SECRETARIAT

William Nack

To my parents

and to Carolyne

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface to the 2010 Edition

SECRETARIAT

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

EPILOGUE

Author’s Note

“Pure Heart” by William Nack

APPENDIX A Secretariat at Stud

APPENDIX B Secretariat’s Racing Record

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface to the 2010 Edition

Nearly forty years have passed since Secretariat swept to three record-smashing victories in the Triple Crown—an unprecedented tour de force that confirmed him as the most capable and charismatic racehorse in the modern annals of the turf—and today his legend as a Thoroughbred, with all that word implies, remains as vibrant and secure as ever.

Horsemen have always been loath to compare horses from different eras, seeing any attempt to do so as a diverting but futile exercise. Could Secretariat have beaten Man o’ War or Citation? Could either of them have whipped Swaps, Seattle Slew, or Native Dancer? Or run down the immortal Count Fleet or Dr. Fager? Or out-gutted Seabiscuit at his match-race best? To all such facile questions, of course, there are only facile answers. The only thing that is really certain, after the passage of two decades since his death at Claiborne Farm, is that Secretariat continues to be viewed as the modern standard against which all members of his tribe are judged.

“His only point of reference is himself,” turfwriter Charles Hatton wrote after witnessing the colt’s thirty-one-length victory in the Belmont Stakes.

If anything, time has only enriched and embellished his name. On ESPN’s acclaimed TV series portraying the fifty greatest athletes of the twentieth century, he was ranked thirty-fifth, the only quadruped honored in the series. In another end-of-the-century event celebrating the decade of the 1970s, the U.S. Postal Service put his comely mug on a thirty-three-cent postage stamp. A three-quarter-sized bronze statue of Secretariat, commissioned by philanthropist Paul Mellon and depicting the horse in full flight, his head and forelegs thrust forward, decorates the middle of the walking ring at Belmont Park—a symbolic centerpiece forever representing the best of the sport and the breed. And a full-sized statue in bronze, with jockey Ron Turcotte aboard and groom Ed Sweat trying to restrain the thoroughbred, was unveiled in 2006 at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington—just down the road from Claiborne Farm, where Secretariat died at age nineteen, on October 4, 1989, and where a loyal network of old friends, many of them anonymous, have kept his grave in flowers through the years, a symbolic reminder of the hold he has had on the memories of those who saw him run almost four decades before.

It was there at Claiborne, one early afternoon in 2009, that actress Diane Lane visited the storied horse cemetery behind the office, its rows of gray headstones engraved with names long celebrated in the richer histories of the American turf: Bold Ruler … Round Table … Gallant Fox … Damascus … Buckpasser … Mr. Prospector … and Secretariat. As she left through the cemetery gate, a gray-haired gent in a black windbreaker stopped behind her and bent over Secretariat’s grave, plucking a single red rose from a vase of flowers tipped against the headstone.

“Here,” the old gent said, handing the rose to Lane. “The horse asked me to give this to you. Wanted you to have it.”

Diane smiled, almost purring. “Thank you,” she said. Lifting the stem in both hands, she touched the rose like an artist’s brush to her exquisite face. “I will treasure this,” she said.

At the moment, the acclaimed actress was at the bustling center of the richest, most extravagant tribute ever paid to the life and legend of Secretariat—a full-length feature film starring Diane as Penny Chenery Tweedy, the woman who drove Secretariat’s career in place of her dying father (played by Scott Glenn), and the brilliant John Malkovich as trainer Lucien Laurin, the man with whom Penny shared the glories, the tumults, and the pressures that attended the leading of this magnificent chestnut, recently syndicated for $6 million, through the turbulent waters of the Triple Crown. I was down there, too, a hired hand observing the making of the film. Walt Disney Pictures, with Mayhem Pictures producing, had just begun shooting it at a rainy churchyard cemetery in rural Lexington, where the scene was the burial of Chenery’s mother, Helen Bates Chenery, and where Diane perfectly evoked Penny’s patrician reserve and grieving beauty beneath panoplies of black umbrellas.

It was, with Lane and Malkovich leading the way, a surpassing cast and crew. They all gathered later at Keeneland racecourse to film a reenactment of the scenes that unfolded at the ′73 Belmont Stakes, the race regarded by most horsemen as the greatest performance ever by an American thoroughbred; among the familiar faces dressed for their parts were James Cromwell as breeder Ogden Phipps, Fred Thompson as Claiborne president Bull Hancock, and Nelsan Ellis as Sweat. Behind the camera was the peripatetic Dean Semler, whose cinematography in Dances with Wolves had won him an Oscar in 1990. Movie locations mimic the collapsible world of the traveling circus, moving from place to place, and after a week at old Keeneland, in the middle of the Blue Grass, the Secretariat troupe packed up and hauled its cameras and trailers seventy miles west to Louisville. Since 1875, the year of its inaugural running, River City had been home to the Kentucky Derby, with its signature Twin Spires, its massive clubhouse and grandstand, and its ancient vault of echoing sounds and memories.

Disney had acquired the rights to this book for the making of the movie, and the film company, at Mayhem’s urging, had retained me as the technical consultant on the film. For those who had been at Churchill Downs on May 5, 1973, it was impossible to wander those historic grounds and that movie set last year—among throngs of extras dressed in the polyesters of the early ′70s, amid fleets of old cars imported from the late ′60s, and around the five attractive chestnuts wrangled from all over to play the horse—and not recall that sublime magic of Derby week some thirty-six years before.

I can close my eyes and see the scenes unfolding one by one:

 The morning of May 2, Thursday, two days before the witching hour, when a hand-wringing Lucien and Penny, still agonizing over Secretariat’s stunning defeat in the Wood Memorial eleven days before, sent him out for a last, crucial morning workout at the Downs. As the colt flew down that stretch, sizzling a final 220 yards in 0:113/5 seconds, Turcotte’s blue and white jacket was billowing like a parachute on his back. Later, Sweat, a rub rag dangling from his back pocket, was whistling as he led Secretariat back to the barn and washed him off with soap and water, the colt’s golden coat shining wetly in the sun.

 The late afternoon of May 5, Derby Day, when the backstretch silence was broken as the loudspeakers blared, “Horsemen! Bring your horses to the paddock for the Derby!” And there was Secretariat, Eddie leading him, walking around the clubhouse turn toward the paddock, the colt’s head bobbing, his mouth grinding on the bit, until he strode into the straightaway past the clubhouse seats, where thousands pressed forward to see him, and he stopped and raised his head and stared a few seconds at the mammoth stands and raucous crowds, still as a piece of statuary, before dropping his head and walking on.

 At the top of the stretch at Churchill Downs at 5:38 P.M., the hour had come round at last: Secretariat was battling his arch rival, Sham, and they were nose and nose through the first 100 yards into the lane when Secretariat began to pull away, slowly but inexorably, and Sham began melting down the wick of that fiery pace as 130,000 people sent up a roar and Secretariat bounded home alone in 1:592/5—the fastest Kentucky Derby ever run—the first horse ever to shade two minutes for the mile and a quarter. In the doing, he pulled off the unprecedented feat of running each successive quarter-mile split faster than the preceding one—0:251/5, 0:24, 0:234/5, 0:232/5, and 0:23 flat—literally running faster and faster as the race went on.

He electrified the crowd that afternoon, and I can hear their echoes in that hallowed grandstand yet today. Secretariat had been voted the nation’s Horse of the Year as a two-year-old in 1972, and he had already shown himself to be a horse of gusting speed and highest quality, but the Kentucky Derby was his first transcendent moment as an equine athlete, the performance by which he joined the racing gods—the likes of Man o’ War and Count Fleet, Citation and Native Dancer, Swaps and Dr. Fager—and announced that he belonged in their pantheon. The Preakness reaffirmed his Derby brilliance, while his pièce de résistance, the Belmont Stakes, left him spinning in an orbit all his own, alone.

By the close of the 2009 Triple Crown season, a total of 1,382,316 thoroughbreds had been born and come of age in North America since 1970, the year of Secretariat’s birth, and not only did he still own the Kentucky Derby record by himself, no horse had come remotely close to equaling his world record at Belmont—a mile and a half in 2:24 flat.

He was sui generis, to be sure, an inspiration not only for documentarians and big-screen movie makers, but also for journalists and novelists and would-be poets.

Charles Hatton had been the dean of American turfwriters for decades before the rise of Secretariat, and he had seen them all since the era when Man o’ War and Sir Barton strutted their stuff on the racing stage; in the end he declared Secretariat to be the most capable racehorse he had ever seen. Nothing delighted Hatton more than seeing the colt fly through his morning workouts. The week before the Belmont Stakes, on the morning Secretariat worked a mile in the astonishing time of 1:34⁴/5, faster than the best older horses were racing in the afternoons, New York Times columnist Red Smith climbed to Hatton’s eyrie above the giant Belmont grandstand and asked how fast the colt had worked.

“The trees swayed,” Charlie told Red.

Upon the colt’s retirement, it was Hatton who penned the most lyrical farewell:

Weave for the mighty chestnut A tributary crown Of autumn leaves, the brightest then When autumn leaves are brown Hang up his bridle on the wall, His saddle on the tree, Till time shall bring some racing king Worthy to wear as he!

SECRETARIAT

CHAPTER 1

It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.

They swung out the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north. It was one of those hours when time is measured not by clocks but by contractions; the intervals between were getting shorter. In a small wooden barn set off at the edge of a nearby field, beneath a solitary light in an expanse of darkness, a mare was about to give birth. The men were rushing to the barn to help her.

The man behind the wheel was Howard M. Gentry, sixty-two years old, for almost twenty years a manager of the Meadow Stud in Doswell, one of the most successful breeding farms in America. Sitting with him in the front seat was Raymond W. Wood, a railroad conductor, fifty-four years old, Gentry’s long-time friend and neighbor, for years his steady companion at straight pool, and himself a modest breeder of thoroughbred horses.

It was the night of March 29, 1970, not the kind of night for anyone to leave the velvet green warmth of a pool table and rush outdoors. The weather had been bleak all day—the sky perpetually overcast, a drizzle falling through the morning and afternoon, and a fog that clung to the farm and the uplands and the bottomlands of Caroline County. A wind, mounting occasional gusts, blew out of the north from Washington. The temperature had been in the high forties during the day, but by evening it had dropped into the thirties, and sometime past eleven o’clock, when the call came, it was almost freezing.

Gentry instantly recognized the voice of Bob Southworth, the nightwatchman at the foaling barn. In a characteristic monotone Southworth told him what he had been waiting to hear. “Mistah Gentry! You better come on down here to the foalin’ barn in the field. That mare’s gettin’ ready to foal.”

That mare is what put an edge on the moment for Gentry. He had delivered hundreds of foals in the years he worked around thoroughbreds, but that mare was not just another broodmare carrying a foal by just another sire. Down in Barn 17A, the two-stall foaling barn near the western border of the farm, an eighteen-year-old broodmare named Somethingroyal, a daughter of the late Princequillo, was going into labor for the fourteenth time in her life. She was carrying a foal by Bold Ruler, the preeminent sire in America, year after year the nation’s leading stallion. It was a union of established aristocracy.

Somethingroyal was the kind of mare breeders seek to raise dynasties. She was the dam of the fleet Sir Gaylord, probably the most gifted racehorse of his generation, the colt favored to win the 1962 Kentucky Derby until he broke down the day before the race. She was the mother of First Family, a multiple stakes winner in the mid-1960s. In 1965 she bore her first Bold Ruler foal, a filly called Syrian Sea, winner of the rich Selima Stakes in 1967. Another Bold Ruler filly, The Bride, was a yearling, and tonight Somethingroyal was having her last Bold Ruler foal: the stallion was dying in Kentucky.

So Howard Gentry felt more anxious than usual to get the foal delivered. The foal would be virtually priceless, and Gentry hoped the delivery would be easy. Gentry had stopped to see Somethingroyal earlier that night, just before he went home for supper at six. She didn’t appear to be near labor then, but when he and Southworth made the rounds two hours later, as they often did together during breeding season, her condition had begun to change. Labor seemed imminent. The mare was “waxing heavily,” as Gentry called it, with milk congealing at the tips of her nipples like beads of candle wax, the tentative sign that labor is near—perhaps a few hours away, perhaps a day. It was then he decided to stay awake, instead of going to bed at nine, his regular time, and to call Wood and ask him to wait it out over a pool table.

Gentry edged his beige 1969 Chrysler across the highway dividing the farm, past the big house on the hill, past the towering stand of trees around the house, around the gravel driveway crunching underneath, down the gentle slope and past the fences and the pastures and through the gate where the broodmares walk to and from the fields during the day, and finally stopped about a hundred feet from where the lights were burning and where Bob Southworth, standing by the stall, was waiting.

Gentry and Wood cut across the wet grass on the field, walking briskly—hurrying—through the pasture toward the barn. Wood jogged to keep up, stumbling once in the dark, skimming through the pastureland to keep up with Gentry, midwife for Somethingroyal.

Gentry looked in the stall and walked quietly inside. Somethingroyal was breathing quickly now. Her nostrils were flared. She was walking the stall and seemed edgy, nervous. Gentry felt her neck and shoulder. She was warm and sweating lightly.

“She’s gettin’ ready,” Gentry said. A quick routine began. He checked for the iodine, the enema, the cup for the iodine, and the bowl for the water to wash the nipples for the suckling foal. Then he spotted his Unionalls, picked them off the hook, and slipped them on. The three men waited at the door, watching the old mare pace the stall, circling it as if caged, and they spoke idly in unremembered conversations.

At midnight, almost to the stroke, Gentry saw Somethingroyal stop pacing and lie down, collapsing her bulk on the bed of straw. She faced the rear of the stall, lying on her left side. Gentry slipped on his rubber gloves and dropped to his knees beside her. Her water bag broke, spilling fluid from her vagina. Any moment now, the foal.

