Secretariat (43 page)
Authors: William Nack
Lawrence Robinson was at the colt’s head inside the van.
“Want to wait on Mrs. Tweedy?” asked Lawrence. Penny had been held up.
“No, I want to get him in his stall now,” said Seth. “You ready, Lawrence? Let’s go. Good, Lawrence.”
In a moment, Secretariat was out of the van and on the ramp and turning and walking off, across the grassy field to the breeding shed, and then past the shed and down the path to the stallion barn. At one point he wheeled, kicked Robinson, snorted, and turned to walk off again.
At the white and orange cinder block stallion barn, Robinson led the colt inside and turned him into the first stall, freshly bedded with straw. Across from him was the stall of the aging Round Table, Princequillo’s finest son and the second leading money winner of all time. He was the colt who had been born the same night and in the same barn as Bold Ruler twenty years before.
Robinson turned the colt around in the stall, and Secretariat leaned down and sniffed at the bedding, made a few quick circuits of the wood-paneled box and looked out his rear window, which faced the fields of Claiborne, and pricked his ears.
On the door was a large brass plate: “Bold Ruler.” He was in his sire’s stall.
Sweat approached behind Robinson and went inside. “Whoa, Big Red,” said Eddie, who dropped to his knees and unfastened the bandages on the horse’s legs.
“How’s it goin’, Eddie? Have a good trip?”
“Yeh, fine, Seth.”
The men were working when Seth left the stall, filled a bucket of water, and brought it back and hung it in a corner. Riva Ridge joined Secretariat in the stallion barn. They shared the place with some of Claiborne’s leading stallions—Round Table, Nijinsky II, Hoist the Flag, Drone, and Le Fabuleaux. Penny and Lucien arrived moments later, and now crowds of farm workers and reporters gathered in the doorway of the stallion shed. “It’s like giving up a child for adoption,” said Penny, lingering in front of Riva Ridge’s stall. “I know it’s best, but I hate to do it.”
“Well, you’re in your daddy’s old stall,” said Eddie Sweat, looking at the nameplate on the door. “How about that!”
“If he only does as well,” someone said.
“He’s got a lot of wood to chop,” said Snow Fields, Bold Ruler’s old groom. “Yes, sir. He’s got a lot of wood to chop.”
The van had arrived at Claiborne at three-thirty, and two hours later the Meadow Stable party—Elizabeth, Penny, and Lucien—had left for dinner with Seth. It was growing dark at the farm. Now and then a car would roll through the gates, its headlights glinting on the trees and shrubs that lined the way, and then disappear. A nightwatchman came by later. Then a family from the farm, the Logans. They turned on the lights in the shed and opened the door of Secretariat’s stall. He looked at them.
“He looks like just another horse, doesn’t he?” said Marion Logan.
“Yeh, just like another horse in there now,” said the nightwatchman.
And they left. The lights went out again. By the office, a farm worker sat inside the shed by the graveyard. “That’s just something we took out of Bull’s office when he died,” said the man. He was looking at a sign in the back of the shed:
Cows may come
And cows may go
But the Bull
In this place
Goes on forever.
“Now he’s just another horse here,” said the man. “Now he’s a stud horse and he has to prove himself here, just like he proved himself on the racetrack. Until he does that, he’s just another horse at Claiborne.”
Outside the sun was down and it grew colder now by the grove of trees in the dark by the stallion barn. Leaves fell, and a faint wind strummed and turned along the trees that rose along the paddocks in the back. Then in the distance, beyond the Claiborne fields toward the home called Marchmont, the sound of a horse whinnying rose. Secretariat came to the window of his stall, and through the darkness of it you could see nothing but the rims of his eyes and hear the breathing in the quiet. The sound of the whinnying rose again, and beyond that and beyond the rows of fences and the fields of grass and the salmon-colored sky, beyond the stands of trees strung out along the skies of Paris, there was the sound of horses charging the bend and the crowd on its feet roaring and the announcer calling the name of a lone figure of a horse reaching and snapping, pounding in a rush, at the turn for home.
