had vastly tempered enthusiasms for the colt. The change in attitude was swift, and it stunned syndicate member Vanderbilt, who spent his mornings in barns, coffee shops, and clockers’ sheds there. Listening to the talk, he heard knowledgeable horsemen no longer giving the colt a chance at Churchill Downs. He couldn’t believe it. In all his years at the racetrack, ever since his mother took him to Pimlico as a child, Vanderbilt had never seen such a wholesale abandonment of faith in a racehorse, or an abandonment executed with such suddenness, and all on the basis of just one race.

The Wood Memorial began something that only the Derby could resolve.

The evening of the Wood, Penny Tweedy and Laurin returned to Barn 5 at Belmont Park, and there gathered with friends and family with whom they had a dinner date at the Tweedy home in Laurel Hollow. The mood was subdued, even somber. Ron Turcotte, done working for the day, joined them as he usually did following a race. Secretariat and Angle Light, fed and cooled out, were in their stalls. Turcotte and Penny spoke briefly of the race, of his timing and even of how hard he had been working. She never told him that he ought to take time off, that perhaps he had been working
too hard,
but that was what Turcotte understood she meant.

“I don’t think you were sharp in judging the pace,” Penny told him. “Your timing could be off.”

She reminded Turcotte of Secretariat’s last workout and of an error in judgment he made while working Riva Ridge the same day. “You worked Secretariat too slow the last time you worked him a mile, and then you broke off Riva Ridge an eighth of a mile too soon in his last work,” she said. Riva Ridge was supposed to work seven-eighths, and Turcotte erred and broke him off at the mile pole, though he realized his mistake en route and compensated for it by pulling him up at the eighth pole instead of at the wire. He had no excuse for the lapse.

Turcotte agreed that he had messed up the workout; all week he had been assuming blame for it, and he would continue to take responsibility for it. Then he added, “I thought he might blow out before the race,” but he decided not to press the point. He didn’t want to imply criticism of Lucien: Laurin worked for Penny and Ron was riding the colt because Laurin put him there. Diplomatically, it would be unwise for Turcotte to criticize Laurin to his boss.

“The horse just didn’t run his race,” he told her. “I don’t feel I took too much hold of him. I got him in the clear and he just didn’t respond. I started nudging him at the three-quarter pole and there was no response.”

She believed Turcotte had misjudged the pace and let Angle Light steal away with it. In fact, she wanted to take him off Secretariat and find another jockey, but they were coming to the biggest race of all, and it would not be prudent to switch jockeys now.

She, too, knew nothing of the abscess on the upper lip.

Penny expressed no displeasure with Laurin while they gathered in the office at Belmont Park. She would not make a scene. But when the guests left for the drive to Oyster Bay, Penny and Lucien climbed into his Mercedes and drove out the stable area and through the iron gates, then up the Cross Island Parkway north toward the sound. The drive usually took about forty-five minutes, but that evening it took them longer.

It was a “terrible fight,” beginning before they reached the stable gate, and Penny started and controlled it, setting whatever thrust and intensity it had. She gave him little chance to speak in defense of himself.

For that hour, Penny vented upon Lucien all the fear, suspicion, frustration, and confusion that the running of the Wood had aroused in her. She felt he had humiliated her in public. She was chagrined, but it really went beyond chagrin. She felt she had a moral obligation and responsibility to all those people who had an interest in Secretariat—to the family and her father’s estate, to Claiborne Farm and to the syndicate members—not to put the colt in the position of embarrassing himself and harming his value. She felt they had invested their faith as well as their money in the red horse, and now her trainer had beaten him with another horse.

The ultimate chagrin was that Lucien had just told Charles Hatton the only way they could beat Secretariat was to steal the Wood. Then he up and stole it himself. And Penny was hopping mad at him. So she reproached and rebuked him the hour long, and he in turn became so furious with her that he refused to follow her directions on getting to her house.

She even wondered whether Lucien felt some obligation to Whittaker, as one Canadian to another, and then she remembered all the times she told Lucien how she feared Angle Light, and she remembered all the times he told her there was nothing to fear, and she remembered all the easy assurances of the autumn and winter past. She knew Lucien had spent his early years bumping about the leaky-roof circuit trying to win a pot to pay the bills. She thought he had entered Angle Light in the Wood as a kind of insurance—a backup in case the red horse didn’t fire.

“You got greedy . . .” she told him that evening in the car.

“I couldn’t tell the other man not to run his horse in the race,” Lucien protested.

“No you couldn’t. You’re a public trainer. Each man has his shot. But you should have warned Ronnie that this could happen.
You
had a special responsibility. Not that you shouldn’t have let Angle Light run, but
you
should have made sure that Ronnie understood your fears about him . . .
You
should have been super careful with Secretariat. We gave you a free service to him just to make sure you were careful with him. You should have taken Angle Light seriously and made sure Ronnie knew this was a real threat.”