Just past midnight, the tip of the left foot appeared, and Gentry waited for the other. In a normal birth, the front feet come out together, with the head between the legs, so Gentry watched and waited. When the foot failed to emerge, he decided to wait no longer. He feared the leg might be folded under or twisted, a position that could cause injury to the shoulder under the extreme pressures of birth. So, kneeling closer to the mare, he reached his arm inside the vagina and felt the head, which was in a good position, and then dropped his hand down to the right leg and felt for the hoof. As he suspected, he found it curled under, so he uncurled it gently, bringing the leg out of the vagina. “Won’t be long now,” he said to Wood.

Somethingroyal pushed, paused panting, and pushed again. Gentry guided but did not pull the legs—not yet. He always waited for the shoulder to emerge before pulling. The legs came out together. Then the head, with a splash of white down the face, slipped through the opening. A water bubble preceded it, and Gentry slit the bubble open. The neck slipped out, slowly, and finally the shoulders emerged. The mare paused, and Gentry took the front legs and waited for her to rest, always letting her lead: push and relax, push and relax.

Somethingroyal pushed, straining, and Gentry pulled on the legs, hard. It was a good-sized foal. Then he called Wood to his side, telling him to put on a pair of rubber gloves. Returning, Wood kneeled down next to Gentry and took one leg, Gentry the other.

“Take it easy now,” Gentry told him. “No hurry—and not too hard—take your time.” They pulled together for several moments. As the foal came out, and Gentry saw the size of the shoulders and the size of the bone, he feared the foal might hip lock—his hips were so wide—and have difficulty clearing the opening. When the rib cage cleared, Gentry guided the hips.

Moments later the foal was out and lying on the bed of straw, the mare was panting and sweating, and Gentry was asking South-worth for the cup of iodine. Southworth broke the umbilical by pulling the foal around to the mare’s head so she could lick him. Gentry cauterized the wound with iodine and gave the foal four milliliters of the combiotics—an antibiotic combination of streptomycin and penicillin—as a precautionary measure, and Southworth rubbed him down with a towel to dry him and circulate the blood.

Gentry looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after midnight, March 30, 1970, the moment the whole foal emerged. He was a chestnut, with three white feet—the right front and the two behind. The colt lay at his mother’s head when Gentry, looking at him, stepped back and shook his head and said to Wood, “There is a whopper.”

CHAPTER 2

The Virginia of Caroline County—acres of porous soil and roughly tree-mantled countryside—is not the Old South of cotton farms and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting among the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. This is not the Virginia where buses stop at overlooks on any of the approved tours, lying outside the limits of the Tidewater and far to the southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, with its pungent orchards and its own haunting song.

Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster—a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country—watermelons and muskmelons—and it has fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for growing corn and soybeans, but it was not always so prosperous or so peaceful there.

The Meadow is part of a neck of land almost midway between Richmond and Washington. For four years, two armies crawled around it feeling for each other’s jugular. The fighting began just seventy miles to the north, at Bull Run, and it ended not far to the southwest, at Appomattox Court House. The Morris family, living on The Meadow at the time, hid the family silver in the well. Some of the largest set-piece battles of the war, with their cavalry sweeps and scouting parties, took place nearby. The land, and whatever civilization had been built on it, came out of the war years badly gored.

The war radically altered the course of the lives of the people who somehow survived it and left James Hollis Chenery the sole male support of three families, including the Morrises of The Meadow. The war had left the Morrises and other families nearly destitute, though it did not destroy them. Chenery ended up as a clerk in a dry goods store in Richmond.

The war also picked up Richard Johnson Hancock in the Deep South, marched him into Virginia, and then left him nearly dead outside a city in the Shenandoah Valley. Hancock was born in Alabama, the son of a farmer, but he was raised and ultimately orphaned in Louisiana, where he joined the Bossier Volunteers when the war broke out. Hancock’s unit was ordered to Virginia and eventually came under the command of Stonewall Jackson. Hancock was wounded three times in the next two years, the first time superficially at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 30, 1862.

The second wound gave him a limp, but it also remade him into a Virginian and in time led him to found what would become one of the largest and most important thoroughbred breeding establishments in the world. In July of 1863, Hancock was jumping a fence in an assault on Cemetery Ridge during the Battle of Gettysburg when a Union soldier turned on him and fired. The ball struck Hancock in the hip. He was dispatched to a Confederate hospital in Charlottesville. While convalescing, Hancock often attended Sunday services at the Christian Church, and one morning he met Thomasia Overton Harris. She was the daughter of John Harris, a prominent landowner on whose 1450-acre farm, called Ellerslie, about one hundred slaves bred and raised livestock and planted corn and tobacco.

The courtship that developed was interrupted when Hancock, recovered from the hip wound, rejoined the Bossier Volunteers. The fighting in the months that followed carried him to the mountains, to the Shenandoah Valley beyond the mountains, and finally to the city of Winchester in the valley. There, on September 19, 1864, a Union soldier shot him in the stomach as he and other members of the unit retreated south from the city. He was a prisoner of war and badly wounded, though he was not either very long. Hancock, with some help, contrived to escape, slipping away unseen and skirting Sheridan’s right flank at Cedar Creek, making his way to the Confederate lines and then on to Ellerslie. There, in November of 1864, he and Miss Harris were married. Richard Hancock had always liked thoroughbreds, and when he returned to the farm after the war, one of the things he wanted to do was raise them at Ellerslie.

James Hollis Chenery had no such visions. He was only sixteen years old when he started work at the dry goods store in Richmond. Sixteen years later, when he was thirty-two years old, Chenery married his second cousin—it was in the family tradition—Ida Burnley Taylor. They had six children, one of whom died young. Ida Chenery, a disciplinarian, pushed and raised and shaped them.

The oldest boy, William, went through journalism school and rose to be the editor of the Rocky Mountain News and then an editor at Collier’s magazine. A daughter, Blanche, attended the University of Chicago, married an advertising man, and settled down in Pelham Manor, New York, where practically the whole family wound up living at one time. The youngest boy, Alan Chenery, went through Richmond Medical School and became a urologist with a practice in Washington, D.C. Charlie, the only one of the children who did not go to college, eventually worked for his brother Chris. And there was Chris.

Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to become—a man of substance and horses and a part of the landed gentry. He was born in Richmond on September 19, 1886, but his parents soon moved to Ashland, north of Richmond and just south of The Meadow, where he acquired a feeling for the land and place that never left him.

Helen (Penny) Chenery Tweedy, Christopher Chenery’s youngest daughter, once wrote in a personal family history that poverty was a central emptiness in their lives:

The boys went barefoot from March first to October first to save their shoes. They did not have servants other than a cook, but they were too proud to admit it, so Chris would wait until after dark to carry the laundry in a wagon down to a colored washerwoman so the neighbors wouldn’t know. The best Christmas present was a tangerine in the toe of their stockings—a rare luxury. But they were a close family, fiercely fond of each other and fearful of insult…. Each of the boys grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin, Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place adjoining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caroline, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have…. His mother kept his feet on the ground, however, and ruled him and his brothers with a magnificent and ladylike temper. If they got out of line, they spent a week in the yard or cut an extra cord of wood. There was no appealing for clemency or using boyish charm with her. She stiffened their spines and sent them out into the world with a great sense of family obligation.

The children shared their opportunities for education. Each boy was allowed to attend Randolph-Macon College in Ashland for two years, but was then expected to quit and work three years to allow another of the boys his two years of study. And that is what sent Chris Chenery into the mountainous terrain of West Virginia when still a boy of sixteen.

By then he had already finished two years of college at Randolph-Macon, and he had taken a job as a surveyor with an engineering party laying tracks for the Virginian Railroad, one of America’s largest lines of coal carriers. He worked there for three years, and when he left, in 1907, he took with him enough money to return to college, this time to study engineering at Washington and Lee. Scholastically, he behaved like a man possessed, poring over the texts, teaching a course in engineering, and pushing himself to the top of his class. By the time he graduated in 1909, he had acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a taste for wild adventure that sent him west, beyond the Appalachians to the Pacific. There he joined another engineering party that reconnoitered the uncharted interior of Alaska by pack train, looking for potential railroad routes from Cook inlet to the Yukon. The job involved surveying 600 miles of land in difficult weather. “It took two polar bears to live through one winter,” said turfwriter Charles Hatton, a friend of Chenery. The terrain was hazardous, the mosquitoes in the summer malevolent.

In idle moments Chenery read and reread the complete works of William Shakespeare and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and in later years he quoted liberally from both, especially when he was with people educated in the arts and letters he had missed.

“When he got back to Oregon,” Penny Tweedy wrote, “he was quite a ‘hell-raiser’ and the minister’s daughter he wooed in Portland spurned him. Later he found her again in Chicago, and after two stormy, indecisive years they were married.” Her name was Helen Bates, and she descended from a long line of New England homeopaths who moved slowly from the east coast to the west, by way of Rochester, Minnesota. Helen Bates was pretty, resented her richer cousins’ hand-me-downs, and found a favorite uncle who sent her to Smith College. She went to Chicago to strike out on her own and improve herself, there married Chenery and left Chicago when America entered World War I:

Christopher “joined up” right after they were married in 1917. Helen did not relish living with her mother-in-law in Ashland. Mrs. Chenery had remarked, hearing that Chris was engaged to an Oregon girl, “I thought they only had barmaids out there.” But these two strong-minded women survived, and Chris survived the war—spent ignominiously teaching cavalrymen to ride at nearby Fort Belvoir.

Chenery left the service in 1918, and in the next decade he switched from engineering to finance and began one of those inexorable American climbs to the presidency of a string of utility companies. In 1927 he quickly became wealthy and began to acquire all the accoutrements of money and position and substance as they had been defined for him and as he had defined them for himself. He moved to Pelham Manor, New York, and founded the Boulder Brook Club—a riding club—in Scarsdale. He played some polo and fox hunted with the Goldens Bridge Hounds. He had an office in Manhattan. And he sent his children to good schools. Chenery was never a haughty man, never a man who flaunted his wealth, and he was enough of a romantic and sentimentalist to want to finally return to The Meadow.

One day, in 1935, he took his daughter Penny and his wife Helen to see a boarding school that Penny would attend in Washington, D.C. She would recall the day many years later, picture it as she and her father and mother drove south toward Richmond from Washington and bumped toward The Meadow, where he had spent summers as a youngster, toward Ashland where he had grown up and learned to know the country to which he was returning now:

We drove south for several hours that day, on narrow roads that went up and down like a roller coaster over countless hills. The brown winter woods and the sluggish creeks had a sameness that depressed me; they were so unlike the twisting roads and sudden vistas of my familiar New England, but I was excited to be going back to dad’s home—not really his, but his cousin’s, where he had spent his happiest summers.

Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:

Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps. My memory fills in tattered children and a few pigs, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalled her father looking perplexed, then angry:

Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—the office, he fumed. At the other were two smaller shacklike structures, but with definite architectural details, which were the smoke house and the old kitchen. The remnants of a classic revival cupola capped the well house. Below, in a wide loop of the river, there had once been rich fields. Slave labor had built a dike around them to keep the river out, but after the Civil War, it was breached by high water, and the cove, as it was called, was now covered by an immense tangle of brush, trees and brambles. It had been overgrown even when dad was a boy, and he had heard stories of a runaway slave who lived down in there. No one had ventured down in many years.

Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it. He told his wife and daughter to remain in the car, warning them that the house might be full of lice. Chenery went inside, but he didn’t stay long. Moments later he walked back to the car. He said nothing as he slid inside and drove off to the house across the road. Penny wanted to ask him what The Meadow homestead was like inside, what it looked like, but she saw his expression and decided to say nothing at all. He bought The Meadow a year later.

Thus Christopher T. Chenery had repossessed his childhood, reclaiming some old hills and remembrances and a place to raise horses. But if there was some of the Gatsby romantic in him—something of a man trying to recapture his past—his brothers hardly shared his enthusiasm. They were against his buying back The Meadow, Penny said:

They thought Chris was crazy to buy it back—that was all behind them—and Virginia would never leave the shackles of its backward economy, especially rural Virginia. The Depression was easing, but the specter of poverty never left any of them.

But Chenery had made his money by stringing utilities together, and he was on his way to being a millionaire several times over again. By 1936, he had already been the president of the Federal Water Service Corporation for ten years, and that year he also became chairman and director of Southern Natural Gas Company. Deep in the Depression, Chris Chenery was making money and incorporating his holdings and sharing his stock with the family, and with the gold he set about in earnest to rebuild The Meadow.

He spent thousands of dollars making it a showplace, rebuilding and enlarging and refurnishing it:

He built stables for one hundred horses, a mile training track, breeding sheds, hay barns, and an office—the old one had been beyond repair. The poor country boy eventually spent his winters in Palm Beach buying at auctions the things that were symbols of wealth in his childhood. He first acquired oriental rugs, then turned to nineteenth-century paintings, and finally to jade.

He had earned what he was spending and what he owned. He had a contempt for idle people and for laziness, a disdain for dullness and the weak witted. Education was not what set men apart. What distinguished them was the intensity of the drive and the energy and imagination they possessed and used.

Politically, he was conservative, a staunch anti-Communist—or, as he would prefer to say, an anti-Bolshevik. Financially, he was bold but careful, and when he invested in thoroughbreds in the late 1930s he made small and what appeared to be insignificant acquisitions of blooded horses. “The price does not always represent what a horse is worth,” Chenery once said. “It is only what some fool thinks he is worth.”

Among his first purchases was a filly named Hildene, a daughter of the 1926 Kentucky Derby winner, Bubbling Over. He paid only $600 for her. “Hildene showed speed, but she tired badly eight times in eight races,” he said. So he retired her to the stud, and there she produced a family of some of the finest horses on the American turf.

Sometime during the Depression, when he was getting started in racing, Chenery acquired a set of jockey silks. They were some old silks that had been abandoned, no doubt discarded by some owner who went haywire for a decade and then dropped off into the perpetual twilight that came in October of 1929. The silks were snappy: white and blue blocks on the shirt, and blue and white stripes down the sleeves. And a blue cap.

CHAPTER 3

In the end it was the land that made them all—the land that raised the horses and made room for the people and supported the empires of chance they built on it.