Upon his death, Secretariat was survived by all the principal members of the small family that had surrounded him almost throughout his racing career: owner Penny Chenery, trainer Lucien Laurin, groom Ed Sweat, and jockey Ron Turcotte. Over the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Chenery served tirelessly as an ambassador-at-large for thoroughbred racing and as the most visible link to Secretariat and the decade of the 1970s, truly the Golden Era of the sport in America. While making her home in Lexington, Kentucky, the bluegrass cradle of American racing, and later from a retirement home in Boulder, Colorado, Penny would travel regularly to all major racing venues, from the Kentucky Derby in May through the Breeders’ Cup races in the fall. “She has been a beacon for the sport,” said Dan Liebman, the executive editor of
The Blood-Horse
, the industry’s leading trade publication—a graceful reminder of racing’s most glorious days and a bearer of the torch for the horse who most vividly represented the best of them.
Lucien Laurin retired as a trainer in 1976, came out of retirement to condition horses again in 1983, then retired permanently in 1987, ten years after he was inducted into racing’s Hall of Fame. Of course, Riva Ridge opened the door to the Hall of Fame, but it was Secretariat who carried Laurin inside. Laurin spent most of his retirement at his home in Key Largo, Florida, with his wife, Juliette. He died on June 26, 2000, at Miami’s Baptist Hospital from complications following surgery to repair a broken hip. He was eighty-eight.
Ed Sweat, whose handling of Secretariat made him the most renowned groom in America, the man whose touch with horses was almost lyrical, died virtually penniless in April 1998 after spending the last years of his life battling a host of physical ailments, including heart problems (he had suffered a heart attack and undergone open-heart surgery), asthma, and cancer of the stomach. At age fifty-nine, in New York, Sweat lost a long and final struggle to leukemia. The man had spent, given away, or lost what money he had saved from his heyday as a groom, and in the end the Jockey Club, which administers a fund to assist racing’s neediest, stepped up and paid for Sweat’s funeral in Vance, South Carolina. Trainer Roger Laurin, Lucien’s son and the man for whom Sweat had worked as groom of the 1984 two-year-old champion, Chief’s Crown, paid the airfare for Sweat’s widow, Linda, and his two daughters to fly there from New York and back. Throughout the last twenty-five years of his life, Eddie never gave up hope of rubbing another Secretariat, of finding the Big Horse again. “I been on the racetrack thirty-four years, and I ain’t never gonna give up,” Sweat told me in 1991. “I think they’ll take me to my grave with a pitchfork in my hand and a rub rag in my back pocket. . . . I might not ever find another Secretariat, but I’ll never stop lookin’.” He never did.
Nor did Ron Turcotte, who searched in vain throughout his last five years as a leading rider in New York. In 1979, like Laurin two years earlier, Turcotte was fairly swept into racing’s Hall of Fame—on the back of Secretariat, of course, with Riva Ridge merely showing the way.
The induction ceremonies came a year after Turcotte’s career had ended tragically at Belmont Park, the scene of the most memorable ride of his career. On July 13, 1978, Turcotte was paralyzed from the waist down after his mount in the day’s eighth race, Flag of Leyte Gulf, fell after clipping heels with a horse in front of her, throwing Turcotte violently to the ground. A year later, after months of rehabilitation, Turcotte and his family moved from their Long Island manse to his hometown of Grand Falls, New Brunswick, where he still resides. There he first raised cattle and later got into the business of tree farming, planting and growing thousands of red pines for eventual use as telephone poles. Turcotte became a man genuinely at peace with himself and his place in history, and he ultimately came to terms with his paralysis; with his wife, Gaetane, at his side, he has often visited America at Triple Crown time, cheerfully signing Secretariat pictures and memorabilia for the fans and horseplayers crowding around him and telling stories about his record-breaking tour de force in 1973. One day a few years ago at Saratoga, as he sat by the paddock in his wheelchair, Turcotte ended a Secretariat soliloquy by saying, with the trace of a grin on his lips, “He should
never
have been beaten. Make no mistake, my friends. He was the greatest racehorse who ever lived, and I was the luckiest guy in the world to be on his back.”
Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.
“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”
In the late afternoon of Monday, October 2, 1989, as I headed my car from the driveway of Arthur Hancock’s Stone Farm onto Winchester Road outside of Paris, Kentucky, I was seized by an impulse as beckoning as the wind that strums through the trees there, mingling the scents of new grass and old history.
For reasons as obscure to me then as now, I felt compelled to see Lawrence Robinson. For almost thirty years, until he suffered a stroke in March of 1983, Robinson was the head caretaker of stallions at Claiborne Farm. I had not seen him since his illness, but I knew he still lived on the farm, in a small white frame house set on a hill overlooking the lush stallion paddocks and the main stallion barn. In the first stall of that barn, in the same space that was once home to the great Bold Ruler, lived Secretariat, Bold Ruler’s greatest son.
It was through Secretariat that I had met Robinson. On the bright, cold afternoon of November 12, 1973, he was one of several hundred people gathered at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington to greet the horse on his flight from New York into retirement in Kentucky. I flew with the horse that day, and as the plane banked over the field, a voice from the tower crackled over the airplane radio: “There’s more people out here to meet Secretariat than there was to greet the governor.”
“Well, he’s won more races than the governor,” pilot Dan Neff replied.
An hour later, after a van ride out the Paris Pike behind a police escort with blue lights flashing, Robinson led Secretariat onto a ramp at Claiborne and toward his sire’s old stall—out of racing and into history. For me, that final walk beneath a grove of trees, with the colt slanting like a buck through the autumn gloaming, brought to a melancholy close the richest, grandest, damnedest, most exhilarating time of my life. For eight months, first as the racing writer for Long Island, New York’s
Newsday
and then as the designated chronicler of the horse’s career, I had a daily front-row seat to watch Secretariat. I was at the barn in the morning and the racetrack in the afternoon for what turned out to be the year’s greatest show in sports, at the heart of which lay a Triple Crown performance unmatched in the history of American racing.
Sixteen years had come and gone since then, and I had never attended a Kentucky Derby or a yearling sale at Keeneland without driving out to Claiborne to visit Secretariat, often in the company of friends who had never seen him. On the long ride from Louisville, I would regale them with stories about the horse—how on that early morning in March of ’73 he had materialized out of the quickening blue darkness in the upper stretch at Belmont Park, his ears pinned back, running as fast as horses run; how he had lost the Wood Memorial and won the Derby, and how he had been bothered by a pigeon feather at Pimlico on the eve of the Preakness (at the end of this tale I would pluck the delicate, mashed feather out of my wallet, like a picture of my kids, to pass around the car); how on the morning of the Belmont Stakes he had burst from the barn like a stud horse going to the breeding shed and had walked around the outdoor ring on his hind legs, pawing at the sky; how he had once grabbed my notebook and refused to give it back, and how he had seized a rake in his teeth and begun raking the shed; and, finally, I told about that magical, unforgettable instant, frozen now in time, when he had turned for home, appearing out of a dark drizzle at Woodbine, near Toronto, in the last race of his career, twelve in front and steam puffing from his nostrils as from a factory whistle, bounding like some mythical beast out of Greek lore.
Oh, I knew all the stories, knew them well, had crushed and rolled them in my hand, until their quaint musk lay in the saddle of my palm. Knew them as I knew the stories of my children. Knew them as I knew the stories of my own life. Told them at dinner parties, swapped them with horseplayers as if they were trading cards, argued over them with old men and blind fools who had seen the show but missed the message. Dreamed them and turned them over like pillows in my rubbery sleep. Woke up with them, brushed my aging teeth with them, grinned at them in the mirror. Horses have a way of getting inside of you, and so it was that Secretariat became like a fifth child in our house, the older boy who was off at school and never around but who was as loved and true a part of the family as Muffin, our shaggy, epileptic dog.
