Secretariat (44 page)

A typical page of scribblings went like this:

“Sweat talks to colt . . . easy, Red, I’m comin’ in here now . . . stop it, Red! You behave now . . . Sweat moves around colt. Brush in hand. Flicks off dust. Secretariat sidesteps and pushes Sweat. Blue sky. Henny comes up. ‘How’s he doin’, Eddie?’ ‘He’s gettin’ edgy.’ . . . Easy Sunday morning.”

Secretariat was an amiable, gentlemanly colt, with a poised and playful nature that at times made him seem as much a pet as the stable dog was. I was standing in front of his stall one morning, writing, when he reached out, grabbed my notebook in his teeth and sank back inside, looking to see what I would do. “Give the man his notebook back!” yelled Sweat. As the groom dipped under the webbing, Secretariat dropped the notebook on the bed of straw.

Another time, after raking the shed, Sweat leaned the handle of the rake against the stall webbing and turned to walk away. Secretariat seized the handle in his mouth and began pushing and pulling it across the floor. “Look at him rakin’ the shed!” cried Sweat. All up and down the barn, laughter fluttered like the pigeons in the stable eaves, as the colt did a passable imitation of his own groom.

By his personality and temperament, Secretariat became the most engaging character in the barn. His own stable pony, a roan named Billy Silver, began an unrequited love affair with him. “He loves Secretariat, but Secretariat don’t pay any attention to him,” Sweat said one day. “If Billy sees you grazin’ Secretariat, he’ll go to hollerin’ until you bring him out. Secretariat just ignores him. Kind of sad, really.” One morning, I was walking beside Hoeffner through the shed, with Gaffney and Secretariat ahead of us, when Billy stuck his head out of his jerry-built stall and nuzzled the colt as he went by.

Hoeffner did a double take. “Jimmy!” he yelled. “Is that pony botherin’ the big horse?”

“Nah,” said Jimmy. “He’s just smellin’ him a little.”

Hoeffner’s eyes widened. Spinning around on his heels, jabbing a finger in the air, he bellowed: “Get the pony out of here! I don’t want him smellin’ the big horse.”

Leaning on his rake, Sweat laughed softly: “Poor Billy Silver. He smelled the wrong horse!”

I remember wishing that those days could breeze on forever—the mornings over coffee and doughnuts at the truck outside the barn, the hours spent watching the red colt walk to the track and gallop once around, the days absorbing the rhythms of the life around the horse. I had been following racehorses since I was twelve, back in the days of Native Dancer, and now I was an observer on an odyssey, a quest for the Triple Crown. It had been twenty-five years since Citation had won racing’s Holy Grail. For me, the adventure really began in the early morning of March 14, when Laurin lifted Turcotte aboard Secretariat and said: “Let him roll, Ronnie.”

The colt had filled out substantially since I had last seen him under tack, in the fall, and he looked like some medieval charger—his thick neck bowed and his chin drawn up beneath its mass, his huge shoulders shifting as he strode, his coat radiant and his eyes darting left and right. He was walking to the track for his final workout, a three-eighths-of-a-mile drill designed to light the fire in him for the seven-furlong Bay Shore Stakes three days later. Laurin, Tweedy and I went to the clubhouse fence near the finish line, where we watched and waited as Turcotte headed toward the pole and let Secretariat rip. Laurin clicked his stopwatch.

The colt was all by himself through the lane, and the sight and sound of him racing toward us is etched forever in memory: Turcotte was bent over him, his coat blown up like a parachute, and the horse was reaching out with his forelegs in that distinctive way he had, raising them high and then, at the top of the lift, snapping them out straight and with tremendous force, the snapping hard as bone, the hooves striking the ground and folding it beneath him. Laurin clicked his watch as Secretariat raced under the wire. “Oh my god!” he cried. “Thirty-three and three fifths!” Horses rarely break 34 seconds in three-furlong moves.

Looking ashen, fearing the colt might have gone too fast, Laurin headed for the telephone under the clubhouse to call the upstairs clocker, Jules Watson. “Hello there, Jules. How fast did you get him?”

I watched Laurin’s face grow longer as he listened, until he looked thunderstruck:
“Thirty-two and three fifths?”
A full second faster than Laurin’s own clocking, it was the fastest three-furlong workout I had ever heard of. Tweedy smiled cheerily and said, “Well, that ought to open his pipes!”