It was blocked off in white and creosote fences and planted in clover and grass, a deep green shag rug that ran, as if unrolled, across a boundless countryside. The land is where the horses were born, on farms such as Hamburg Place in Kentucky, where still stands a single barn—a historic marker now—in which five Kentucky Derby winners were foaled: Old Rosebud (1914), Sir Barton (1919), Paul Jones (1920), Zev (1923), and Flying Ebony (1925). It is where the horses were raised and weaned, where they romped and grazed and grew to young horses on the racetrack. Some were returned to it as pensioners, many more to serve in studs and nurseries. A chosen few were buried on the land, the best beneath granite headstones chiseled in their names and, at times, in epitaphs rendered in the style of Boot Hill:

HERE LIES THE FLEETEST RUNNER

THE AMERICAN TURF HAS EVER KNOWN,

AND ONE OF THE GAMEST

AND MOST GENEROUS OF HORSES.

That is the epitaph on the monument of Domino, the “Black Whirlwind,” who was buried in 1897 in a grave outside of Lexington. There was no faster horse than Domino in the sprints—he was the Jesse Owens of his species in the Gay Nineties—and when they retired him to stud, he whirled the wind again as a progenitor. Domino died at six, twenty years too soon for a sire of his prepotency, and he left only twenty offspring from his duty as a stud horse, eleven daughters and nine sons. But among the sons was Commando, a horse who would strike his and his sire’s names into the pedigree charts of champions for many years. Through Pink Domino, a daughter, his name would surface often in the family trees of numerous racehorses, appearing in the distant collateral reaches of the bloodlines of many modern horses, including the colt Gentry delivered that night at The Meadow.

Domino was a phenomenon, a complete thoroughbred, sui generis. He remains today one of the few American racehorses in history who left the land and became one of the fastest horses of his era, then returned to it and made an even deeper imprint on the breed itself. Most thoroughbreds, in the days of Domino and since him, left the land and failed at the races—if they ever got to the races at all, which many did not—or they raced through careers of declining mediocrity. Many colts were gelded along the way, destroyed for a variety of reasons, sold for use as saddle horses or jumping or hunting horses, or hitched to wagons or rented out, by the hour, at livery stables everywhere.

Scores of stallions, coming off superior racing careers, failed as stud horses, some more ignominiously than others. Sir Barton, winner of the 1919 Triple Crown, failed to transmit much of his speed to his offspring, and he finished out his stud career at a cavalry remount station in Douglas, Wyoming. Grey Lag, one of the most gifted runners in the early 1920s—winner of the 1921 Belmont Stakes and the prestigious Brooklyn Handicap—was virtually sterile when sent to stud. Returned to the races at age nine, he had trouble beating horses that could not have warmed him up in his younger days. He was retired a second time, given away, and a few years later was discovered again, at the age of thirteen, running against cheap $1000 claiming horses in Canada. Harry F. Sinclair, who raced Grey Lag in his prime while leasing oil fields at Teapot Dome, was in no need of more adverse publicity. Quietly, he dispatched an agent to Canada, bought the horse, and retired him to his Rancocas Farm. Grey Lag never raced again, living out his life as a pensioner. The other famous impotent, 1946 Triple Crown winner Assault, did the same, as did many fine geldings, such as Exterminator and Armed.

But most of the horses sent back to the farms, the many fillies and mares and the few colts and horses, were pressed into the service of breeding enterprises, of large stud farms such as Hamburg Place and Himyar, Rancocas and Idle Hour and Calumet Farm. The fortunes of the farms and their owners, in some ways, ran with the fortunes of the horses and the bloodlines they produced. All of them would rise to prominence in their day, wane, reemerge, or die away. There is no great Himyar anymore, no flourishing Idle Hour since Colonel E.R. Bradley died, though the land still raises horses. Sinclair sold the last of the Rancocas horses in 1932, all but Zev and Grey Lag. Hamburg Place, once the showplace of American breeding, bred its last Derby winner, Alysheba, in 1984. And Calumet Farm is no longer the 1927 Yankees it was when Bull Lea filled the farm’s stable with so many high-classed runners, three Derby winners and all those nimble-footed tomboys. But what is behind them, behind all the young horses and the new owners and breeders of thoroughbreds, is the land.

While Christopher T. Chenery was piecing together the shards of his family homestead, the descendants of Richard J. Hancock emerged as the leading breeders of thoroughbreds in America. It had taken seventy years.

R. J. Hancock founded Ellerslie Stud and within ten years of the war had bought his first stallion, Scathelock, and his first broodmare, War Song. That was the start.

Hancock’s rise to prominence as a Virginia breeder actually began after he acquired the stallion Eolus from a Maryland breeder, swapping Scathelock in an even trade. The transaction revealed Hancock’s shrewd eye for horses. Eolus sired a number of winners, giving a measure of prestige to the Hancock name among Virginia horsemen. Among the best was Knight of Ellerslie, who not only won the 1884 Preakness Stakes, but also made a name as the sire of Henry of Navarre, the chestnut colt who battled Domino, the Black Whirlwind, in one of the most celebrated struggles in the history of the American turf. High-rolling Pittsburgh Phil bet $100,000 on Domino and calmly ate figs out of a bag as he watched the two horses struggle to a dead heat.

Eolus died three years later, in 1897, but by then Ellerslie had become a major thoroughbred nursery in Virginia, selling its yearlings every year at auction, buying and raising its own bloodstock. And by then, too, Richard Hancock’s son, Arthur, had graduated from the University of Chicago, a reedy young man, six feet six inches and 165 pounds, who came home in 1895 to be about his father’s business. He became his father’s assistant, attending yearling sales and doing his novitiate on the farm. And then, within one three-year period, a series of events occurred in Arthur Hancock’s life that enlarged its scope and potential, multiplying the possibilities open to him as a breeder.

In 1907, seeking a man without local ties or friendships, Senator Camden Johnson of Kentucky invited Hancock to judge a class of thoroughbreds at the Blue Grass Fair in Kentucky. Hancock accepted. While he was there, he met Nancy Tucker Clay, one of the many Clays of Bourbon County. Like the Harrises of Virginia, the Clays of Kentucky were landed gentry, owning lots of land, acres of some of the choicest real estate in the Blue Grass country. Nancy Clay and Arthur Hancock were married the following year, in 1908, fusing a family owning one of the finest estates in Virginia with another owning miles of rolling greenery in Kentucky.

In 1909, Arthur Hancock took over the operation of Ellerslie from his aging father.

In 1910, within a span of four days, Nancy Clay Hancock’s father and mother died. Nancy Hancock inherited 1300 acres of property in Paris, Kentucky, rich farmland set off Winchester Road. So the events of the year made Hancock the steward of two manors, and they left him an heir to his fortune and name. Earlier in the year, Nancy Hancock had given birth to a son, Arthur Boyd Hancock, Jr., a man whose influence on American bloodstock would one day exceed that of his father. Arthur Hancock, Sr., did not take long to coordinate the operations at Ellerslie and Claiborne Farm, the name they chose for the land in Paris. The Hancock stud at Ellerslie survived the horse-racing blackout of 1911–1912, when the sport was outlawed in New York during an outburst of moral fervor, but Hancock had to cut back the broodmare band to all but about twelve mares. Over the next twenty-five years, Hancock’s long climb to preeminence as a breeder began. He moved his family permanently to the Kentucky farm in 1912, a move suggesting that he knew Kentucky would one day be the home of thoroughbred breeding in America.

A year later he bought the stallion Celt, a son of Commando, for $20,000 in a dispersal sale at Madison Square Garden. Under Celt, the Hancock stud regained the vigor it possessed in the days of Eolus. Hancock’s interest in foreign bloodstock heightened when the prices dropped in Europe at the start of World War I. In 1915 he bought the English stallion, Wrack, for $8000 from Archibald Philip Rosbery. It marked Hancock’s first major acquisition of a foreign stallion, and it launched a breeding operation at Claiborne Farm, where Wrack was sent to stud. Barns were built near Kennedy Creek. Part of the land was fenced with planking. A grazing paddock was built for Wrack to loll away his idle hours. And the farm itself expanded, growing in size from 1300 to 2100 acres.

The Hancock studs flourished in the 1920s, grew in influence and prestige. In 1921, Celt was America’s leading thoroughbred sire in the amount of money won by his offspring, his fifty-two performing sons and daughters winning 124 races and $206,167 in purses. Hancock reached out for more foreign blood. His acquisition of foreign bloodstock reached its zenith in 1926, when he formed a four-man group—composed of Hanover Bank president William Woodward, Marshall Field, Robert Fairbairn, and himself—and bought Sir Gallahad III, a French stallion and a son of Teddy, for $125,000. Sir Gallahad’s impact at the stud was felt almost at once.

Bred his first year in America to Marguerite, a daughter of Celt, he sired Belair Stud’s Gallant Fox. “The Fox of Belair,” as he came to be known, won the Triple Crown in 1930, the second horse to do it. Sir Gallahad III was the leading American sire that year, with just sixteen offspring winning forty-nine races and $422,200, a record in purses that stood until 1942. He led the sire list three more times, his horses winning more than the horses sired by any other stallion.

Through the importation of the potent Teddy blood, through Sir Gallahad III and later his full brother, Bull Dog, American and other imported blood was freshened and invigorated. Sir Gallahad III’s influence became unusually pervasive in his role as a “broodmare sire,” so pervasive that he led the annual broodmare sire list for twelve years, ten years in a row, from 1943 to 1952. The broodmare sire list is a special category that singles out stallions whose daughters are exceptional producers. For twelve years the daughters of Sir Gallahad III produced racehorses that won more money than the racehorses produced by the daughters of any other sire. No horse in American history, before or since, ever dominated that list so long. He sired La France, dam of the 1939 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Johnstown; and he sired Gallette, dam of champion handicap mare Gallorette; Fighting Lady, dam of the speedy Armageddon; and Black Wave, dam of the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner, Jet Pilot.

In 1936, Hancock was instrumental in bringing Blenheim II, the 1930 Epsom Derby winner, to America. Blenheim II cost an American syndicate $250,000. Among Blenheim II’s first sons to reach the races in America was Whirlaway, winner of the 1941 Triple Crown, the fifth horse to win it.

Hancock’s fortunes as a breeder soared. In 1935, horses bred by Hancock won more races—392—and more money—$359,218—than the horses bred by any other breeder. He led the breeder lists for the next two years. Hancock was not racing his homebreds. Following a policy adopted originally by his father in 1886, he sold his yearlings at auction every year. Through the years, he developed a reputation as a breeder knowledgeable about bloodlines, both foreign and domestic, who could recall in minute detail the distant reaches of a pedigree.

By then his son Arthur was a student of breeding, too. “I grew up at Claiborne and when I was twelve, my father was paying me fifty cents a day to sweep out after the yearlings,” he once said. That was in the summer of 1922, the year before he left the public school system in Paris and went to Saint Mark’s Academy in Southborough, Massachusetts, a bastion of righteous Episcopalianism, where he subscribed to the Daily Racing Form, the industry’s trade newspaper and the horseplayer’s bible. He transferred to Woodberry Forest, a Virginia school, and there picked up his nickname, Bull, by which he would one day be known throughout all the major world marketplaces for the blooded horse. His central ambition was to be a thoroughbred breeder.

In the summers of his youth, when his jobs went beyond sweeping out after the yearlings, he worked with the broodmares, the stud horses, the yearlings, the farm veterinarian, alternating jobs summer after summer. He went to Princeton, played baseball and football, and earned letters. He was a six-foot-two raconteur with a reverberating baritone voice.

At Princeton he studied eugenics, French, and genetics. And when he graduated in 1933 he returned to Claiborne, as his father had returned to Ellerslie almost forty years before, to become his father’s assistant. He learned, as his father learned, from the grass up—about the care and feeding of the yearlings and the broodmares and the stud horses, starting from the beginning. He learned about the land, too, walking it so often that one day he would know every tree and plank on it.

“I never wanted to be anything but a horseman,” Bull once said. “I just never thought of anything else.”

CHAPTER 4

Claiborne Farm was no empire of prepotent young stallions and mares of promise when Bull Hancock returned to it in 1945, the year the air corps released him after his father suffered the first of several heart attacks.

Bull was thirty-five then and much had begun to wane since he became his father’s assistant. What he came back to was a farm with a twilight presence to it—old stallions and old mares and an aging, ailing owner who would not let go. Arthur Hancock, Sr., had been the leading breeder again in America, but there had been no infusion of fresh bloodstock. Breeding blooded horses is an enterprise that flourishes most vigorously with recurrent transfusions of young horses and mares of quality, with the culling of the failures and the replacement of the aging stock with younger animals. Stallions and mares—with some notorious exceptions—usually produce their finest offspring before they reach the age of fifteen.

In 1945, Blenheim II was already eighteen years old and beyond his prime, though he later sired several excellent runners. Sir Gallahad III, whose influence as a broodmare sire was growing, was a ripened twenty-five and only four years away from Valhalla. The younger stallions were not successful. In general, the 250 mares living on the farm, most of them owned by Claiborne’s clients, who boarded them there, were well bred but not exceptional producers. Hancock was unenthusiastic about the quality of Claiborne’s own mares. “We had gone twelve years without replacing stock,” he once recalled. “He [Arthur, Sr.] had sold everything. When I took over he had about seventy-five mares and I didn’t like any of them, except two. I started rebuilding. I made up my mind that my children wouldn’t have to go through what I did.” And by 1950, when he was refreshing the bloodstock with mares like Miss Disco, he already had two sons. The oldest was Arthur B. Hancock III. And the youngest, an infant at the time, was Seth.

The rebirth of the Hancock breeding dynasty actually began to take place six years earlier, launched by an event so inconspicuous that it stirred only the mildest notice of a day. It occurred when the Georgian Prince Dimitri Djordjadze and his wife Audrey, a Cincinnati heiress, decided to retire their little bay colt, Princequillo, and arranged to have him stand at stud in Virginia.