The story I now tell begins on that Monday afternoon last October on the macadam outside of Stone Farm. I had never been to Paris, Kentucky, in the early fall, and I only happened to be there that day to begin an article about the Hancock family, the owners of Claiborne and Stone farms. There wasn’t a soul on the road to point the way to Robinson’s place, so I swung in and out of several empty driveways until I saw a man on a tractor cutting the lawn in front of Marchmont, Dell Hancock’s mansion. He yelled back to me: “Take a right out the drive. Go down to Claiborne House. Then a right at the driveway across the road. Go up a hill to the big black barn. Turn left and go down to the end. Lawrence had a stroke a few years back, y’know.”
The house was right where he said. I knocked on the front door, then walked behind and knocked on the back, and called through a side window into a room where music was playing. No one answered. But I had time to kill, so I wandered over to the stallion paddock, just a few yards from the house. The stud Ogygian, a son of Damascus, lifted his head inquiringly. He started walking toward me, and I put my elbows on the top of the fence and looked down the gentle slope toward the stallion barn.
And suddenly there he was, Secretariat, standing outside the barn and grazing at the end of a lead shank held by groom Bobby Anderson, who was sitting on a bucket in the sun. Even from a hundred yards away, the horse appeared lighter than I had seen him in years. It struck me as curious that he was not running free in his paddock—why was Bobby grazing him?—but his bronze coat reflected the October light, and it never occurred to me that something might be wrong. But something was terribly wrong. On Labor Day, Secretariat had come down with laminitis, a life-threatening hoof disease, and here, a month later, he was still suffering from its aftershocks.
Secretariat was dying. In fact, he would be gone within forty-eight hours.
I briefly considered slipping around Ogygian’s paddock and dropping down to visit, but I had never entered Claiborne through the back door, and so I thought better of it. Instead, for a full half hour, I stood by the paddock waiting for Robinson and gazing in the distance at Secretariat. The gift of reverie is a blessing divine, and it is conferred most abundantly on those who lie in hammocks or drive alone in cars. Or lean on hillside fences in Kentucky. The mind swims, binding itself to whatever flotsam comes along, to old driftwood faces and voices of the past, to places and scenes once visited, to things not seen or done but only dreamed.
It was July 4, 1972, and I was sitting in the press box at Aqueduct with Clem Florio, a former prizefighter turned Baltimore handicapper, when I glanced at the Daily Racing Form’s past performances for the second race, a 5 ½-furlong buzz for maiden two-year-olds. As I scanned the pedigrees, three names leaped out: by Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal, by Princequillo. Bold Ruler was the nation’s preeminent sire, and Somethingroyal was the dam of several stakes winners, including the fleet Sir Gaylord. It was a match of royalty. Even the baby’s name seemed faintly familiar: Secretariat. Where had I heard it before? But of course! Lucien Laurin was training the colt at Belmont Park for Penny Chenery Tweedy’s Meadow Stable, making Secretariat a stablemate of that year’s Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Riva Ridge.
I had seen Secretariat just a week before. I had been at the Meadow Stable barn one morning, checking on Riva, when exercise rider Jimmy Gaffney took me aside and said: “You wanna see the best-lookin’ two-year-old you’ve ever seen?”
We padded up the shed to the colt’s stall. Gaffney stepped inside. “What do you think?” he asked. The horse looked magnificent, to be sure, a bright red chestnut with three white feet and a tapered white marking down his face. “He’s gettin’ ready,” Gaffney said. “Don’t forget the name: Secretariat. He can run.” And then, conspiratorially, Gaffney whispered: “Don’t quote me, but this horse will make them all forget Riva Ridge.”
So that is where I had first seen him, and here he was in the second at Aqueduct. I rarely bet in those days, but Secretariat was 3–1, so I put $10 on his nose. Florio and I fixed our binoculars on him and watched it all. Watched him as he was shoved sideways at the break, dropping almost to his knees, when a colt named Quebec turned left out of the gate and crashed into him. Saw him blocked in traffic down the back side and shut off again on the turn for home. Saw him cut off a second time deep in the stretch as he was making a final run. Saw him finish fourth, obviously much the best horse, beaten by only 1 ¼ lengths after really running but an eighth of a mile.
