Secretariat (39 page)

Pancho was also planning to enter Knightly Dawn in the Belmont. He was the colt who came into Linda’s Chief in the Santa Anita Derby, but there seemed no way that Pancho could beat the red horse other than with Sham. Speed would only help Secretariat, set it up for him, so Knightly Dawn would work for Secretariat as well as Sham. The Belmont was the center of discussion at the racetrack for a full three weeks preceding it, among trainers and grooms, hot walkers and track officials. Only a handful thought Sham had a chance. One was John Parisella, a youthful trainer and a man far closer to Martin than to Laurin.

“If I was in Frank’s position,” Parisella said one day at the racetrack, “I would say his best chance to beat Secretariat is to go to the front and dictate the pace. Lucien Laurin had better take the lead. Martin actually believes he has the better horse. All he wants is a clean-run race. If Sham goes to the front with slow fractions, Secretariat is going to have to go get him. This is a grueling distance and Sham is eligible to beat Secretariat. It’s not as simple as some people might make it seem.”

But Parisella and Martin were in the smallest of minorities as Belmont Day approached. Most of the intelligent trainers, such as Phil Johnson, were speculating on the length of victory rather than on the strategy.

“If Knightly Dawn goes out there and sets the pace, he’ll make it a true race,” said Johnson. “And if it’s a true race, Secretariat will win it. Turcotte has only two things to worry about. If the pace is too slow, he has to go to the front. If the pace is too fast, he has to sit still for a while. All this psychology—whether Knightly Dawn or Sham will go to the lead—doesn’t make any difference. They’re not going to unnerve Turcotte, who sits so cool on a horse. If Frank was dealing with anything but that big red bombshell, it might work. But not against him.” Many horsemen felt that way; that there was no fair way he could be beat. And that feeling set the tone of things.

The fact is that the Belmont Stakes was not to be seen as a race but rather as a coronation. All that remained to speculate was the margin of Secretariat’s victory, his running time, the incidentals. However he won it, whether by two and a half lengths—as he had won the Derby and the Preakness—whether by five or by ten lengths, the important thing was that he win. And there seemed no doubt of that. Victory would be enough to satisfy a public that had waited all these years to see a racehorse win the Triple Crown.

Turcotte sensed he was riding possibly the greatest horse that had ever lived. One evening, he and Lucien had dinner at a restaurant in Valley Stream, Long Island, then drove to Belmont Park and to Barn 5. They had each been drinking. They stood together outside the barn and talked. It was very late and it was dark. Outside the shed, Turcotte said to Lucien, “He’s the greatest horse that ever looked through a bridle.”

“Do you think so, Ronnie,” said Lucien. “Do you
really
think so?”

“If we don’t win the Belmont,” said Turcotte, “I might as well pack my tack and leave New York.”

“You?” said Lucien. “What about me?”

So Turcotte came to the race supremely confident, talking about winning as he rarely did. At the Belmont Ball on Thursday night, Turcotte accepted accolades for his victory on Riva Ridge the year before. The winner of the Belmont is honored at the ball the following year. Turcotte told the formal gathering of socially elite from the Jockey Club: “If it’s a clean race, I’ll be back here next year.” As he sat down at the table, his wife Gaetane whispered, “Ron! You never talk that way. I hope you didn’t jinx him.” Sitting back in his chair, Turcotte lit a thin cigar and sipped his drink.

Laurin, as cautious as he had been, got caught up in the air of coronation in the final days before the race. There had been speculation on the running time, some believing a record was possible. The Belmont main track had been lightning fast the week before the race, but it had slowed through the final days. The talk of a record Belmont Stakes had tailed off. Andy Beyer would predict 2:27, two-fifths of a second slower than Gallant Man’s track mark, if Secretariat ran a speed figure of 129, as he had done at Churchill Downs and Pimlico. Of the winning margin there was some conjecture. Some thought the margin would be a repeat of the Derby and the Preakness. Others thought that, with the added distance, Secretariat might win by five, perhaps more.

Lucien had his own ideas. He knew the colt was at his peak in physical condition, wound up and ticking since that final sharpener in 0:46
3
/
5
, and the night before the race he abandoned all caution.

“I think he’ll win by more than he’s ever won by in his life,” said Lucien. “I think he’ll probably win by ten. What do you think of that?”