Almost two decades earlier, in 1928, two figures connected with the Belgian turf purchased a weanling—a colt by the stallion Rose Prince out of a mare named Indolence. The cost was 260 guineas. The weanling, shipped to Belgium, was named Prince Rose.

Prince Rose became the greatest racehorse in the Belgium of his day—probably the best that had ever run in that country—and one of its greatest sires. He had the bloodlines: Prince Rose’s sire, Rose Prince, was by Prince Palatine, a son of Persimmon, who was himself a son of one of the greatest sires in thoroughbred history, the undefeated St. Simon. As a direct male-line descendant of St. Simon, Prince Rose descended in what is called “tail male” from St. Simon, a potentially valuable genetic trait. The St. Simon male line produced an unusual number of superior horses.

As Prince Rose was establishing himself as Belgium’s leading sire, the American representative in France for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Laudy Lawrence, obtained the horse from Belgium on a three-year lease. Lawrence brought the horse to France in 1938 and installed him in his Haras de Cheffreville. In the spring of 1939, he bred Prince Rose to his mare Cosquilla, a daughter of Papyrus, winner of the Epsom Derby. She conceived. The breeding occurred in a turbulent time. War was coming to Europe. The German armies were menacing France. Pregnant, Cosquilla didn’t stay there long. She was dispatched across the English Channel, while in foal, to be bred in England the next spring.

In early 1940, as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Cosquilla gave birth to her bay colt at the Banstead Stud at Newmarket, near Suffolk, about ninety miles outside of London. The air war over England began in July of 1940, and later that summer or fall—after the colt had been weaned—he was sent to Lawrence’s farm in Ireland. Then, in 1941, he and a number of yearlings were shipped across the North Atlantic, by then a lair of submarines, to New York. The colt disembarked as a refugee of sorts.

Named Princequillo, he was broken at the Mill River Farm in New York and put in training there. Prior to leaving the country again, Lawrence leased Princequillo to Chicago owner Anthony Pelleteri. One of the clauses of the lease permitted Pelleteri to run Princequillo in claiming races—in which the horse could be bought or “claimed” for a specific price—even though Pelleteri did not own him.

Pelleteri raced Princequillo for the first time under a $1500 claiming tag. No one took him.

He then ran the colt back for a $2500 claiming price, and again there were no takers.

Pelleteri then raced Princequillo for $2500 in his fourth start, winning with him then, and that was the last time Pelleteri had him. Trainer Horatio Luro, acting for the Boone Hall Stables of Princess Djordjadze, claimed him for the price. Luro ran him as a claimer, too. Aside from his pedigree, there was no apparent reason for anyone to believe that Princequillo would develop into the best longdistance runner in America in 1943. But he did, running best beyond a mile and an eighth.

In 1943, the spring classics were dominated by Count Fleet, an extremely fast horse who raced to easy victories in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes and became the sixth horse in history to win the American Triple Crown. He won the Belmont Stakes by twenty-five lengths, the longest margin by which it had ever been won. Princequillo began his three-year-old year modestly. He won an allowance race in New Orleans, not a major racetrack compared with those in New York, then lost two others there, but he quickly became sharp. On June 12, seven days after Count Fleet rushed to his record-breaking clocking in the Belmont Stakes—clipping two-fifths of a second off War Admiral’s stakes record of 2:283/5 for the mile and a half—Princequillo ran the best race in his career. He defeated Bolingbroke, the great long distancer, beating him going a mile and five-eighths.

Princequillo then hooked the older Bolingbroke and Shut Out, winner of the 1942 Kentucky Derby, at a mile and a quarter in the Saratoga Handicap. Princequillo won it. The farther they ran, the better he liked it. He would leave the gate and simply roll on. A week after the Saratoga Handicap, he raced Bolingbroke over a mile and three-quarters, thus far the longest race of his career, and he won a head-bobbing stretch duel in record time. He closed out his year with a triumph in one of the longest races in America, the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park.

Princequillo, by acclaim, was the best cup horse—that is, the best long-distance runner—in America, beating the most accomplished routers consistently. He won two more races in 1944, when he was a four-year-old, then pulled up lame at Saratoga. He won $96,550 and twelve of thirty-three races over three years.

Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., liked Princequillo’s racing record—his ability to stay a distance of ground—and he liked his pedigree. So he installed Princequillo at Ellerslie in 1945. There were no breeders leaping over one another to get their mares to Princequillo. He may have been the best long-distance runner in America, but he was not a fashionable stallion like Count Fleet or War Admiral. Princequillo was held in such uncertain esteem, in fact, that Hancock was unable to get enough mares to breed to him, the thirty-five or so mares needed to fill his book. But those who did decide to send him mares at Ellerslie made the difference. One was William Woodward. Another was Christopher T. Chenery.

CHAPTER 5

Princequillo was bred to Chenery’s Hildene in the spring of 1946, a year that ushered in a quick succession of landmark years in the fortunes of Hancock and Chenery and in the course of breeding thoroughbreds in America.

In 1946, the Hancocks sold Ellerslie, which had been losing money and declining as a stud farm for years, and consolidated all their thoroughbred holdings at Claiborne. Among the horses dispatched from Charlottesville to Paris was Princequillo. For him it was a long journey’s end. And Hildene, one of the last of the hundreds of mares bred at Ellerslie since the days of Richard Hancock’s Eolus, was returned to The Meadow in foal. The following year, in the spring of 1947, Hildene gave birth to a bay son of Princequillo. Chenery named him Hill Prince.

The racing fortunes of the Chenery horses were rising. More pivotally, 1947 was also the year that Chenery attended a dispersal sale of the estate of W. A. La Boyteaux at Saratoga and decided to join the bidding when the mare, Imperatrice, winner of the 1941 Test Stakes, was led into the sales ring. It was perhaps the most important decision of Chenery’s extraordinary career as a breeder.

Imperatrice was not much to look at, but she liked to hear her feet rattle. She was a big-barreled, short-legged, floppy-eared bay mare with a stirring gust of speed. Sprinting was her trump, but she had a depth of quality about her that almost carried her home in the 1941 Beldame Stakes, an important middle-distance race at Aqueduct. She finished a close second.

At her side in 1947 was a colt by the stallion Piping Rock, and the gallery at the sale was advised that she was in foal to him again. So Chenery, seeing a once-speedy race mare with a Piping Rock foal beside her and another advertised within, jumped into the bidding and moved it upward, finally upward to $30,000. The gavel slammed down, and they were his. Then down to The Meadow went Imperatrice. Later in the year Dr. William Caslick, a veterinarian, made his regular rounds of the Chenery broodmares to pronounce them either in or not in foal.

Chenery happened to be at The Meadow that day. Caslick moved from mare to mare, coming finally to the stall of Imperatrice. He walked inside and began the examination, inserting his hand in the mare’s rectum and reaching far inside, to where he could feel the outside of the uterine wall through the intestines. He was feeling for the fetus.

Moments passed. Caslick probed carefully for the signs of life. More time passed. Chenery, standing by Howard Gentry, wondered out loud what was taking so long.

“That mare’s empty,” Caslick finally said.

Chenery plopped down on a bale of straw: “Thirty thousand dollars, and empty!”

Imperatrice did not stay empty long.

In the autumn of the year, another kind of milestone was reached. Hundreds of men and women drove or walked the twelve miles from Lexington to Faraway Farm, filing through the gates until all of them, some horsemen and some not, gathered near the grave and listened as the mayor of Lexington gave a speech, and the head of the American Horse and Mule Association, Ira Drymon, delivered a eulogy. Bull Hancock was among the breeders there.

The mood was reverential. Man o’ War was lying in an oak coffin at the edge of an open grave. The top of the coffin was open. Man o’ War had died with an erection, and someone had discreetly placed a black cloth or blanket over it. He had suffered a series of heart attacks within a forty-eight-hour period, getting to his feet repeatedly until the last one put him down for good. He was thirty then, extremely old for a horse. The crowd listened as the eulogy ended, watched as the coffin was closed. They had paid the ultimate tribute to a racehorse—giving him a funeral fit for a prince of the blood, celebrating the cherished belief in Kentucky that Man o’ War was the greatest horse America had ever produced.

In the winter of 1948, trainer Jimmy Jones saddled Citation for the Ground Hog Course at Hialeah Racetrack in Florida, where many top three-year-olds would begin their campaigning for the Triple Crown. On May 1, he won the Kentucky Derby by three and a half, beating a stablemate, Coaltown. Two weeks later he won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico by five and a half lengths. On June 12, at Belmont Park on Long Island, he raced to an eight-length victory in the Belmont Stakes. Thus Citation became the eighth Triple Crown winner in American turf history and earned a reputation as one of the greatest runners of all time.

In 1949, the winnings of the Chenery horses soared to $141,005, with Hill Prince winning the World’s Playground Stakes at Atlantic City, worth $11,275, and the Cowdin Stakes at Belmont Park under Eddie Arcaro. Hill Prince was voted the leading two-year-old in America. The value of Princequillo’s stud services started climbing. At Claiborne Farm, meanwhile, Bull Hancock was engineering the masterstroke in modern American breeding, the pièce de résistance.

Toward the end of 1949, sometime in the fall of the year, Dr. Eslie Asbury, a Cincinnati surgeon, received a telephone call from Hancock, his long-time friend and counselor on thoroughbred breeding. The call concerned Nasrullah, the Irish stallion that Hancock wanted to import to America. He had tried twice without success to purchase him. Foaled in 1940 at the Aga Khan’s Sheshoon Stud in Ireland, Nasrullah was a son of the unbeaten Nearco, the greatest racehorse of his day in Europe. Nasrullah was a stubborn if gifted animal, a rogue at the barrier, a rogue sometimes in the morning. If the spirit did not move him to gallop on the racetrack, which was often, an umbrella opened behind him usually did; that became one of the techniques used to make him run at Newmarket. He was a champion two-year-old in England, and Hancock believed the horse was unlucky when he finished third in the 1943 Epsom Derby. Bull Hancock liked him.

In fact, Hancock tried to buy him once in 1948 for £100,000 in partnership with Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, the copper baron, and banker Woodward, but the pound was devalued and the deal caved in with it.

And now a year later Hancock had tried again and finally succeeded in getting him. Nasrullah, at last, was coming to America.

“We have the horse,” Hancock said to Asbury. “Do you want in?”

Asbury did not hesitate. Nasrullah was not new to him. Years later he recalled that he and Hancock had often spoken of Nasrullah’s prospects as a sire, his racing record, his temperament, and the vigor he might infuse into American strains. Hancock had always wanted a stallion from the Nearco line, a powerful line only tokenly represented in America at the time. Nearco had been the leading sire in England in 1947 and 1948 and was on his way to being the leading sire again in 1949. Asbury recalled that he and Hancock had spoken specifically about the invigorating effect the Nasrullah blood might have on the blood of Sir Gallahad III and Bull Dog, the sons of Teddy. “We had felt Nasrullah was an out-cross for all the Teddy blood here,” said Asbury. “We had so much Teddy blood here, especially at Claiborne and in my own mares.”

Hancock told Asbury that the syndication was almost complete: the stallion had been acquired for $340,000 and the price was $10,000 per share. The syndicate included some of the most prominent names in American turf: Guggenheim and Woodward, H. C. Phipps, and George D. Widener, chairman of the Jockey Club, among others.

The announcement that appeared on page 572 of the December 10, 1949, issue of The Blood-Horse began ironically in the passive voice:

The purchase by a syndicate of American breeders of the nine-year-old stallion Nasrullah was announced this week by Arthur B. Hancock Jr. of Claiborne Stud, Paris. The son of Nearco-Mumtaz Begum by Blenheim II … was purchased from Joseph McGrath of the Brownstown Stud, County Kildare, Eire.

The resurgence of the Hancock dynasty was now at hand.

The following year, in 1950, Hill Prince finished second in the Kentucky Derby, a race Hancock and Chenery always wanted to win. The son of Princequillo romped to a five-length victory in the Preakness Stakes, worth $56,115 to Chenery, and to victories in the Withers Stakes and the Jerome Handicap. As Hill Prince was making a run for Horse of the Year honors on the East Coast, a five-year-old horse named Noor beat Citation fairly four times. For the showdown, Noor came east to meet Hill Prince in the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup. Hill Prince rolled to the lead and never lost it, easily winning the race his sire won in 1943. Noor, an Irish-bred horse, finished second. The significance of these events was only gradually dawning.

Hill Prince was named Horse of the Year in 1950.

Prince Simon, another son of Princequillo, was among the best three-year-olds in Europe. He was owned by William Woodward. And Noor was a son of Nasrullah, one of his first sons imported to America.

Nasrullah had arrived in America in July 1950, and he started his first days in stud there—his paddock was near that of Princequillo—in the early part of 1951.

That same year, with one champion son of Princequillo in his barn, Chenery sought another from him. But he didn’t return Hildene to him. Instead, in 1951, Chenery sent Imperatrice to Princequillo, and on January 9, 1952, she had a filly foal at The Meadow. She was a bay, and Mrs. Helen Bates Chenery—who named most of the horses—called her Somethingroyal.

CHAPTER 6

Jockey Eddie Arcaro was riding Bold Ruler toward the winner’s circle late that afternoon of 1956, moments after the colt had raced to a two-length victory in the Futurity at Belmont Park, when Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps stepped forward to meet them. Bold Ruler had just beaten the fastest two-year-old colts in America, running in near-record time, and he was dancing home, his nostrils flaring hotly, his neck bowed and lathered with sweat, moving powerfully toward his seventy-three-year-old owner. Turfwriter Charles Hatton watched her meet him.

“Mrs. Phipps was out at the gap to get him and lead him down that silly victory lane they had there. And she must have weighed all of ninety pounds, and here is this big young stud horse—and she walked right up to him and held out her hand, and he just settled right down and dropped his head so she could get ahold of the chin strap, and Bold Ruler just walked like an old cow along that lane and she wasn’t putting any pressure on him to quiet him down or make him be still. It was one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. It was incredible to me because anyone else reaching for that horse—and he was hot!—you’d have had to snatch him or he’d throw you off your feet or step all over you. But not with her. For her he was just a real chivalrous prince of a colt. He came back to her and stopped all the monkeyshines, ducked down his head and held out his chin, and here was this little old lady with a big young stud horse on the other end and he was just as gentle as he could be.”