You should have seen Clem. Smashing his binoculars down on his desk, he leaped to his feet, banged his chair against the wall behind him, threw a few punches in the air and bellowed: “Secretariat! That’s my Derby horse for next year!”
Two weeks later, when the colt raced to his first victory by six, Florio announced to all the world, “Secretariat will win the Triple Crown next year.” He nearly got into a fistfight in the Aqueduct press box that day when Mannie Kalish, a New York handicapper, chided him for making such an outrageously bold assertion: “Ah, you Maryland guys, you come to New York and see a horse break his maiden and think he’s another Citation. We see horses like Secretariat all the time. I bet he don’t even run in the Derby.” Stung by the put-down “you Maryland guys,” Florio came forward and stuck his finger into Kalish’s chest, but two writers jumped between them and they never came to blows.
The Secretariat phenomenon, with all the theater and passion that would attend it, had begun. Florio was right, of course, and by the end of Secretariat’s two-year-old season, everyone else who had seen him perform knew it. All you had to do was watch the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga. I was at the races that August afternoon with Arthur Kennedy, an old-time racetracker and handicapper who had been around the horses since the 1920s, and even he had never seen anything quite like it. Dropping back to dead last out of the gate, Secretariat trailed eight horses into the far turn, where jockey Ron Turcotte swung him to the outside. Three jumps past the half-mile pole the colt exploded. “Now he’s runnin’!” Kennedy said.
You could see the blue-and-white silks as they disappeared behind one horse, reappeared in a gap between horses, dropped out of sight again and finally reemerged as Secretariat powered to the lead off the turn. He dashed from last to first in 290 yards, blazing through a quarter in :22, and galloped home in a laugher to win by six. It was a performance with style, touched by art. “I’ve never seen a two-year-old do that,” Kennedy said quietly. “He looked like a four-year-old out there.”
So that was when I knew. The rest of Secretariat’s two-year-old campaign—in which he lost only once, in the Champagne Stakes when he was disqualified from first to second after bumping Stop the Music at the top of the stretch—was simply a mopping-up operation. At year’s end, so dominant had he been that he became the first two-year-old to be unanimously voted Horse of the Year.
Secretariat wintered at Hialeah, preparing for the Triple Crown, while I shoveled snow in Huntington, New York, waiting for him to race again. In February, twenty-three-year-old Seth Hancock, the new president of Claiborne Farm, announced that he had syndicated the colt as a future breeding stallion for a then world record $6.08 million, in 32 shares at $190,000 a share, making the 1,154-pound horse worth more than three times his weight in gold. (Bullion was selling at the time for $90 an ounce.) Like everyone else, I thought Secretariat would surely begin his campaign in Florida, and I did not expect to see him again until the week before the Kentucky Derby. I was browsing through a newspaper over breakfast one day when I saw a news dispatch whose message went through me like a current. Secretariat would be arriving soon to begin his Triple Crown campaign by way of the three New York prep races: the Bay Shore, the Gotham and the Wood Memorial Stakes.
“Hot damn!” I blurted to my family. “Secretariat is coming to New York!”
At the time, I had in mind doing a diary about the horse, a chronicle of the adventures of a Triple Crown contender, which I thought might one day make a magazine piece. The colt arrived at Belmont Park on March 10, and the next day I was there at 7
A.M.
, scribbling notes in a pad. For the next forty days, in what became a routine, I would fall out of bed at 6
A.M.
, make a cup of instant coffee, climb into my rattling green Toyota and drive the twenty miles to Belmont Park. I had gotten to know the Meadow Stable family—Tweedy, Laurin, Gaffney, groom Eddie Sweat, assistant trainer Henny Hoeffner—in my tracking of Riva Ridge the year before, and I had come to feel at home around Belmont’s Barn 5, particularly around stall 7, Secretariat’s place. I took no days off, except one morning to hide Easter eggs, and I spent hours sitting on the dusty floor outside Secretariat’s stall, talking to Sweat as he turned a rub rag on the colt, filled his water bucket, bedded his stall with straw, kept him in hay and oats. I took notes compulsively, endlessly, feeling for the texture of the life around the horse.