Oh, it did that. Three days later, blocked by a wall of horses in the Bay Shore, Secretariat plunged through like a fullback, 220 yards from the wire, and bounded off to win the race by four and a half lengths. I could hear a man screaming behind me. I turned and saw Roger Laurin, Lucien’s son, raising his arms in the air and shouting, “He’s too much horse! They can’t stop him. They can’t even stop him with a wall of horses!”

I had ridden horses during my youth in Morton Grove, Illinois, and I remember one summer I took a little black bullet of a thoroughbred filly out of the barn and walked her to the track that rimmed the polo field across Golf Road. I had been to the races a few times, had seen the jockeys ride, and I wanted to feel what it was like. So I hitched up my stirrups and galloped her around the east turn, standing straight up. Coming off the turn, I dropped into a crouch and clucked to her. She took off like a sprinter leaving the blocks—swoooosh!—and the wind started whipping in my eyes. I could feel the tears streaming down my face, and then I looked down and saw her knees pumping like pistons. I didn’t think she would make the second turn, the woods were looming ahead, big trees coming up, and so I leaned a little to the left and she made the turn before she started pulling up. No car ever took me on a ride like that. And no roller coaster, either. Running loose, without rails, she gave me the wildest, most thrilling ride I had ever had.

And there was nothing like the ride that Secretariat gave me in the twelve weeks from the Bay Shore through the Belmont Stakes. Three weeks after the Bay Shore, Turcotte sent the colt to the lead down the backstretch in the one-mile Gotham. It looked like they were going to get beat when Champagne Charlie drove to within a half length at the top of the stretch—I held my breath—but Turcotte sent Secretariat on, and the colt pulled away to win by three, tying the track record of 1:33
2
/
5
.

By then I had begun visiting Charles Hatton, a columnist for the
Daily Racing Form
, who the previous summer had proclaimed Secretariat the finest physical specimen he had ever seen. At sixty-seven, Hatton had seen them all. After my morning work was over, I would trudge up to Hatton’s private aerie at Belmont Park and tell him what I had learned. I was his backstretch eyes, he my personal guru. One morning, Hatton told me that Secretariat had galloped a quarter mile past the finish line at the Gotham, and the clockers had timed him pulling up at 1:59
2
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5
, three fifths of a second faster than Northern Dancer’s Derby record for 1 ¼ miles.

“This sucker breaks records pulling up,” Hatton said. “He might be the best racehorse I ever saw. Better than Man o’ War.”

Those were giddy, heady days coming to the nine-furlong Wood Memorial, the colt’s last major prep before the Kentucky Derby. On the day of the Wood, I drove directly to Aqueduct and spent the hour before the race in the receiving barn with Sweat, exercise rider Charlie Davis and Secretariat. When the voice over the loudspeaker asked the grooms to ready their horses, Sweat approached the colt with the bridle. Secretariat always took the bit easily, opening his mouth when Sweat moved to fit it in, but that afternoon it took Sweat a full five minutes to bridle him. Secretariat threw his nose in the air, backed up, shook his head. After a few minutes passed, I asked, “What’s wrong with him, Eddie?”

Sweat brushed it off: “He’s just edgy.”

In fact, just that morning, Dr. Manuel Gilman, the track veterinarian, had lifted the colt’s upper lip to check his identity tattoo and had discovered a painful abscess about the size of a quarter. Laurin decided to run Secretariat anyway—the colt needed the race—but he never told anyone else about the boil. Worse than the abscess, though, was the fact that Secretariat had had the feeblest workout of his career four days earlier, when Turcotte, seeing a riderless horse on the track, had slowed the colt to protect him from a collision. Secretariat finished the mile that day in 1:42
2
/
5
, five seconds slower than Laurin wanted him to go. Thus he came to the Wood doubly compromised.

The race was a disaster. Turcotte held the colt back early, but when he tried to get Secretariat to pick up the bit and run, he got no response. I could see at the far turn that the horse was dead. He never made a race of it, struggling to finish third, beaten by four lengths by his own stablemate, Angle Light, and by Sham. Standing near the owner’s box, I saw Laurin turn to Tweedy and yell, “Who won it?”

“You won it!” Tweedy told him.

“Angle Light won it,” I said to him.

“Angle Light?” he howled back. But of course! Laurin trained him, too, and so Laurin had just won the Wood, but with the wrong horse.