Even growing old, as her walnut face withdrew inside a frame of white hair, she had a mind as quick as a crack of lightning and always drove to the racetrack in the morning by herself, without a chauffeur, steering her Bentley south from Spring Hill, the marble palace on Long Island.

Mrs. Phipps must have seemed the picture of some innocent eccentric—the way she tipped back her head to see the road above the dash, the way she gripped the wheel with both hands, the way she climbed from the car with the poodles beside her and walked into the barn at Belmont Park. Her horses turned to watch her coming. She carried sugar, and she wore a plain dress, sometimes a stocking with a run in it and sometimes moccasins or gym shoes. The men at work in the stables stepped gingerly around her when she walked up the shed, some nodding deferentially and saying hello, and she returned the salutations but did not speak at length to them, only to Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, her crippled trainer.

On summer mornings they would sit as if enthroned like ancients from another time. He was the sage, a former trolley car motorman from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn who became one of the finest horsemen of all time, the only man to train two winners of the Triple Crown, Gallant Fox and Omaha, and almost three and four in Johnstown and Nashua. She was the patron, fulfilling the aristocratic role, racing horses for the sport of it and never complaining, win or lose. She was the stable bookkeeper and knew how much each horse had won. She would ask how they were doing, how they were eating, and when and how they were working, and when and where they would race again. She was an independent little statue of a woman who went her own way, and she would walk up to the shed and stop to pet and feed her horses, complimenting those who had won, scolding softly those who had just lost: “You dope,” she would say, holding a cube of sugar. “I don’t know if I should give you one.” But she always did.

She was the grande dame of the American turf, and she hardly ever spoke in public. The news accounts in words attributed directly to her are sparse, and one newsman confided that he always left her alone when he saw her sitting in the box seat because he sensed a privacy inviolate.

She was born Gladys Mills on June 19, 1883, in Newport, Rhode Island, a twin daughter of Ruth Livingston and Ogden Mills, her name minted from a marriage between heirs of two of the largest family fortunes in America. The Livingstons were old American wealth and aristocracy, pre-Revolutionary real estate and later steamboats up the Hudson. The Millses were nineteenth-century nouveau riche. Darius Ogden Mills made millions in the California Gold Rush. His son Ogden became a financier, and a sportsman. He went into a racing partnership with Lord Derby of England, and together they operated a strong stable of racehorses on the Continent—so strong that in 1928, the year Mills died, it was the leading stable in France. The Mills-Derby racing venture continued to endure when Gladys Mills’s twin sister, the Right Honourable Beatrice, Countess of Granard, replaced her father and helped to carry the stable. By then Gladys Mills was an owner, too.

In 1907, when she was twenty-four years old, Gladys Mills married into one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America, the steel family of her husband, Henry Carnegie Phipps. He was a son of Henry Phipps, who, with Andrew Carnegie, founded a steelworks so profitable that when J. Pierpont Morgan bought them out in 1901, Phipps’s share alone came to $50 million.

Gladys Mills and Henry Carnegie Phipps settled down in New York, in a home with a marble facade at Eighty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, and on the Long Island estate off Wheatley Road in Roslyn. Phipps was tall, distinguished, and played polo. Mrs. Phipps was small, with a flinty New England dignity about her, and a crack shot. In her later years she climbed into a swivel seat mounted on a swamp truck in Florida, and shot birds with a 12-gauge as she spun in circles. She bagged her limit in quail at the age of eighty-six.

Mrs. Phipps, in partnership with her brother Ogden L. Mills and his wife, bought horses for the first time in the mid-1920s and raced them under the nom de course of the Wheatley Stable. The stable flourished early, launched to a quick success after the leading American breeder of the 1920s, Harry Payne Whitney, a Long Island neighbor of the Phippses, offered her a choice of ten of his yearlings in 1926, reportedly to satisfy a gambling debt incurred during a high-rolling card game with Henry Carnegie Phipps. Whether out of luck or shrewdness—probably part of both—Mrs. Phipps and trainer Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons chose five yearlings that went on to win stakes for her and more than once whipped Whitney’s horses. Incredibly, the other five were multiple winners, too, though not of stakes. The best of the ten were Diabolo, a long-distance runner who won the 1929 Jockey Club Gold Cup at two miles, and the unbeaten but ill-fated two-year-old Dice (who died of colic as a youngster), as well as Nixie, Distraction, and Swizzlestick.

Her passion was for horses purely as runners. “I just like to see them perform as thoroughbreds,” she once said, in one of her rare public remarks. Her interest in horses involved her as a breeder soon enough. In 1929, the same year Diabolo won the Jockey Club Gold Cup, she purchased a broodmare, Virginia L., in partnership with Marshall Field, who had just helped finance the importation of Sir Gallahad III. Mrs. Phipps never bought a farm of her own for the breeding and raising of thoroughbreds. But she did meet Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., early in her career as an owner, and when she finally did decide to breed as well as race her horses, she became a client of Hancock at Claiborne Farm. Through the next forty years, most of her homebreds were foaled and raised in Paris, Kentucky. It was she who decided which of her mares would be bred to which stallion; she became a student of the pedigrees of all her horses, and though she took advice, she made her own decisions.

In her first twenty-five years as a breeder, by far the fastest thoroughbred she bred was Seabiscuit, the bay horse who bumped off War Admiral in the famous Pimlico match race on November 1, 1938, though “The Biscuit” did not carry the Wheatley gold and purple silks for her then. He had raced eighteen times as a two-year-old before he won his first start for her, thirty-five times in all that year with only five wins. He was just a sluggish selling plater when Mrs. Phipps, becoming impatient and discouraged with him, sold him for $8000 to Charles S. Howard. It was one of the rare mistakes she made in the business. Seabiscuit retired in 1940 with earnings of $437,430, a world record at the time.

The Wheatley-breds won more than $100,000 for the first time in 1935, winning 106 races and $113,834. Never again did they earn less than $100,000 annually. Among the best horses Mrs. Phipps bred were Seabiscuit, High Voltage, and Misty Morn, a daughter of Princequillo who won $212,575. Yet nothing she ever did compared in import to the purchase she made early in the 1950s, when she prevailed upon Hancock to sell her Miss Disco, upon whom the Phippses founded a dynasty.

Miss Disco came to Gladys Phipps at the end of a curious, sometimes unlikely series of events that began unfolding late in 1933, the year Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt turned twenty-one. Vanderbilt had just begun to involve himself as an owner and breeder of racehorses, as a man of name, means, and ambition in the thoroughbred industry. He grew up, fatherless, with family fortunes on both sides of his pedigree.

He was the son of Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Sr., a wealthy sportsman who perished with 1152 others when a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the Irish coast, and the former Margaret Emerson, the daughter of Isaac Emerson, a Baltimore chemist of modest means until he invented Bromo-Seltzer. Emerson acquired Sagamore Farm, an 848-acre stretch of rolling landscape in the Worthington Valley, and his daughter went into racing. Young Alfred acquired his mother’s passion for the sport, dropping out of Yale at the end of his sophomore year to raise and race the running horse.

In the photos taken of him in the early 1930s, he looks strikingly like the James Stewart of Destry Rides Again, and what adds to that impression is the whimsy of his humor. One year, prior to the running of a race in which his horse appeared to have no chance, Vanderbilt gave jockey Ted Atkinson a sandwich, a wristwatch, and a flashlight, advising him, “It may be dark before you get back.” He never took himself too seriously, not even as a breeder.

When Vanderbilt turned twenty-one on September 22, 1933, he was given $2 million in government bonds, the first of four such installments his father had left him. His mother gave him Sagamore Farm, which Isaac Emerson had given to her. With that, Vanderbilt had money and land, the means to buy and breed and raise and race horses of his own.

In August of 1933, he hopped into his sporty new LaSalle roadster, fire-engine red, and tooled north toward Saratoga. Beside him in the car was a set of his new racing silks, a modified version of his mother’s silks of cerise and white blocks. On the advice of trainer Bud Stotler, he was heading north with a check for $25,000 to buy a big, raw-boned chestnut colt named Discovery. Vanderbilt intended to buy him and race him in the Hopeful Stakes. Discovery had been bred by Walter Salmon’s Mereworth Farm, and he was a son of a fast if fiery rogue of a horse named Display. Display was a son of Fair Play, who also sired Man o’ War, and there was nothing docile about “Big Red.” But when bred to Ariadne, Display transmitted nothing of his unruliness to their offspring, Discovery, a colt of estimable poise and calm at the post. He launched his racing career in a blaze of indifference, but by the time of the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga, he had matured considerably.

The sale was delayed until after the Hopeful Stakes, so Vanderbilt didn’t get to run Discovery in the race. After the horse finished a sharp third in the event—behind High Quest—his price jumped from $25,000 to $40,000, the equivalent of $400,000 today. Vanderbilt left Saratoga without the horse, but he had been impressed by Discovery and continued following the colt’s career. He bought the horse when he had the first chance.

Discovery won eight of his sixteen starts as a three-year-old, including the Brooklyn Handicap against older horses. But even that hardly suggested what was coming when he matured to a four-year-old horse, 16.1 hands high and 1200 pounds, about 200 pounds heavier than the average horse. (A horse is measured from the ground to his withers, the highest part of his back, in a unit of measure called “hands”—a hand is 4 inches, so Discovery at 16.1 hands stood 65 inches from the ground to the withers.)

Though Discovery lost his first five starts as a four-year-old, he came alive when he broke from the barrier in the Brooklyn Handicap in June and carried 123 pounds for a new world’s record for a mile and an eighth, 1:481/5, the second year he won the race. And for the next six weeks, until August 10, Discovery rolled across the east and midwest in a boxcar on what remains among the greatest six-week grinds in racing history. As a horse running mostly in handicaps, Discovery had to carry whatever weights the track handicappers decided to load on him. The aim of handicapping horses with weights (inserting lead slabs in the jockey’s saddle) is simply to weigh down the horses—with the superior horses carrying more than their inferiors—so that all finish at the same time, in a dead heat. That is the theory, anyway. Discovery, a sensible horse, never paid any attention to that theory.

After the Brooklyn, he won the Detroit Challenge Cup carrying 126 pounds and then the Stars and Stripes Handicap in Chicago, spotting his rivals’ weight and winning by six. He kept winning with high weights everywhere.

Known as the “Iron Horse” and the “Big Train,” Discovery retired after the 1936 season with a lifetime record of sixty-three starts—twenty-seven wins, ten seconds, and ten thirds—and with a reputation as one of the greatest weight carriers that ever lived, a touchstone by which other handicappers would be measured. Vanderbilt sent him to Sagamore for stud duty beginning in 1937.

“There is no other horse in the entire range of turf history, American or foreign, that ever attempted to do anything so tremendous or came anywhere near Discovery to doing it so successfully,” wrote turf historian John Hervey.

Vanderbilt, for his part, did not confine his activities to racing during his first years as an owner. He was buying mares at auction to build up breeding operations. The most crucial purchase he ever made at a sale occurred at the dispersal sale of W. Robertson Coe in 1935, when a mare named Sweep Out was led into the sales ring. The mare was in foal to Pompey, a fast and game horse who won the Futurity Stakes at Belmont Park in 1925.

Vanderbilt bought her for $2000, and the following year she had a filly foal by Pompey that Vanderbilt named Outdone. In 1943, he bred Outdone to Discovery for the third time. She produced a good-looking filly foal in 1944. In fact, they were a grand bunch of foals at Sagamore that year, but Vanderbilt was not there to tend or race them. He had joined the navy in 1942 and was in command of a PT boat in the Pacific. While there, he instructed his farm manager and trainer to “go to the field and pick out twelve yearlings you like best, before they’re broken, and sell the rest.” Of the yearlings kept, none went on to any distinction either at the racetrack or in the stud. But of the twelve they sold, six eventually won major stakes races. One was Conniver, a daughter of Discovery, who was voted the leading handicap mare of the year in America in 1948. Another was the bay filly by Discovery from Outdone.

Sidney Schupper, not a major owner, bought the filly for $2000 and named her Miss Disco. Schupper raced her from 1946, when she was a two-year-old, until 1950, when she was six. She was a strikingly handsome, racy-looking mare with a beautiful head—a prominent forehead and the face penciled like that of an Arabian. She carried herself elegantly and liked to get her work done in a hurry. She won ten of fifty-four races and $80,250 for Schupper. Nor did she shy away from tangling with the boys. Miss Disco won the Interboro Handicap as a four-year-old, whipping colts over three-quarters of a mile, a sprint. She also won the New Rochelle Handicap. As a three-year-old, Miss Disco won the Test Stakes at Saratoga, a race in which a number of good fillies have run, if not won, over the years.

Miss Disco had speed, and she would transmit it to her many foals, one by one, especially the seal brown bay colt she foaled in 1954. Schupper did not own her then, not when she served in the stud.

At the close of Miss Disco’s racing career, Bull Hancock saw the potential in her as a broodmare, so he bought her from Schupper for himself, privately, for an undisclosed price. Bull had the Vanderbiltbred mare shipped to Claiborne Farm to join the bands of other mares. That was in 1950, when a rebirth at Claiborne Farm was in the making, and when Gladys Phipps prevailed upon Bull to sell the mare and he gave in, since she was an old client and wanted to own Miss Disco so badly.

Owned by Mrs. Phipps, the bay daughter of Discovery was bred to Nasrullah in 1951, and the following year she foaled a bay colt that Mrs. Phipps called Independence, a horse who would become one of the nation’s finest steeplechasers. Miss Disco was returned to Nasrullah in 1953, and in the spring of 1954 the whirlwind came, the horse for which all breeders tap their feet and wait.

The evening of April 6, 1954, at Claiborne Farm was perhaps the most remarkable of any in the long history of the American turf, certainly in the annals of Claiborne.

