Secretariat (9 page)

Chapter 9

The van door opened in Florida on that January day of 1972, and Secretariat first stepped foot on the racetrack at Hialeah Park.

Like Bold Ruler, Secretariat emerged into a new kind of world, insular, superstitious, and perpetually on the make, a world forever in bivouac—whole armies of grooms and hot walkers, exercise boys and trainers and jockeys’ agents, feed men peddling alfalfa and medicine men with horse aspirins weighing sixty grains, clockers and jockeys—ready on a moment to move on to other tracks, north to Maryland, New York, New Jersey, or Chicago.

Flies on all the windowsills, rows of stalls in rows of barns, hooves clicking on cement, metal gates clanging, springs whining, liniments and alcohol for rubbing, a pint of whiskey holstered like a wallet in the pocket, tips hot at six o’clock in the morning, lukewarm at three, cold at dinner over ham hocks or enchiladas.

As a young two-year-old—plump as he was off the farm—Secretariat had begun to grow into an aesthetic marvel of anatomical slopes and bulges, curves and planes that were stressed and set off by the color of his coat, a reddish gold that ran almost to copper. His shoulders were deep, his bone of good length, and there was no lightness of bone under the knee, as Miss Ham once suggested there might be. He had a sloping rump, the imprimatur of the Nearco tribe, and an attractive face and head. The quality of his head and face set him apart at once from many other Bold Rulers, including Bold Ruler himself. His sire was coarse about the head, with the jug-headedness common to trotters, and he transmitted this trait to not a few of his offspring.

Secretariat didn’t inherit Bold Ruler’s lengthiness; he was shorter of back, more barrel chested and muscular in his physical development. But he had what Bull Hancock regarded as a mark of quality in all the Bold Rulers that could run. “You can pick the Bold Rulers out on their conformation,” Bull once said. “I see the same musculature as Nasrullah. They all had an extra layer of muscle beside their tail running down to their hocks. It is a good sign when you see it in a Bold Ruler. It means strength and speed.”

All he had was physique in the beginning, the look of an athlete. Lucien Laurin was wary of appearances. In his years spent on the racetrack, he had seen too many equine glamor boys come and go. To Laurin, Secretariat was just another untried thoroughbred.

To jockey Ron Turcotte, he was a potential mount, no more than that. The day after Secretariat arrived from the farm, Turcotte was at the barn at Hialeah, where he worked mornings exercising horses for Laurin. He walked up the shed to see Riva Ridge, and glancing down the barn, two stalls away from his Kentucky Derby favorite, he saw the white star, the ears pricked forward, and the neck a mass of red. Secretariat was glancing back at him.

Turcotte went to the stall, took a closer look, and called up the shed to Henny Hoeffner, the assistant trainer. It was the first time Turcotte ever saw Secretariat, whom he described as “a pretty boy.”

Penny Tweedy, when she first saw him said, simply, “Wow!”

But the game is a horse race, not a horse show, and the axiom among horsemen is: “Pretty is as pretty does.” Secretariat, in the opening weeks, did not do much.

He didn’t awe the clockers with the bursts of speed that Bold Ruler loosed at Hialeah as a youngster. There were no quarter-mile workouts in 0:22, no leveling off into a flat run, all business, from the quarter pole at the top of the stretch to the wire. He was still the overgrown kid.

Ron Turcotte was with Lucien Laurin one morning at Hialeah when four two-year-olds were led from the barn and began circling them, grooms holding the bridles.

Turcotte jumped aboard Secretariat that morning for the first time, guiding him out to the racetrack with the others in Indian file, reaching the dirt track and turning right, counterclockwise. Laurin told them to let the youngsters gallop easily, side by side, in a schooling exercise designed to accustom them to having other horses running next to them. The drill was the same as Secretariat had done two months earlier, under Bailes, at the farm. The four colts took off at a slow gallop around the mile-and-an-eighth oval, galloping abreast. The riders stood high in the saddles, going easily, Secretariat almost lackadaisically. The red horse plopped along in casual indifference, his head down, a big, awkward, and clumsy colt, Turcotte thought. Galloping past the palm trees and the infield lake, jockey Miles Neff, riding Twice Bold, reached his stick over and slapped Turcotte on the rump. Turcotte yelled. There was laughter on the backstretch. With Charlie Davis riding inside him on All or None, Turcotte leaned over and jammed Davis in the butt with his stick. Davis almost went over All or None, screaming. This was not all intended for fun. Exercise boys often do this to get young horses accustomed to quick movement, to shouts, to noise, to horse racing.