Chapter 28

It is four sharp on Saturday morning at Belmont Park, and Pinkerton guard Joe Fanning sits framed against the light of the tack room door in Barn 5, hunched forward in his chair and snapping off the playing cards in front of him. The Belmont Stakes is thirteen hours away, and the imminence of it pervades the silence of shed row and the world of the horses sleeping in it. The air is warm and a wind is blowing from the sound, turning the leaves on the row of trees by the street lamps of the stable area. A tire screeches occasionally along Hempstead Turnpike, which runs alongside the stable. A rooster crows. The night is cricketless. Nightwatchman Clem Kenyon has just fed Secretariat his single quart of uncrushed oats, the limited ration of grain on the day of a race, and now Kenyon is gone and Secretariat is finished with it. He is lying down again, his legs folded under him in Stall 7. Breathing deeply, his sides rising and falling like bellows, he is asleep.

It is 5:10. Secretariat, on his feet, pokes his head outside the stall and looks at Henny Hoeffner. Henny sees him, stops and looks him up and down, very slowly, and walks on. More men emerge from the doorway. Screens slam. The coffee truck idles past, stops. Seth Hancock, intense and uncommunicative, emerges from the complex of ground-floor rooms by the barn and walks down the road to another shed. Ed Sweat arrives in his Dodge at 5:25, and moments later stable foreman Ted McClain strolls by, too. They are coming to work. There is muttering, the sipping of coffee, lips smacking.

“I can hardly wait to see this day over with,” says McClain.

“This is it,” responds Sweat. “I’m as ready now as I can get.”

Sweat ambles down the aisle of the shed, passing the rows of stalls, and on the way calls Secretariat’s name. The colt sticks his head from the doorway and pricks his ears and flips his nose in the air. Setting his coffee down across the aisle from him, Sweat crosses over to see him. “Hey, Red,” he says. “Let me get old Big Red ready here.”

The routines begin. Sweat spreads a piece of burlap cloth in front of the stall and begins piling it with large forkfuls of old straw and moist bedding and manure, whistling and chattering with his red horse. A rake leans tipped against the webbing, and Secretariat suddenly grabs it, seizing the handle in his teeth. He scrapes it across the aisle in front of him, then pulls it back into the stall. Grooms stop, look, and laugh.

The activity at the barn picks up, the rich composts of straw and hay rising in front of all the stalls down the shed.

Davis leads the colt out of the stall and into the fresh light of the walking ring in the paddock. A thin dirt path traces the circle, perhaps 100 feet around, passing the shed and the pony stalls, passing the chain and wooden fences and the spigot where the grooms come to fill their buckets with water. Caring for the ponies in the stalls, Robin Edelstein rattles a bucket on the wall, and the effect is of an explosion under Secretariat, who leaps high on his hindlegs in the air and paws at the sky, a bronze general’s horse in Central Park. He rises high above Davis, who looks up, cowering, and snatches the chain that connects them.

Floating down, Secretariat prances around the ring, his neck bowed and drawn up tightly beneath the throat, kicking dirt and cinders in the air, spraying the walls of the pony shed, jumping again, shifting left and right. He has never been so fit. In all these past three months, from the days leading to the Bay Shore Stakes, he has never seemed so sharp. Robin Edelstein rattles the bucket again and he rises up once more, towering above Davis, higher this time, his hindlegs almost straight, and coming down he dances off sideways, his nostrils flared and snorting, his eyes darting, islands of brown in pools of white. The final half-mile drill in 0:46
3
/
5
has ground him so fine at the edges, leaving him sharper than he has ever been. He moves as if on springs, bouncing when he walks, aglide, and those who pass him stop to look in wonder at the sight. Now Davis is talking almost incessantly to him, trying to calm the colt and keep him on his feet. Davis tugs on the chain. A plane flies overhead and Secretariat stops and raises his head and watches it, turning his head slowly as it passes off to Kennedy. There is noise as a set of horses passes by and he lunges forward again, up and down twice, spinning on his hooves, and kicks and then goes up once more. He comes down moving as if in dressage, his neck arched in a crest, which accentuates the power, while his back and shoulders are roped with muscles taut beneath a dappling coat that shifts with light.

Trainer Bill Stephans rides by on horseback and stops to watch Secretariat play. “Looks good, don’t he?” he says.

Henny Hoeffner comes by.

“Okay, Charlie,” says Henny. Davis shortens his hold on the shank and leads the red horse back inside the shed, then up the aisle and into Stall 7. He has been out eighteen minutes. He will not leave the stall again until he walks to the paddock for the Belmont Stakes.