In the foaling barn set back off the road that winds through the farm, two foals were born that night thirty minutes apart. One was a bay son of Princequillo out of a mare called Knight’s Daughter. His name was Round Table, and by the time he retired as a racehorse at the end of 1959, running for Oklahoma oilman Travis Kerr, he had won forty-three of sixty-six races, been named America’s Horse of the Year in 1958, become regarded as the greatest grass runner in American history, and won more money than any horse in the history of the sport, $1,749,869.

Down the row of stalls Miss Disco gave birth to her son of Nasrullah who, by the time he retired in 1958, had been voted America’s Horse of the Year in 1957, won twenty-three races and $764,204, and earned a reputation as a magnificent cripple—one of the fleetest runners the American turf had ever known, and one of the gamest and most generous of horses. He was Bold Ruler.

Bold Ruler had a hernia as a foal, and he was so common looking that Hancock sequestered him in a distant paddock so that visitors to Claiborne Farm wouldn’t see him.

“He was a very skinny foal,” Hancock would recall. “We had the devil’s own time trying to get him to look good, and I was never really pleased with his condition the whole time I had him. But he had a good disposition in many ways and he never missed an oat.”

Bold Ruler suffered a painful accident as a yearling, almost cutting off his tongue in his stall one night, and the experience made him forever sensitive about his mouth. Nor was that all. One morning, while being broken under saddle, he fell and got tangled under a watering trough, almost breaking a leg while struggling to his feet. Somehow he survived all this, and made it to Hialeah Race Course in the winter of 1956. One of the first things he did was to begin ripping off quarter-mile sprints in 0:22 during morning workouts. Few quarter miles are run that fast in actual races.

So Fitzsimmons had no trouble cranking up his speedball for his first start at Jamaica on April 9. He won it by three and a half lengths. “Easy score,” reads the official past performance charts.

With that began the racing career of the fastest of all Nasrullah’s sons or daughters, a tall and leggy runner with a seal brown coat, phenomenal powers of acceleration, and a fiercely combative instinct that held him together when the oxygen was running low. Nothing ever seemed ready-made for him, nothing as easy as it might have been. There was always a measure of adversity to overcome, some trouble plaguing him. He raced three years, and at one time or another he was hounded by arthritis, by torn back muscles, and by what was called a “nerve condition” in his shoulder. A minor cardiac condition came and went during his three-year-old year. He developed splints—bony and sometimes painful growths on his legs—and later osselets, an arthritic condition in the ankle joint. He once wrenched an ankle. And throughout the last year he raced, when he won five of seven races and $209,994, he ran with an undetected two-and-a-half-inch bone sliver sticking into a leg tendon like a splinter. Bold Ruler carried 134 pounds in the mile-and-a-quarter Suburban Handicap of July 4, 1958—one of the epic duels of the turf—spotting the talented Clem 25 pounds. Bold Ruler did not take the lead early in the race, but then bounded past Clem after a half mile. Clem stalked him from there as they raced for the far turn. Banking for home, Bold Ruler was two on top. The crowd grew deafening as Clem moved up on Bold Ruler down the lane, charging on the outside and actually getting the lead at one point in the stretch. Most horses, losing such a lead, would have hung or quit. But jockey Eddie Arcaro dug in and Bold Ruler battled back, getting up just in time to win it by a nose.

He was almost rheumatic in the way he walked from his stall in the morning, but he was capable of tremendous speed, of dazzling bursts. In 1957, his three-year-old year, after spending the winter at Hialeah and Gulfstream Park trading blows with Calumet Farm’s Gen. Duke—perhaps the fastest horse Calumet ever produced, though he died before he could prove it—Bold Ruler came north to New York for the Wood Memorial on April 20 at Jamaica. The close of the race was an eyepopper, something like the Suburban a year later, with Bold Ruler and Gallant Man in a desperate stretch fight. Bold Ruler actually lost the lead with about 200 yards to go, but he came back at Gallant Man to win it by the snip of a nose.

He might have won the Kentucky Derby May 4, his next start, but Fitzsimmons and Arcaro decided that the colt should be restrained off the pacesetting Federal Hill, a horse with sharp early speed. They feared Federal Hill would drag Bold Ruler through a dizzying early pace and set it up for a stretch-running Gallant Man. Whether as a son of the temperamental Nasrullah or as a youngster whose tongue had almost been severed as a yearling, Bold Ruler clearly resented the tactic, fighting Arcaro’s exertions to restrain him. Iron Liege, Calumet’s second-string colt substituting for the injured Gen. Duke, won by a whisker over Gallant Man in one of the Derby’s most exciting renewals, with Bill Shoemaker standing up prematurely on Gallant Man, misjudging the finish and probably costing him the race.

Arcaro did not restrain Bold Ruler in the Preakness Stakes. He let him roll, and the son of Nasrullah and Miss Disco raced unchallenged through the mile and three-sixteenths, beating Iron Liege by two lengths.

Bold Ruler’s stamina—his ability to run a distance beyond a mile and a quarter—would always be suspect. The origins of this suspicion stemmed in large part from his performance in the mileand-a-half Belmont Stakes of 1957. Gallant Man’s fainthearted stablemate, Bold Nero, dragged Bold Ruler through a set of rapid early fractions, softening him up for Gallant Man’s finishing kick. Gallant Man blew past Bold Ruler at the turn for home and raced to an eight-length victory in a record-breaking 2:263/5 Bold Ruler, exhausted at the end, wound up third.

Bold Ruler came back later that year, gaining in stature as he went on. Like his maternal grandsire, Discovery, he began to show his gifts for lugging high weights at high speeds.

He won the Jerome Handicap by six with 130 pounds.

He won the Vosburgh by nine lengths under 130 pounds in the mud, shattering the track record that had been held by Roseben, the sprinting specialist, for fifty years. He raced the seven-eighths of a mile in a sizzling 1:213/5, three-fifths of a second faster than the old mark.

He won the Queens County Handicap under 133 pounds, spotting the second horse 22 pounds.

Under 136 pounds, an enormous burden for a three-year-old, he won the Ben Franklin Handicap by twelve. “Breezing all the way,” said the charts of that race.

The ending of the year was almost poetic. In the $75,000-Added Trenton Handicap at a mile and a quarter, Bold Ruler faced his two archrivals for Horse of the Year honors—Gallant Man and Round Table. The gate sprang, and Arcaro let Bold Ruler bounce, sitting as the colt opened up an eight-length lead at the end of the first three-quarters of a mile. He simply coasted for the final half mile, beating Gallant Man by two and a half. Round Table was third.

That made Bold Ruler Horse of the Year.

In 1958, as a four-year-old, even with that splinter in the tendon, he won the Toboggan Handicap under 133 pounds, spotting Clem 16 pounds, and grabbed the lead in the stretch of the Carter Handicap at seven-eighths of a mile, and won that by a length and a half under a crushing 135 pounds. He failed to spot Gallant Man 5 pounds in the Metropolitan Mile on June 14, losing by two lengths. But he won the Stymie Handicap by five lengths under 133 pounds, and that led to the nose-bobbing struggle with Clem in the Suburban, and finally to a last victory, under 134 pounds, in the mile-and-a-quarter Monmouth Handicap. He wrenched an ankle in the Brooklyn, finishing seventh with 136 pounds on his back; and then Fitzsimmons took x-rays at Saratoga, discovering the splint on the back of a cannon bone. And that ended it for Bold Ruler.

All through his campaigns on the racetrack, from his two-year-old year onward, he endeared himself to the frail old widow, Mrs. Phipps. He was always the first horse she went to in the mornings at the barn, the first horse she asked about, the horse she dwelled with the longest, the one she favored most with her time and sugar cubes. Groom Andy DeSernio used to braid a Saint Christopher’s medal into Bold Ruler’s foretop, the lock of hair between his ears, before each race. Mrs. Phipps was not a Catholic, but for Bold Ruler she overlooked nothing.

She never lost her fondness for Bold Ruler, certainly not in the dozen years since that day they sent him off to Claiborne Farm from Saratoga. Bold Ruler was led to the van waiting at the stable area. The colt hesitated a moment, balking at the sight of the van, but Sunny Jim poked him in the rump with a cane and he walked on dutifully. Inside the van, the lead shank was handed to Claiborne Farm groom Ed (Snow) Fields, and Fitzsimmons said, in parting, “Come on, Andy, we’ve done our job. It’s their horse now.” Moments later Bold Ruler was rolling southwest toward the Blue Grass.

He seemed destined for some measure of success from the outset. There was so much in his favor. Bold Ruler would begin with the choicest mares. Hancock, as well as Mrs. Phipps and her son, Ogden, and other clients at Claiborne had assembled bands of champion race and broodmares over the years—the foundations of all great studs—and to Bold Ruler many of them would be sent.

He had the pedigree himself, on both the male and the female sides, representing a popular foreign and domestic mixture of bloodlines in his ancestry: the son of a thoroughly European stallion and a completely American mare. Genetically, he was what is known as a “complete outcross,” with no name appearing more than once in the first four generations of his family tree.

Since siring Bold Ruler in 1952, Nasrullah himself had become a champion stallion in America, representing the flourishing Nearco male line, and his dam, Mumtaz Begum, was among the most prized of mares in the Aga Khan’s magnificent stud. She herself was a daughter of Blenheim II, the stallion later imported to stand at Claiborne Farm, and Europe’s “flying filly” Mumtaz Mahal. By the time Bold Ruler was sent to Claiborne, Nasrullah had already led all American sires in 1955, when his performers won 69 races and $1,433,660, and in 1956, when they won 106 races and $1,462,413. Bold Ruler was only one of several champion runners by Nasrullah: he also sired the 1955 Horse of the Year, William Woodward’s Nashua, who retired in 1956 with earnings of $1,288,565, a world record until Round Table broke it three years later. Nasrullah had also sired the 1956 two-year-old filly champion, Charlton Clay’s Leallah; the 1957 two-year-old colt champion, Nadir, eventual winner of $434,316; and Captain Harry F. Guggenheim’s Bald Eagle, America’s champion handicap horse of 1960 and the winner of $676,442.

Miss Disco, among the fastest fillies of her generation, was no doubt a source of some of Bold Ruler’s quickness, and as a daughter of one of the greatest weight carriers of all time, she gave bone and bottom to the underside of Bold Ruler’s pedigree. He had everything a sire should have.

Bold Ruler also had the brilliant speed of the Nearco tribe—speed is an important characteristic for a stud horse to have—and he had it in greater abundance than any other of Nasrullah’s sons and daughters. Moreover, he carried that speed the classic distance of a mile and a quarter, and he did it carrying high weights against horses who were just as serious about their business as he—Clem, Gallant Man, Sharpsburg, and Round Table.

Yet no one, not even a breeder as experienced and astute as Bull Hancock, could have foreseen the extent to which Bold Ruler would dominate the American sire championships. He became a phenomenon at the stud, and some believe the greatest sire in the history of American bloodstock.

For seven successive years Bold Ruler was the leading American stallion. Only Lexington, a stallion from a different era, was America’s leading sire more often, for sixteen years between 1861 and 1878. But the two horses are hardly comparable. The “Blind Hero of Woodburn,” as Lexington was known, competed with only 215 sires of runners in the last year he was the champion, 1878. In 1969, Bold Ruler was competing with 5829 sires of runners. Only three other stallions—Star Shoot, Bull Lea, and Bold Ruler’s own sire, Nasrullah—led the list as many as five times.

His reign as America’s premier blooded stallion began in 1963, when his twenty-six performers from only two crops of racing age won fifty-six races and $917,531. And this was only a foreshadowing. His influence and power as a stallion grew steadily.

In 1964—44 performers, 88 wins, and $1,457,156.

In 1965—51 performers, 90 wins, and $1,091,924.

In 1966—51 performers, 107 wins, and $2,306,523, the first time in history a stallion’s progeny ever won more than $2 million in a single season.

In 1967—63 performers, 135 wins, and $2,249,272.

In 1968—51 performers, 99 wins, and $1,988,427.

In 1969—59 performers, 90 wins, and $1,357,144.

While his two-year-olds were often precocious and brilliant, and for five years he was America’s leading sire of juveniles, Bold Ruler’s ability to transmit stamina became suspect. His sons Bold Lad, Successor, and Vitriolic, as well as his daughters Queen of the Stage and Queen Empress, were all champion two-year-olds in their divisions. Yet each failed to return as a champion three-year-old, the year the distances stretch out. No son or daughter of Bold Ruler, in all the seven seasons he dominated the sire standings, had ever won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, or Belmont stakes.

As he added championship upon championship to his record at the stud, his value as a stallion climbed to an incalculable level. Gladys Phipps was the founder of a major racing dynasty, one supported largely by dozens of valuable broodmares at Claiborne Farm, and she and her heirs were interested in maintaining and building on it, not selling the fruits of it piecemeal.

Money could be made in many ways, but there was only one Bold Ruler, and he was the stuff to build and serve a racing dynasty. William Woodward, Sr., was fond of saying, “Upon the quality of the matron depends the success of the stud.” Bull Hancock later agreed with that, but he would add, “Remember, Mr. Woodward’s big success came when he got Sir Gallahad III as a stallion. As long as I have a Nasrullah and a Princequillo, an Ambiorix, Double Jay and Hill Prince, I’ll be on top.” (Ambiorix, another import from France, and Double Jay were leading stallions in America in the postwar resurgence of Claiborne as a thoroughbred nursery.)

Mrs. Phipps had the greatest stallion in the history of the American turf in this century, and his breeding services were not for sale. Owners of mares would have to enter into an unusual agreement with the Phippses to get a mare bred to Bold Ruler. In general, a breeder would offer the Phippses a prospective broodmare for Bold Ruler. If the mare was acceptable, she would be bred to Bold Ruler for two seasons, or until she had two foals. First choice of the foals was determined by the flip of a coin. Thus, Bold Ruler was the Phippses’ lever in acquiring foals out of some of the finest broodmares in the world, broodmares they did not own. And one of the breeders with high-class mares was Ogden Phipps’s friend, and a fellow member of the Jockey Club, Christopher T. Chenery.

