Secretariat (30 page)

“He has never been better,” he said, leaving the clocker’s shed with a flourish. “Never! That was a
big
move!”

Sham’s work seemed to inspire and embolden Martin, for it coincided with his sudden launch into a week-long run of soliloquies denouncing Laurin and extolling the manifest gifts of Sham.

Twirling a Mexican cigar with Havana tobacco, leaning against the cinder block of Barn 42, sipping a demitasse (against doctor’s orders), and wearing a hat with a feather in it, Martin held forth among the crowds of newsmen gathered there to hear him. He was cocky, brash, and self-assured, confident of victory. He excoriated Laurin in an oratory of disdain, sarcasm, and ire.

“All you hear from Laurin is excuses, excuses, excuses, excuses. He’s got more excuses than China’s got rice, and China’s got a lot of rice. Cryin’ like a little baby. That’s not my game.” Smiling wryly he said, “It’s very coincidental that the only time Secretariat ran a bad race is the one time he met Sham. We are going to run four times against one another: the Wood, the Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont stakes. We’ll see who’s the best out of the four. If he beats me, I’ll say he’s better. We’ll see who’s the best. If he beats me more than I beat him—if he beats me three out of four—I’ll take my hat off and congratulate him and say, ‘You got the best horse.’ ”

Martin took off his hat and put it back on. “In my estimation, I got the best horse. My horse is in top condition. He loves the track. And I got Pincay. What more do I want? I have the best horse in the country. But the only way we can find out is running over there.”

Pancho jabbed his cigar toward the racetrack in the distance. “And I ain’t gonna have no excuses.”

Chapter 24

It was the evening of Tuesday, May 1, for Turcotte the close of a long and nervous day, and he was hoping to relax. He had just arrived in Kentucky from New York, following a five-hour journey that left him frazzled and edgy in his room at the Executive Inn. He had ridden all morning at Belmont Park and all afternoon at Aqueduct. When the last race was over, he showered hurriedly, climbed into a pair of jeans, a work shirt, and his Meadow Stable jacket and took off with his agent for Kennedy where he had to catch a helicopter shuttle to Newark Airport. Nothing went easily on that trip: Kennedy was under a heavy fog when Turcotte got there, and all chopper flights had been grounded. He rented a limousine to take him across the two rivers to Jersey and brooded all the way about missing his flight and being stranded in New York.

Turcotte was going to Louisville to ride Secretariat in his most important workout so far that year, the colt’s final major drill for the Kentucky Derby. Turcotte hadn’t liked that first workout at Churchill Downs, and now he was anxious to try him again, hoping he had returned to what he had been. The work would give some indication of the kind of colt he would be riding Saturday.

The limousine deposited him at Newark on time. Then the plane was late. Restless still, he glanced at his watch and paced the terminal. It was raining. By the time he arrived in Louisville and checked into his room, he had a headache and felt uncomfortable. He took a sleeping pill and went downstairs to have a cup of tea, something to settle him. As he crossed the lobby, Turcotte spotted Eddie Arcaro.

They sat down at a table by a window overlooking a fountain, a statue, and a waterwheel, and Arcaro settled into his chair with a martini, Turcotte with a brandy on the rocks. Arcaro was good company. Turcotte was feeling better already. Arcaro asked about Secretariat’s race in the Wood, a race he’d won on Bold Ruler sixteen years ago. Arcaro, like many horsemen, had doubts about Secretariat and the whole three-year-old crop, and he expressed them publicly before the week was out: “There isn’t a standout horse in the field. This is not a good three-year-old year. It’s hard to explain why it happens this way. No one knows if Secretariat can go a mile and a quarter.”

“This horse doesn’t have to go a distance, you know,” Arcaro continued to Turcotte. “Bold Ruler wasn’t a true distance horse. I remember a horse I never thought could go the distance in the Derby: Whirlaway. When Mrs. Markey asked me to ride him, I didn’t want to. Ben Jones told me, ‘Don’t worry about the horse. He’ll go the distance. But for God’s sake ride him the way I tell you.’ ” Arcaro told Turcotte the story of Whirlaway and how Ben Jones said no one could beat him sprinting and the idea was to save Whirlaway’s speed and let him gallop along easily for the first part of the Derby and then bust him loose in the late stages. Turcotte paid close attention to the master as he sipped his brandy, and he got the strong feeling that Arcaro was trying to tell him something about how to win a Kentucky Derby with a horse who didn’t want to go that far.

He had already given much thought to how he was going to ride Secretariat on Saturday. Among Laurin and Penny and others there was some sentiment for sending the horse early—right out of the gate—and lying close to the front from the start. But Turcotte mulled over what Arcaro told him. He believed Secretariat could go the distance, but he wasn’t absolutely certain of it—no one was, because he hadn’t done it yet.

“I know he can beat any horse in the country going a mile,” said Turcotte. “It’s that extra quarter. But, I really think he can go on.”