I was sick. All those hours at the barn, all those early mornings at the shed, all that time and energy for naught. And in the most important race of his career, Secretariat had come up as hollow as a gourd. The next two weeks were among the most agonizing of my life. As great a stallion as he was, Bold Ruler had been essentially a speed sire and had never produced a single winner of a Triple Crown race. I couldn’t help but suspect that Secretariat was another Bold Ruler, who ran into walls beyond a mile. In the next two weeks, Churchill Downs became a nest of rumors that Secretariat was unsound. Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder caused an uproar when he said the colt had a bum knee that was being treated with ice packs. I knew that wasn’t true. I had been around him all spring, and the most ice I had seen near him was in a glass of tea.

All I could hope for, in those final days before the Derby, was that the colt had been suffering from a bellyache on the day of the Wood and had not been up to it. I remained ignorant of the abscess for weeks, and I had not yet divined the truth about Secretariat’s training: He needed hard, blistering workouts before he ran, and that slow mile before the Wood had been inadequate. The night before the Derby, I made my selections, and the next day, two hours before post time, I climbed the stairs to the Churchill Downs jockeys’ room to see Turcotte. He greeted me in an anteroom, looking surprisingly relaxed. Gilman had taken him aside a few days earlier and told him of the abscess. Turcotte saw that the boil had been treated and had disappeared. The news had made him euphoric, telling him all he needed to know about the Wood.

“You nervous?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t think you’ll win,” I said. “I picked My Gallant and Sham one-two, and you third.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Turcotte said. “He’ll beat these horses if he runs his race.”

“What about the Wood?” I asked.

He shook me off. “I don’t believe the Wood,” he said. “I’m telling you. Something was wrong. But he’s O.K. now. That’s all I can tell you.”

I shook his hand, wished him luck and left. Despite what Turcotte had said, I was resigned to the worst, and Secretariat looked hopelessly beaten as the field of thirteen dashed past the finish line the first time. He was dead last. Transfixed, I could not take my eyes off him. In the first turn, Turcotte swung him to the outside and Secretariat began passing horses, and down the back side I watched the jockey move him boldly from eighth to seventh to sixth. Secretariat was fifth around the far turn and gaining fast on the outside. I began chanting: “Ride him, Ronnie! Ride him!” Sham was in front, turning for home, but then there was Secretariat, joining him at the top of the stretch. Laffit Pincay, on Sham, glanced over and saw Secretariat and went to the whip. Turcotte lashed Secretariat. The two raced head and head for 100 yards, until gradually Secretariat pulled away. He won by 2 ½ lengths. The crowd roared, and I glanced at the tote board: 1:59
2
/
5
! A new track and Derby record.

Throwing decorum to the wind, I vaulted from my seat and dashed madly through the press box, jubilantly throwing a fist in the air. Handicapper Steve Davidowitz came racing toward me from the other end. We clasped arms and spun a jig in front of the copy machine. “Unbelievable!” Davidowitz cried.

I bounded down a staircase, three steps at a time. Turcotte had dismounted and was crossing the racetrack when I reached him. “What a ride!” I yelled.

“What did I tell you, Mr. Bill?” he said.

I had just witnessed the greatest Kentucky Derby performance of all time. Secretariat’s quarter-mile splits were unprecedented—:25
1
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5
, :24, :23
4
/
5
, :23
1
/
5
and :23. He ran each quarter faster than the preceding one. Not even the most veteran racetracker could recall a horse who had done this in a mile-and-a-quarter race. As quickly as his legions (I among them) had abandoned him following the Wood, so did they now proclaim Secretariat a superhorse.

We all followed him to Pimlico for the Preakness two weeks later, and he trained as if he couldn’t get enough of it. He thrived on work and the racetrack routine. Most every afternoon, long after the crowds of visitors had dispersed, Sweat would graze the colt on a patch of grass outside the shed, then lead him back into his stall and while away the hours doing chores. One afternoon I was folded in a chair outside the colt’s stall when Secretariat came to the door shaking his head and stretching his neck, curling his upper lip like a camel does. “What’s botherin’ you, Red?” Sweat asked. The groom stepped forward, plucked something off the colt’s whiskers and blew it in the air. “Just a pigeon feather itchin’ him,” said Sweat. The feather floated into the palm of my hand. So it ended up in my wallet, along with the $2 mutual ticket that I had on Secretariat to win the Preakness.