Chenery had been sending mares regularly to Bold Ruler at Claiborne, where he had Hill Prince standing at the stud, since Bold Ruler stood his initial season there. The first mare Chenery sent him was Imperatrice, and in 1960 the twenty-two-year-old matron had a filly foal that Mrs. Chenery named Speedwell. The Meadow Stable’s Speedwell was Bold Ruler’s first of many stakes winners. Chenery sent his mare First Flush to Bold Ruler in 1961, and she had a filly foal named Bold Experience, who eventually won $91,477 at the races.

In 1965, Chenery ceased sending mares singly to Bold Ruler. Instead, in a coin-flip arrangement with the Phippses, he began sending two mares to Claiborne every year. The Phipps-Chenery deal, matching the greatest sire in America with some of Chenery’s choicest mares, was anything but a smash: the biggest winner, the stakes-winning Virginia Delegate who started fifty-five times and won $67,154, ended up a gelding.

Then events began unfolding in the spring of 1968 that set the stage for the most monumental coin toss in racing history, a curious flip in which the winner lost and the loser won—but neither knew it at the time.

For the breeding season of 1968, Chenery sent the mares Somethingroyal and Hasty Matelda across the Alleghenies to Claiborne Farm. Each was bred to Bold Ruler. Each conceived. Each had a foal the following year.

Hasty Matelda had a colt foal.

On March 19, 1969, Somethingroyal had a filly foal.

Just a month later at Claiborne Farm, Somethingroyal entered her heat cycle, and on April 20 she was separated from her suckling foal and taken to a stall at one end of the black creosote board breeding shed at Claiborne. In the adjoining stall, his head sticking into Somethingroyal’s stall over an open half door, was a “teasing” stallion named Charlie, a mongrel of Percheron and saddle horse ancestry. Somethingroyal was already believed to be in heat, but the breeding men wanted to be sure, so they walked her into that stall next to Charlie the teaser. Charlie nipped at Somethingroyal, sniffed at her, nuzzled her. She did not protest, backing up to Charlie, squatting, and exposing herself to him. “She was red hot,” said the keeper of the stallions, Lawrence Robinson. But Somethingroyal was not mounted by Charlie, as are some of the virgin mares. A few of the thoroughbred stallions at Claiborne come into the breeding shed screaming and whinnying. Such carryings-on can frighten a maiden mare, especially when the screamer mounts her for the first time. Docile Charlie, among his other jobs at the farm, was trotted out to mount such nervous mares—though he did not have intercourse with them—to get them used to it.

Somethingroyal was taken around the breeding shed, where the road runs past the huge sliding front doors, and walked inside the large 35-by-35-foot room. Robinson signaled Snow Fields, Bold Ruler’s groom. Fields went to the main cinder block stallion barn and unfastened the sliding bolt from Bold Ruler’s stall, with its fireproof ceiling and stained oak walls and heavy oaken door. Snow slipped a bridle on the horse, inserting a straight, stainless-steel bar bit in his mouth, clipped a lead shank to it, and walked the horse the short distance from the stall to the front of the breeding shed.

Robinson met Fields outside the shed, took the shank, and walked Bold Ruler through the door, turning him around in the nearest corner so that he faced Somethingroyal, who was standing in the center of the room with her back to him. One man held Somethingroyal. Her hind legs stood in an indentation on the gravel floor where the hind legs of hundreds of other mares had stood while breeding and bearing the weight of the stallion. Other men—including Dr. Walter Kaufman, holding a pint cup—waited nearby.

Bold Ruler’s penis dropped from its flap as he walked into the breeding shed. He was a fifteen-year-old horse who knew what he was about. The mood was sober and businesslike.

Fields immediately dipped a sponge into a bucket of warm, clear water and washed Bold Ruler’s penis, which was beginning to stiffen. Some stallions excite themselves into readiness by sniffing at a mare, but Bold Ruler was not one of them. All he needed to do was look. Robinson restrained the horse, who soon began prancing, and waited until he saw the horse was ready, watching for the penis to harden fully. Irving Embry, at the front of Somethingroyal, lifted up her left front foot, a precaution designed to prevent her from kicking Bold Ruler while he mounted her. Another man moved in and lifted the mare’s tail. Privacy was neither demanded nor afforded.

Robinson brought the horse forward and raised the shank. Bold Ruler mounted Somethingroyal in an instant. Holding the shank with his left hand, standing on the left side of the horse and mare, Robinson gave Bold Ruler one final assist: with his right hand, he guided the penis in. Bold Ruler was inside Somethingroyal no more than two and a half minutes, and Robinson watched for the single most compelling sign that the horse had covered the mare, watched for the flagging of the horse’s tail, the dipping of it during orgasm. Some stud horses dismount during copulation, either to rest or prolong the pleasure of it, but Bold Ruler rarely did. “He was one of the most wonderfullest coverin’ horses you have ever seen,” Robinson said. “The first time up, every time.”

Bold Ruler flagged. And as he dismounted Somethingroyal, Dr. Kaufman came to the horse’s side with the pint cup to catch a dripping for examination. Then Fields, with a sponge dipped into a soap and disinfectant solution, washed the horse again. Bold Ruler was then led from the barn, no more than five minutes after he walked into it, and was turned out to romp on the greenery of his nearby private pasture.

Kaufman later checked the dripping, in a routine examination, to make sure the horse had ejaculated. He had.

Two days later, on April 22, Somethingroyal was returned to the breeding shed for a second and final mating with Bold Ruler. The same procedure was repeated. There was no way of telling, Robinson said, when Somethingroyal actually got pregnant that spring. But she did.

That year, The Meadow sent Cicada to Bold Ruler as the second mare in the arrangement with Phipps, but she proved barren.

In the summer of 1969, Penny Tweedy was in Saratoga to meet Phipps and Phipps’s trainer, Eddie Neloy, in the offices of the chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association, James Cox Brady. It was time to flip the coin.

Each knew the consequences of winning the toss.

Under the rules of the flip arrangement, the winner of the flip would automatically get first choice of the first pair of foals—the two born in 1969—either the Somethingroyal filly or the Hasty Matelda colt. The loser, while getting the second choice of the first pair, automatically would get the first choice of the second pair of foals. And the winner would get the second choice of the second pair.

But there would be no second foal in the second pair. Somethingroyal was pregnant, but Cicada was barren.

So neither party wanted to win. The winner would get only one of the three foals, the first choice of the first pair. The loser of the flip would get the second choice of the first pair but also the only foal to be born in 1970—the foal that Somethingroyal was carrying on that day in August.

The coin sailed in the air. Ogden Phipps returned to his box seat and dourly told his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, “We won the toss.” And that was it. The Phippses took the filly foal from Somethingroyal. They called her The Bride; she couldn’t run a lick, finishing out of the money in four starts as a two-year-old before she was retired to the Phippses’ stud at Claiborne. The Meadow Stable got the Hasty Matelda colt, who was named Rising River because he was foaled when the river below The Meadow was flooding. He always had more problems than future.

The Bride was weaned at Claiborne in the fall of 1969 and taken from her mother at Claiborne. On November 14, Somethingroyal was loaded on a van and returned across the Alleghenies to Doswell. She was almost seven months pregnant. She spent the winter that year at The Meadow, with the other broodmares, her belly growing larger and rounder until came that chilly night of March 29, 1970, when Southworth rang Gentry from the foaling barn in the field.

CHAPTER 7

The newborn Somethingroyal foal gained his legs just forty-five minutes after birth and began suckling when he was an hour and fifteen minutes old. He was well made, well bred, healthy, and hungry, and that made him as much a potential Kentucky Derby winner as any of the other 24,953 thoroughbreds born in America in 1970.

The mare and the foal were turned loose together the following day in a confined one-acre paddock behind the foaling barn. So that the newborn foal does not injure himself trying to stay at her side, a mare is not given much room to run and roam about. After the foal had gained the strength to stay with her—four days later—the pair was turned out with other mares and their foals in a three-acre pasture near the broodmare barn. The routine of farm life began.

For six weeks the mare and foal were pastured in the daytime, and returned at night to their single Stall 3 in the broodmare barn. The routine changed in mid-May, when groom Lewis Tillman began taking them outdoors in the early afternoon, leaving them out all night, and then returning them in the morning to Stall 3. The foal subsisted on Somethingroyal’s milk for the first thirty-five days of his life. Then Tillman began to supplement the youngster’s regimen with grain, preparing him for the day of weaning in October. Tillman would tie up the mare in the stall and give the colt small portions of crushed oats and sweet feed. He grew quickly as the summer passed. Christopher Chenery’s personal secretary of thirty-three years, Elizabeth Ham, visited the farm and looked at the foals. Miss Ham noted in her log, dated July 28, 1970:

Ch. C Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal.

Three white stockings—Well-made colt—Might be a little light under the knees—Stands well on pasterns—Good straight hind leg—Good shoulders and hindquarters—You would have to like him.

Summer cooled into October. The daily rations of the Bold Ruler colt were boosted periodically, up to five and finally to six quarts of grain a day by the time he was separated from Somethingroyal on October 6, 1970. Like other newly weaned colts, the youngster howled and stomped around the stall and field, but that passed in a couple of days. Somethingroyal was far into pregnancy once again by then, this time carrying a foal by the Meadow stallion First Landing. The aging Imperatrice, the colt’s maternal grand-dam, had been bred for the last time in 1964, and since then had been pressed into service as baby-sitter for nervous, young, and uncertain mares, especially for broodmares visiting the farm. They would gather around her in a field, as if around a grandmother, within the apron and circumference of her calm. Chenery had bought her twenty-three years before, when she was nine in 1947, so while her grandson was romping around toward his yearling year, which would begin January 1, 1971, Imperatrice was already pushing thirty-three. She was aging visibly, three dozen ribs and elbows dressed up inside an old fur coat, but her eyes were clear. Everyone hoped she would live to reach the milestone age of thirty-five.

Her chestnut grandson had begun to fill out into a striking if still pony-sized colt by the day of his weaning, and on October 11, Miss Ham was moved to note: “Three white feet—A lovely colt.” Lovely was twice underlined.

In autumn it was time to name the weanlings, a tiresome process for many owners. Nine of ten names submitted to the stewards of the Jockey Club, which administers the naming of all thoroughbreds, are rejected for various reasons. Under the rules of the Jockey Club, a name cannot be that of a famous horse, such as Swaps; or advertise a trade name, such as Bromo-Seltzer; or be that of an illustrious or infamous person, such as Jesus Christ or Hitler; or duplicate the name of a horse having either raced or served in the stud during the last fifteen years, such as Virginia Delegate or Imperatrice; or have more than eighteen characters, including spaces and punctuation marks (Man o’ War, for instance, counts ten characters). Nor are names of living persons allowed unless they give their written consent, as have Shecky Greene, Pete Rose, and Chris Evert. Most names are rejected because they are identical to the names of existing horses.

The Bold Ruler colt was named with a formidable assist from Miss Ham. The Meadow sent in a total of six names, two sets of three names each, for the colt. The first five were rejected.

The first choice of the first set was Scepter, a name Penny Tweedy liked. The second name, suggested by Miss Ham, was Royal Line. The third was Mrs. Tweedy’s Something Special. The three were submitted and quickly rejected. So the owners were forced to try again. A second set of names was submitted for the Bold Ruler colt. Mrs. Tweedy suggested Games of Chance and Deo Volente, Latin for “God Willing.”

Miss Ham suggested the third name on the second list. She had once been the personal secretary of Norman Hezekiah Davis, a banker and diplomat who served in a number of ambassadorial posts for the United States. Davis was the financial adviser for President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, and later an assistant secretary of the treasury and undersecretary of state under Wilson. Later still he was the chief American delegate to the disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland, the home of the League of Nations’ secretariat.

Secretariat, Miss Ham thought, had a nice ring to it. It was submitted as the third and last name on the second list. The following January, after rejecting the first two names, the stewards advised The Meadow that the colt by Bold Ruler-Somethingroyal, by Princequillo—with the white star and the three white stockings, born on March 30, 1970—had been registered under the name of Secretariat.

Secretariat grew out above the matchstick legs, his ration of grain increasing from six to seven and then to eight quarts as he lengthened, heightened, and widened through his yearling year of 1971. “A lovely colt. Half brother to Sir Gaylord,” Miss Ham noted.

After his weaning, Secretariat lived in the end of a row of stalls by the office behind the big house that Chris Chenery rebuilt and renovated. Barn 14 is an attractive set of stalls withdrawn under a roof topped by a spanking bright blue and white cupola.

Secretariat lived in the premier stall, the one traditionally reserved for the most promising colt yearling, Stall 11. Gentry placed him there because of his superior conformation and pedigree. Somethingroyal may not have been a runner—starting only once and finishing far up the racetrack—but she had given birth to fine running horses—Sir Gaylord, Syrian Sea, First Family. Putting the most promising colt in Stall 11 was not mere symbolic ceremony to Gentry. Facing the Coke machine and nearest the feed bin, the stall is seen and passed more times a day than any other stall in the shed, so its occupant is observed more closely during the routine of the farm.

Secretariat lived there that fall, winter, spring, and most of the summer of 1971. Danny Mines, a yearling man, would daily walk the youngster to and from the field. Secretariat was nosy, alert, ambitious, playful, playing constantly with other yearlings, and in that shifting pecking order of the yearling crowd he was at times a leader, at times not.

Meanwhile, he grew up. On April 20, 1971, Miss Ham noted that Secretariat had suffered a minor injury at the farm: “Nicked left shoulder—Not serious.” Things far worse had happened at the farm. The nick on Secretariat’s left shoulder, probably from a fence post, healed and disappeared.

As spring and summer warmed up to August—baking the sand and gravel white on roadside shoulders, dappling the wardrobes of the bays, grays, and chestnuts in the fields—there was a sense of transition in the air at The Meadow. Chris Chenery was ill, and no one was certain what would happen to The Meadow if he died or whether anyone near him would continue it—his horses in the racing stable at Belmont Park and the stud in Virginia. No one knew if it would be sold or dissolved.