“I sure hope you’re right,” said Arcaro. “I got him in a pool in Florida.”

At 5:47 the next morning the rows of sheds were coming alive at the Downs. Television film crews patrolled between the barns and racetrack. Newspaper reporters trundled from shed to shed.

Down the shed from Barn 42, horses were grazing on the strips of grass beside their barns. Handlers held them by leather shanks. It was already Wednesday, only three days from the Kentucky Derby, and stable hands could feel it coming, the gathering bustle and the stirring of hope.

Lucien Laurin and Penny Tweedy arrived by 7:25 that morning, and Laurin approached the stall holding part of the bridle and the blinkers, putting them under Secretariat’s nose and saying, as if peeking into a crib, “If you’re a good boy, you’ll let me put this on.” Turcotte helped him, and the two men huddled talking in the shed.

Whatever Lucien Laurin was—excited or strained or tired—he was not confused about how to train the red horse for the ninety-ninth Kentucky Derby. He had his back against the wall. He appeared as if he had it all to do, and more. He was at his finest when the crunch was on, when he was under the severest pressures, for he seemed to train then with the sharpest insight and perception. He appeared harassed, and often angry and worried. At times he seemed frantic, trying to put down the stories of unsoundness, but he never lost track of what he was doing.

The rumors of unsoundness exasperated Lucien, following him from New York to Louisville to Lexington, and wherever he went people asked him if it were true that the colt was standing in ice or had a bad knee.

If the condition of Secretariat’s knees had been discussed sotto voce at the racetrack, after the Wood it became an open debate. Newspapers and wire services gave space to the circulation of the rumors, adding substance to their otherwise vaporous shapes. Hearsay was juxtaposed with fact, without any attempt at verification from a primary source. The Associated Press, for instance, ran a widely circulated story on April 26 in which the reporter interviewed the noted Las Vegas oddsmaker, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, and quoted Nevada’s leading expert on Secretariat’s knees as follows:

I just don’t like Secretariat—I don’t know why, I just don’t like Secretariat. I said before the Wood Memorial that this horse had no right to be a 1–5 odds-on choice. The race bore me out. . . . I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I still think they’re putting ice packs on Secretariat’s knees.

Jimmy the Greek had never been to the barn at Belmont Park, and he was handicapped by a somewhat limited understanding of the sport, as witnessed by his immortal explanation for Secretariat’s defeat in the Wood: “Maybe the pace was so slow Secretariat thought it was just a workout.”

In Louisville, the day before the workout, the estimable
Louisville Courier Journal
ran a story on the front page of its sports section in which the Associated Press reporter quoted H. A. (Jimmy) Jones as saying:

It doesn’t measure up as a good field. There are some good horses running, no great ones. No superstars . . . I don’t know about Secretariat. He has good breeding and his record was good coming into the Wood Memorial. But he ran as if something was pinching him. I keep hearing reports that there is some heat in his leg somewhere and he is being treated with ice packs, but Lucien denies it. Some people around the stables insist it’s true.

Laurin came to Kentucky in an announced search for Secretariat’s redemption, and if he worried privately about the colt’s ability to go the distance, publicly he remained confident.

On Wednesday morning, preparing for the redemption and convinced he was bringing the colt to the Derby off the right workouts, Laurin gave Turcotte the same instructions he did before the colt worked the sensational three-eighths of a mile that day before the Bay Shore. Wednesday was the end of a four-month program of races and workouts, all aiming ultimately for this Saturday.

“Let him bounce, Ronnie,” Lucien told Turcotte under the shed. “Don’t punish him, but let him roll.”

They had put blinkers on him as a signal to Secretariat that serious work was at hand, and Laurin raised Turcotte aboard. As Turcotte gathered up the reins, Lucien and Penny left hastily for the clubhouse to watch the workout from the homestretch side of the oval, rather than the backstretch clocker’s shed. They did not know the clubhouse doors were locked.

The newsmen and stable hands followed Secretariat into a drizzle to the racetrack. Cameras whirred as men walked backward, while Billy Silver pricked his ears and swipes and hot walkers stopped work as the entourage passed. Secretariat ground the bit in his mouth—his eyes flicking, rimmed in white—and turning to the touch, he galloped off on the sloppy track. Turcotte warmed him up well, while Laurin and Penny went from one entrance to the next, trying frantically to hail a guard to let them in. All the gates were locked.

Turcotte galloped Secretariat past the clocker’s shed, where a large group of reporters gathered, and then took the colt to the five-eighths pole and aimed him toward the far turn. Coming to the pole, Turcotte took a hold and clucked to Secretariat. Turcotte’s blue and white jacket started billowing out in back, and as he passed the pole he chirped again and again and felt the red horse accelerate.