Secretariat is back in his stall at 6:15, and five minutes later Lucien Laurin arrives in his gray Mercedes.

“He was buckin’ and playin’ the whole time he was out this mornin’,” someone says to him.

“That’s good. That’s good. Means he feels good.”

Henny Hoeffner has already organized the morning on his clipboard, orchestrated it through to its conclusion, and Lucien wanders about abstractedly for a moment, peering into stalls, the tack room, and finally into Stall 7 to see the red horse.

Horses are going out now in sets, and Lucien and Henny follow Capital Asset and Capito, the two half brothers, out the gate and to the track to watch them exercise.

So the morning passes in review—bays and chestnuts, grays and browns, galloping slowly past, working out.

By ten o’clock news and TV men have begun to stop by the barn. The day has grown oppressively muggy, and the last of the horses are back in the barn. In the paddock, Billy Silver, who will take Secretariat to post for the Belmont Stakes, is now limping about heroically on a sore foot. Beseechingly, Charlie Davis takes him around and around to help work out the kinks.

“Come on, Billy,” says Davis. “Can’t stop on us now.”

Mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, Lucien looks at Billy Silver and shakes his head and flees the heat to his air-conditioned office. He sits down on the couch, his face red, and rubs his face once more. Turcotte is there talking to CBS commentator Frank Wright. Jack Whitaker asks Laurin how he is doing.

“I’ve done my part,” Lucien tells him. “It’s up to the master now. God almighty. I’m glad it’s close to the end. It’s getting rough and tough. It’s beginning to get the best of me, so help me. Everyone expects him to do so much. That’s what bothers me.”

Tony Leonard, the photographer, approaches Laurin with a proposal for pictures. Lucien is beginning to fret and pace the floor. “
The
Blood-Horse
is putting out a special supplement—twenty-four pages—that they’re going to send to every racetrack around the world,” said Leonard. “They want me to get pictures of you, Secretariat, the groom. Do you think I can get some of those?” The question is inappropriate for the moment, and Lucien’s voice seems to teeter on his words, his voice dry with impatience.

“No one under the shed!” he says. “No one! I’m lucky
I
can get under the shed today.”

There are still the big and small decisions to be made. Sweat knocks on the door. “Which of these nose bands do you want to wear—the blue or the white one?”

“The white,” says Lucien.

The day’s pressing work is done. It is 10:30. The horses eat a normal lunch, though Secretariat’s is cut to one quart of dry oats from the regular regimen of three. Ed Sweat turns inward. He crushes out a cigarette.

“He’s in the back of the stall. He knows. He knows and he don’t want to bother. He’s thinkin’ about it.” Excusing himself, he walks to the middle of the shed and turns on the spigot, and for the next hour sits cleaning the leather halters and lead shanks with soap and water. The morning lurches on toward noon. Lucien has borne up well under the strain, and now he is giving a tour of his barn to a visiting dignitary. Moments later he is raving about a horse he had just sold who, he has just discovered, is a cribber given to gulping air. Secretariat gazes impassively at Laurin as he passes the stall. He pricks his ears and listens, then calmly turns to his hay. Fifteen minutes later the shed is empty and cool again, and the wind is moving through it and waving the manes of the horses looking out their stalls, though Secretariat remains at the back of his. Sweat washes towels. Outside the crowd is coming to Belmont Park in endless caravans of cars and buses strung along Hempstead Avenue and the parkway. The lots fill quickly. From the shed you can hear the lot attendants hollering and directing lines of traffic.

There are 67,605 persons coming to Belmont Park—the Taj Mahal of American racing—and they come fully expecting to see a coronation. They jostle through the clubhouse and the dining rooms, among the grandstand seats and across the lawns. An oomppah band plays music at the eighth pole. Back at the barn, two years after breaking Secretariat under saddle in the indoor training ring, Meredith Bailes is back at the shed and talking to those visiting. “He was beautiful to train,” he is saying. “No problem. A perfect gentleman. We thought the world of him, you know, because of his breeding. I been wrong with a lot of them, but I really felt he was special when we had him. So did Mr. Gentry. We live right off Route 95, between Washington and Richmond, and I felt we could have galloped him right down the road. Nothing bothered him.”