The colt next to Secretariat drifted out and banged against him and the red horse countered with a grunt.

He didn’t alter course, drifting back and taking up the same path he had before the bumping. “He was just a big likable fellow,” Turcotte said. “His attitude was ‘Stay out of my way.’ ” But they didn’t. The colt beside him came out again, sideswiping him a second time.

Turcotte remembered the same drill a year before on Riva Ridge. The rangy bay was timid, shy, and leery of all contact. If Riva Ridge had been sideswiped like that when he was a young two-year-old, he would have leaped the fence to get away. Not this one.

Ron Turcotte liked him instantly because he was “a big clown,” likable and unruffled among crowds, a handsome colt who relaxed while on the racetrack, who behaved himself, going as kindly as if out in the morning for a playful romp in the Florida sun.

Secretariat became the most popular of the baby two-year-olds to gallop, and one after another the exercise boys and jockeys who worked for Laurin climbed on him. There was Cecil Paul, a thirty-year-old jockey from Trinidad, who jumped aboard one morning and remembered hearing Lucien tell him, “He’s a nice colt, Mr. Paul, and he’s just a baby. You take care of him.”

Mr. Paul galloped Secretariat frequently on those balmy mornings. On his back went Miles Neff, too, the jockey who was about to retire after thirteen years of knocking about on racetracks, and off went he and the colt into an easy gallop.

Neff especially liked the way he moved, feeling something a rider feels after straddling many horses over many years. Part of it had to do with size and strength, but some of it was just a feeling, a sense. “This is your best two-year-old, Mr. Laurin,” Neff said one morning, as he slid off Secretariat.

As the days chased one another like colts in a pasture, Secretariat’s bearing, his ease and kindliness, increased his popularity among the exercise boys until they were actually competing for his stirrups. Gold Bag, a youngster owned by Lucien Laurin, was quicker on his feet but he was headstrong—rank and speed crazy—often trying to run away with riders in the morning. Twice Bold pulled so hard on the reins that riders used to dismount rubbing the soreness in their arms. All or None, the filly, would buck, jump, kick, spin, and wheel; no one wanted to ride her. “Everyone wanted to gallop Secretariat,” Turcotte said. “All you had to do was sit there.” As the days passed, Cecil Paul felt the youngster getting stronger, more rhythmic in his strides, and felt him begin to take hold of the bit.

That was pivotal. Turcotte also felt the colt lean against the bit, fall into it, grab it in his mouth, and run against it in a communion transmitted from mouth to hands through the lines stretched taut between them.

“You want to make him think he’s doing something, so you sit against him, take ahold of him, and make him think he’s doing everything on his own. You have to build his ego. You have to give him confidence,” Turcotte said.

Not even confidence came easily for the red horse. In late February Laurin boosted Turcotte on Secretariat for a quarter-mile workout, not an easy gallop but a speed drill, in company with Gold Bag, Twice Bold, and a colt named Young Hitter. It was time to teach them how to run, how to level out and reach for ground, something all horses have to learn.

“No race riding, boys!” Lucien called out to the four as they walked their horses to the racetrack that morning, through Sunny Fitzsimmons Lane and out the quarter-mile bend under the spanking brightness of the morning. The four riders reached the racetrack and moved into a gallop around the turn. They headed for the three-eighths pole at the top of the stretch, then pulled to a stop, lining up abreast and walking several yards. Then they clucked to their horses and went into a jog, picking up speed slowly.

Nearing the quarter pole, the four riders chirped again and the horses started leveling and reaching out, bodies lower to the ground. Twice Bold, Gold Bag, and Young Hitter accelerated rapidly, gathering speed from a gallop to a run as they raced past the quarter pole at the top of the straight.

Turcotte picked up Secretariat’s reins and chirped to him, trying to give the colt a feel for the game, not yelling, but urging quietly. He sensed bewilderment in the colt, so he gathered Secretariat together and gave him time to steady himself and get his legs under him, synchronized and meshing. The three others blew away from him. Far up the racetrack, as Secretariat battled along by himself down the stretch, Turcotte saw the three more precocious horses far down the lane as the colt started to find himself and gather momentum.