He plunged for the far turn, Turcotte sitting quietly on him, and raced for the bend in an opening quarter of 0:23
4
/
5
. Now he started picking it up, faster and faster, as they raced for the quarter pole and the turn for home. They went the third eighth in 0:11
1
/
5
, and the fourth in 0:12 for a half mile in 0:47. He was pounding for the wire, while in the clubhouse Laurin and Penny rose just in time to see him work the final eighth. Turcotte sent him through a final 220 yards in 0:11
3
/
5
. He finished out the five-eighths in 0:58
3
/
5
. Turcotte stood straight-legged at the wire, and Secretariat galloped out another eighth in 0:13
2
/
5
for a six-furlong clocking of 1:12.

At the clocker’s shed a man came walking past on a pony. “Man,” he said, “that big son of a gun went around there like a train. What did you get him in up there?” he asked.

“Fifty-eight and two,” someone shouted. A fifth of a second fast.

“See,” he said to a companion. “I knew that son of a gun was rolling.”

Turcotte pulled the red horse up around the turn and came past again, slowly, then to a stop. He was smiling.

Secretariat was back again, and Turcotte knew it.

Laurin and Penny missed the workout, and when they returned to the barn and got the report they were visibly aggravated that they hadn’t seen the show.

Like Sham, Secretariat was coming to the Derby off a sharp final drill, the kind on which the red horse thrived. He was eating sixteen quarts of grain a day, seven more than the average horse, and most of it in noncrushed oats, and he needed hard work to burn it off and keep him fit. With age he could endure more and even harder work than ever, far more than most horses. That was not so with Angle Light. He ran better off slower works, not needing such tighteners before a race. Angle Light was training for more than the Kentucky Derby on that Wednesday morning. Whittaker was aiming him for a larger pot.

In the wake of the Wood Memorial, the price of Angle Light soared from an estimated $200,000 to more than $1 million—all because he beat the Horse of the Year, the Derby favorite, the $6.08 million stud horse. For Whittaker this was the time to sell and he began considering offers of as much as $1.5 million for Angle Light. He had the colt shipped to Kentucky, meanwhile, though he was convinced he wouldn’t be running him in the Derby. Whittaker believed the bay would be sold by then. One of the offers was for $1.25 million, and Whittaker was seriously entertaining it. Under the proposal, Whittaker would sell the colt to a breeding syndicate of seven members, and he would receive the money in three payments, with the last two installments payable at 6 percent interest: $400,000 on May 5, 1973; $425,000 on May 5, 1974; and $425,000 on May 5, 1975.

Penny Tweedy’s feelings of enmity toward Whittaker, which the Wood Memorial aroused, had not subsided in the week following the race. They didn’t spring from anything substantial. Whittaker had never said or done anything to hurt her. Laurin took charge of Angle Light’s training in the winter of 1972 at Hialeah—about the same time he started training Secretariat—at the urging of Ron Turcotte, who was Whittaker’s friend and a fellow Canadian. Penny resented Laurin’s taking Angle Light, and she came to feel that Whittaker had somehow “wormed his way in” to the Laurin barn. She was offended by Whittaker’s deferential manner, for another thing, and regarded it as insincere.

None of this, though, went to the root of why she was coming to feel such hostility toward Whittaker, who was unaware that he was the object of such powerful emotion. She was still wondering where Lucien’s loyalties lay and wondering what, if any, feelings of obligation he had to Whittaker. She was still grappling with the anxieties that had surfaced in the wreckage of the Wood, and she felt strongly that she had to remove Whittaker from the scene.

Knowing generally how she felt, Laurin saw the potential for conflict if Whittaker were to arrive at the barn while she was there. If it was any consolation to him, at least Secretariat and Angle Light got along, eyeing one another docilely from their adjoining stalls.

Laurin sought to avoid clash and confrontation. One day following the Wood, when Penny was at Belmont Park to watch Riva Ridge work out, Lauren asked Turcotte to head Whittaker off at the Belmont stable gate and arrange to keep him occupied until Penny left the barn.

Whittaker talked to Laurin alone in the racing secretary’s office. Laurin told him he thought he could sell Angle Light. “Would you take a million and a half for him?”

“Sure,” said Whittaker.

“I’ll know by Tuesday.”

With that, Edwin Whittaker flew to Kentucky. He went to work on the $1.25 million syndication deal while Laurin moved to sell the colt for $1.5 million. Events moved quickly in Kentucky as the Derby neared. By Wednesday morning, the day of the workout, Laurin’s efforts to sell the colt had failed, but Whittaker was still in touch with the Kentucky syndicate. The deadline for the sale was that night. There had been delay in putting the syndicate together, and some of the prospective members of the syndicate wanted to watch Angle Light work that Wednesday morning. Turcotte was given to understand that he was working Angle Light for the benefit of prospective buyers, and he later recalled telling Whittaker that a fast workout would knock the colt out of the running for the ninety-ninth Kentucky Derby.