The races begin at 1:30. Horses are now moving along the stable pavement to the racetrack, and thirty minutes later returning through the tunnel bespattered with sand and heaving out of breath. Cars are now packed bumper to fender throughout the expanses of the lots. Lucien goes to the races. And now Penny is in her box seat with Jack Tweedy and sister Margaret and brother Hollis. There is something almost monarchical about her, a sense inspired by the way she smiles and dips her head. She is standing now in the second-floor box seat above the grandstand, as if on a balcony overlooking multitudes seeking absolution. She is dressed in a blue and white dress over whose sleeveless top hangs a golden pendant, and her hair is teased and drawn in puffs in the shape of a turban. She raises her arms, and her cheeks are flushed. The crowds below her shout her name and wave and carry signs—“Good Luck Secretariat,” one of them proclaims—and she beams and waves back and shouts her thank-yous to the left and to the right. The tumult builds throughout the afternoon at the racetrack, while at the barn the mood grows solemn.

There is a crowd of people—grooms, hot walkers, assistant trainers, news reporters—waiting at the barn for Sweat and Secretariat. Pigeons flutter about the eaves, roosting in the straw bales above the stalls. Every half hour, from the distance, the grandstand builds in a tremendous roar of sound as the races, one by one, are run. Minutes later, the horses who drew the roars come dripping with sweat and panting back to the barns, like gladiators returning from the Roman Circus.

It is four o’clock, and Sweat is working casually around the colt, who stands at ease, quietly.

From the tunnel, suddenly, the horses return following the fifth race on the card, a one-mile sprint for older horses. The track is not as fast as it has been. Four of the fastest older horses on the grounds—including Tap the Tree and Spanish Riddle—have needed 1:36 to run a mile. Spanish Riddle has won the race by a half length. The first four finishers are all stakes winners. Two races later, around the corner of the tunnel leading to the racetrack, comes the badly beaten Angle Light. He is puffing and moving wearily, his head down and his legs and eyes spackled with sand thrown up in his face by the eight horses to finish in front of him just moments earlier. He has not been the same colt since the Wood Memorial. He ran poorly in the Derby, and on Belmont Stakes Day he has run even worse, taking the lead early and then fading badly. For the moment he is just another spear carrier in the spectacle to come. At the age of three, he has already passed his youth and prime. Few seem to notice him as he heads up the shed toward Secretariat, and no one asks his name.

At 4:07, Charlie Davis rides up on Billy Silver and reins him quickly to a stop. The Appaloosa gelding is no longer sore. He is standing still and waiting for Secretariat. Sweat has just fitted on the bridle. Now all is set.

From the crowd, then, there is a murmuring. “Here he comes,” someone says. Edward Sweat is leading Secretariat up the aisle of Barn 5, past the rows of stalls, and toward the doorway at the end. The colt’s head is down, he is moving relaxed. Ted McClain walks in front of him.

“Y’all are gonna have to step back from here now,” says Ted.

It is 5:10, just a half hour to post time.

Leaving the shed, Secretariat’s head comes up, as if he wants to stop, but he advances next to Sweat, his eyes flicking and his neck and head turned slightly to the left, his ears not playing and his teeth chewing on the bit, rolling it with his tongue and grinding down on it. He looks almost predatory. As he turns out of the shed, Sham and Pancho Martin cross the road in front of him and head through the tunnel to the paddock. Sweat’s expression is stern. He says nothing to anyone, holding the bridle with his right hand. He is wearing his victory hat.

Racing official Frank Tours is walking directly behind Secretariat, five feet away, and blocking people from stepping on the heels of the colt. There are people all around him. A ten-year-old boy, darting in and out of the moving crowd, runs into Tours, who has his arms spread out.

“Stay behind!” shouts Tours.

The entourage scuffs down the rubber-floored tunnel and rises to the paddock 200 yards away. Crowds line the fences. Sweat passes through the cyclone fence by the racing secretary’s office, up the top of the incline to the paddock.

He enters the walking ring, which is lined twenty-deep in a circle around it, and there is applause as he makes the circuit. Owners and trainers and syndicate members cluster in the grassy paddock shaded by a giant old white pine that is encircled by a row of park benches. The atmosphere is that of a garden party—women draped in chiffons and silks. Penny has descended, too, and so has Lucien, who is rubbing his hands nervously. A television camera beams down. Secretariat makes a circuit of the walking ring. Sweat takes him to his stall for saddling. Lucien fits on the blinkers and adjusts the bridle while CBS’s Frank Wright comes by. “Lucien, the heat doesn’t seem to be bothering him too much, does it?”