They all dusted Secretariat easily that morning, beating him by about fifteen lengths and racing the quarter mile in 0:23. Secretariat finished in about 0:26.

Periodically, as Secretariat worked out in Florida, Penny Tweedy would ask Laurin about the red horse, and he hardly reflected buoyant hope.

“He hasn’t shown me much,” Lucien would say. Or, “He’s not ready. I have to get the fat off him first.” Or, “I have to teach him to run. He’s big, awkward, and doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

Secretariat was beaten more than once in workouts that winter at Hialeah. Gold Bag beat him again. So did Twice Bold and All or None, the filly. So did a colt named Angle Light, a two-year-old bay owned by Edwin Whittaker, a Toronto electronics executive. He wasn’t beaten by fifteen lengths again, but the crowd of young horses did beat him by five lengths another time.

Riva Ridge remained the luminary of the Meadow barn. The champion worked sharply for the seven-furlong Hibiscus Stakes March 22, and when he won it briskly coming off the pace, Laurin honed him for the Everglades Stakes—the same race won by Citation twenty-four years earlier—on April 1. That was the day Turcotte sensed a change in Secretariat during a workout. The track was muddy that morning when Laurin put Turcotte on the red horse, Neff on Angle Light, and Charlie Davis on All or None. The filly had thrown Turcotte earlier, so Laurin put Davis, a strong and experienced exercise boy, on her.

He told them he wanted them to work an easy three-eighths of a mile.

It was about eight o’clock. It had been raining heavily earlier in the day, but it had lightened to a drizzle by the time the set of horses headed down the backstretch to the three-eighths pole, midway through the turn for home. About seventy yards from the pole, in unison, the riders took hold of the reins and eased their horses toward the rail, keeping them about five feet out. Turcotte could feel Secretariat fall against the bit, heavy-headedly, and he could see a horse on each side of him. He eased down in the saddle. The tempo picked up as the horses raced past the three-eighths pole and banked into the stretch. Suddenly the horse on the inside of Secretariat drifted out, glancing off his side.

Turcotte steadied Secretariat. Recovering from the bump, the red horse started slowing down, easing himself back. Turcotte reached forward with his whip and waved it in front of the colt’s right eye and he picked it up again, slipping back into the breach. He stayed there through the run down the lane, striding hard against the bit to the wire, finishing head and head with the others in 0:36, breathing easily, a sharp move for young two-year-olds in the mud at Hialeah. They had run at a perfect “twelve-clip.” It was a fast workout. Secretariat was learning how to run.

Running times vary considerably from track to track, from condition to condition, and according to the sex and age of the horses, so what is fast is relative. But most horsemen agree that horses are stretching out on a fast track when they run a furlong—a distance of 220 yards or one-eighth of a mile—in 0:12 seconds. When horses string a few 0:12 furlongs back to back, they are moving at what horsemen call a “twelve-clip.”

A twelve-clip is the rate of speed horses must average or maintain to win major stakes races at American middle and classic distances, distances from a mile to a mile and a quarter.

Most horses, even young two-year-olds like Secretariat, Angle Light, and All or None, should be able to run at a twelve-clip for a few furlongs—at least four.

That means they would be running one-eighth of a mile in 0:12, one-quarter in 0:24, three-eighths in 0:36, a half mile in 0:48.

At that rate of speed, a horse would run six furlongs, or three-quarters of a mile, in 1:12, which would win races on some tracks. If a horse strung two more furlongs together at a twelve-clip, he would be running a mile in 1:36, a time that equals or betters the clocking for six of the dozen runnings of the $50,000-added Jerome Handicap at Belmont Park between 1961 and 1972. The degree of difficulty in sustaining a twelve-clip beyond a mile, unlike sustaining it from four furlongs in 0:48 to five furlongs in one minute, increases in quantum jumps. The degree of difficulty increases vastly beyond a mile.

For another furlong in 0:12 would send a horse a mile and an eighth, or nine furlongs, in 1:48, a clocking that would have won every running of the $100,000 Wood Memorial since it was run at that distance in 1952. And another 0:12-second furlong would send a horse a mile and a quarter in 2:00 flat, which was the Kentucky Derby record set by Northern Dancer in 1964; and a mile and three-eighths in 2:12, two and one-fifth seconds faster than Man o’ War’s American record; and a mile and a half in 2:24.