Meredith Bailes, for one, sensed the uncertainty, and so did his father Bob, the trainer of the yearlings at The Meadow. Meredith was an exercise boy at the yearling training center. He and his father had talked about what would happen if Chris Chenery died, about who would take it over. They knew change might be in the air and were looking to the future.

Penny Tweedy had been taking an interest in The Meadow in the last few years. The farm had been suffering through a dry spell and it needed something to give it a push while Chenery was ill; it needed a big horse, a gifted horse.

For that reason, there was a sense of jubilation at the farm when the Meadow Stable’s homebred Riva Ridge, a son of Chenery’s First Landing, ran off with the $25,000 Flash Stakes at Saratoga August 2, winning by two and a half lengths and running three-quarters of a mile in the swift time of 1:094/5, only three-fifths of a second off the track record. The Flash had always been a prestigious two-year-old race, and the victory vaulted Riva Ridge into exclusive prominence among the 24,033 thoroughbreds born to his generation.

A blacksmith shod Secretariat on August 3, fitting him out for a set of racing plates on his front feet. They were of aluminum and signaled the start of a new way of life. Later that morning, groom Charlie Ross and several other men headed for the row of stalls at the yearling barn. It was a day of permanent change.

Ross, clipping a shank on Secretariat, led him out of Stall 11, to which he would never return, lined him up in single file with the other yearlings, and marched him in caravan down the road. Yearling trainer Bob Bailes directed traffic while the youngsters, heads up, moved across the pavement, passing the stretch of the racetrack, across the sandy surface to the infield and offices.

Secretariat was taken to Stall 1, in the corner, and there his training began on August 4.

Ross played with the colt’s ears, preparing him for a bridle. Secretariat ducked away from Ross; he did not like his ears touched. Ross also tried to lift a foot to clean it, but Secretariat kicked him away. Meredith Bailes watched from the doorway and heard Ross cussing softly.

Secretariat’s spookiness, not uncommon in the young, meant more work for Ross, more trouble teaching, more time. He put a rub rag to the colt, trying to clean him off, and Secretariat dipped away again. So Ross worked with Secretariat the next few days, picking up his feet again and again, toying gently with the sensitive ears, rubbing and patting him and talking, getting him accustomed to the presence of a human in the stall.

On August 9, they fitted a bit into his mouth for the first time, pulling the bridle over his ears. Meredith Bailes put on the saddle. At the odd sensation of the saddle and girth, Secretariat humped his back, arching it. Inside the 220-yard indoor ring, where all the Meadow yearlings are schooled and broken under saddle, the three stopped—Bailes, Ross, and Secretariat.

Bailes put his arms over the colt, patting him. Ross took the bridle with one hand and reached down, giving Bailes a boost.

Up Bailes went, not straddling the colt, only lying across his back, lengthwise, his stomach lying on the saddle. Bailes said nothing, watching what he was doing, his full weight resting on the back. The bridle was reinless. Ross led Secretariat several steps down the ring with Meredith lying across him. Ross stopped the colt. Bailes slid off, jumped back on. Ross walked Secretariat forward again, a few steps at a time around the oval. Bailes was up and off, up and off, Ross walking and stopping, walking and stopping. For three days they went through that routine, accustoming the colt to a saddle and bridle and a body on his back, a bit in his mouth. Secretariat behaved sensibly, Bailes recalled, with poise and equanimity. The lesson changed on August 12.

Bailes again saddled the colt, and he stood for a moment beside him in the indoor ring. Secretariat no longer humped at the feel of the saddle, and he had never tried to “break Western,” as they call it on the farm—to buck, kick, or break loose. But August 12 was another day, the one on which Bailes would climb aboard and ride him for the first time, straddling the colt with both legs. Bailes knew the ceiling of the ring was about twelve feet high, perhaps a foot or so more. His head had almost grazed it while riding yearlings that bucked him. Bailes donned his blue fiberglass helmet, steadied himself at the side of Secretariat, talking to him. “Take it easy, old boy. Whoa. Easy now. Whoa.”

When a horseman like Bailes communicates with a horse, it is not through language, of course, but through stringing together tone and sounds with a melody, a rhythm of oral unguents, lotions, and balms to soothe and reassure. Secretariat was strapping for his age, and Bailes felt him as a source of great energy, of unusual strength.

On his back, Bailes spoke and Secretariat peered back at him, but he didn’t buck, just watched Bailes as Ross took him around the ring. He never turned a hair in menace. Nor did he on August 17, the first day Ross turned Secretariat loose with Bailes on him. The prospect had concerned Bailes. What worried him was that Sir Gaylord had been tough to break as a yearling in training, and he wondered whether Secretariat, his half brother, might be the same—it sometimes ran in a family. But Secretariat behaved with unusual aplomb for a yearling. Bailes walked, stopped, started again, rubbed Secretariat’s sides with his legs, and eased back on the reins. Three days later he clucked to the colt—a kissing sound—and Secretariat moved off in a jog, a slow trot. The tempo of the schooling continued to pick up, but always one move at a time.

Bailes urged Secretariat into a canter, then a slow gallop, for the first time on August 24, and during the next eight days the colt walked, jogged, and cantered in the indoor ring. He learned how to canter easily both ways with facility.

That was the key: Bailes cantered the colt clockwise and counterclockwise in the one-furlong shed, teaching Secretariat to use the left and right leads, or strides, a crucial part of any yearling’s training. It is important because a horse—when he canters, gallops, or runs—leads each stride with one front leg, just as a swimmer doing a sidestroke leads each stroke with one arm. A horse will tire leading too long with one foreleg. In races, horses that appear to be tiring will often come on again by simply changing leads. On a racecourse, running counterclockwise in America, horses learn to lead with their left foreleg going around a turn—that is, while turning left—and to switch to the right lead on the straights.

Dr. Olive Britt, a Virginia veterinarian, gave the colt a physical examination for a $200,000 life insurance policy on August 26. He passed. Five days later, the final stage of his indoor training ended, and he was moved outdoors for the rest of his schooling.

That began on September 1, when Ross walked him from the stall and Bailes hopped aboard. Bailes walked him in company with two other yearlings to the training track, a one-mile cushion of soft sand that wraps like a cinch around the training complex. The track runs past a series of interlocking wooden fences and paddocks, past old hurdles that Chris Chenery built for jumping horses years ago. Secretariat walked, jogged at the sound of clucking, and broke into an easy canter that first day, his ears playing, his eyes looking around, a youngster as nosy as he was when he was just a weanling. On a grassy plot called the “filly field,” Bailes walked and jogged him through figure eights, teaching him to respond to reins, to guidance at a touch, to pressure on the lines. Week by week the training increased in speed and duration; on September 3, the colt walked a quarter mile, jogged three-quarters, and cantered a half, and after several days Bob Bailes noted in the training log: “Secretariat very good size, well-made colt, good manners.”

Training was interrupted routinely. There was a break when the colt was wormed, and he galloped a complete mile, once around the track, for the first time on September 13. It was a slow mile, one of five in the course of as many days. Then again the training stopped when he was inoculated against VEE, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis. The colt was lolling about in a lush playpen at The Meadow to prevent aftereffects from the medicine when Bailes and Gentry heard the news from Belmont Park: homebred Riva Ridge, with Ron Turcotte up, raced to a handy victory in the $75,000-Added Futurity Stakes September 18. The youngster hounded the pace from the break, dashed to the lead at the turn for home, and won by a length and a half. The victory was worth $87,636 to the Meadow Stable, and it made Riva Ridge the leading two-year-old in America.

Two days later, the chief delegates from the stable victory party arrived at The Meadow, their faces beaming in the afterglow of the Futurity. There was Penny Chenery Tweedy, who had been making strong, decisive gestures in taking over the running of the Meadow Stable; Elizabeth Ham, who began with Christopher Chenery in 1937 when she answered his want ad for a secretary; and the new trainer for the Meadow Stable, a volatile little French Canadian named Lucien Laurin.

Racing had not yielded its riches easily to Laurin’s touch in the early years, leaving him a mediocre riding career under sheds from West Virginia through New England and Canada. It was a difficult circuit: low purses, sore and crippled horses banished from Long Island, small tracks, and living day to day. He began there.

Laurin was born about fifty miles north of Montreal, in Saint Paul, Quebec. He left school early to work at Delormier Park, a half-mile oval in Montreal, where he first exercised horses and finally, in 1929, became a jockey. He was only moderately successful, reaching a professional zenith of sorts when he rode Sir Michael to victory in the King’s Plate in Canada in 1935. His career as a rider bottomed out one summer morning in 1938 when he walked into the jockeys’ room at Narragansett Park, took off his jacket and hung it behind him, and sat down to play a game of cards. A while later he was summoned to the stewards’ office.

Laurin went downstairs to see the stewards—officials who wield enormous power on racetracks as watchdogs. They have the power to disqualify horses in a race, thus altering the order of finish, and they mete out suspensions, usually with the crisp denouement: “By Order of the Stewards.”

The steward put a battery device on the table in front of him. Jockeys have been caught using such illegal gadgets to shock their horses into sudden bursts of speed. “What are you doing with this in your jacket?”

“What am I doing with what in my jacket?” Lucien asked.

It was hopeless. Laurin would later insist that he was framed, that the battery had been planted in his jacket. The final ignominy came when two policemen escorted him from the racetrack. “I was playing cards and some son of a bitch put it in my pocket. That’s the truth,” he said. He was ruled off the racetrack.

So he went to work at Sagamore Farm, galloping and exercising horses for Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt liked his way with horses and his way of riding. Convinced that the jockey was innocent of any wrong-doing in the Narragansett affair, Vanderbilt moved to get the suspension lifted. In 1941 it was lifted, though Vanderbilt maintains he does not know whether his influence had anything to do with clearing Laurin.

Laurin rode only briefly on his return, turning instead to training horses. He wound his way up to the rear staircase of that artful profession, up through the leaky-roof circuit with the cheap horses, up along the eastern coast from Charlestown to New Hampshire and to the day a New York owner, J. U. Gratton, sent him some horses that he trained successfully. “I couldn’t do anything but win races for him.” So Gratton brought Laurin to New York, and introduced him to businessman Reginald Webster. That made all the difference. For Webster, Laurin had the finest horse he ever trained, his only champion, Quill. She was a daughter of Princequillo and was the American two-year-old filly champion of 1958, a winner of $382,041. She made his name as a trainer.

Lucien Laurin had come a long way in racing, building up steadily if unspectacularly his reputation as a shrewd conditioner of the thoroughbred horse. He finally found his way to Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga, and ended up making a substantial living on that most competitive of racing circuits in America, working for Reginald Webster and then for America’s master breeder and horseman, Bull Hancock. In 1952, in partnership with two other men, Laurin invested in the purchase of a farm in Holly Hill, South Carolina, where for years he ran a training center. He bought his partners out and prospered. He bought a home in Malverne, Long Island, and a home in Florida.

Now he was sixty years old, with silver hair and an elfin grin and traces of French Canada in his voice. He was a man given to uniform pleasantness—courteous, charming, and jovial. He worried visibly, openly, muttering to himself and wiping his face with a hand as if fatigued, thumb and fingers sliding down the bridge of his nose. He sighed a lot.

At sixty, on the brink of retirement, he was at Chris Chenery’s farm in northern Virginia with a potential two-year-old champion in his barn at Belmont Park, the winner of the Flash Stakes and Futurity.

One thing Lucien Laurin had never had was the big horse, the champion two-year-old colt who had a shot at the Kentucky Derby, the ability to win the Triple Crown. Laurin had won the 1966 Belmont Stakes with Amberoid, but Amberoid was a nice horse, not a champion. The Derby, as it had for Hancock, Chenery, Vanderbilt, and Mrs. Phipps, had always fallen out of Lucien’s reach. Nor had he ever won the Preakness, or many other major races. Now, at the twilight of his training career, he had Riva Ridge and was standing at the moment outside the yearlings’ stalls, looking at next year’s Meadow two-year-olds, when Meredith Bailes led Secretariat toward the gathering—Lucien, Penny Tweedy, Miss Ham, Howard Gentry, and Bob Bailes. In the notes she took that day, dated September 20, Penny Tweedy wrote under Secretariat’s name: “Big (turns out left front—LL), good bone, a bit swaybacked—very nice—lovely smooth gait.” (LL meant Lucien Laurin.) But if his left fore turned out slightly and he was a trifle swaybacked to the eye—he quickly grew out of that—Secretariat raised Laurin’s eyebrows when Bailes brought him forward, stopping him.

Lucien Laurin did not know it then, but he was moving gradually toward a time in his life that would strain his capacity for understanding, wrench his beliefs in what he had learned about long odds and about a sport shot through and through with chance. After more than forty years on the racetrack, he was about to go to the races.

Through September and October of that year, as Secretariat galloped around the Meadow training track—he went as far as a mile and an eighth with other yearlings galloping beside him, getting used to company—Riva Ridge was doing what no horse had ever done for Lucien Laurin.

On October 9, the day that Secretariat galloped three-quarters of a mile at the farm, Riva Ridge bounced to the lead in the one-mile Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park, opened a four-length lead in midstretch, and won off by seven. First money was $117,090. Riva Ridge was an exceptionally fast horse, even if he did not look it. He had a small head, long legs, and a narrow chest—but Turcotte recalled him as almost deerlike in the way he moved, as if skipping effortlessly. All the two-year-olds were at his mercy now.

In the Pimlico-Laurel Futurity in Maryland on October 30, the day Secretariat galloped a mile and an eighth, Riva Ridge lay off the pace going a mile and a sixteenth—the farthest he had ever run—moved to the front as he wished, and ran away to win by eleven. He earned $90,733. His dominance of the two-year-olds was undisputed. Two weeks later—a day after Secretariat breezed his first quarter mile at The Meadow—he went head and head with Ask Not and Last Jewel in about 0:26—Riva Ridge beat seven others in the Garden State Stakes in New Jersey, winning by two and a half lengths and earning $176,334.

At last Lucien had his big chance for the Triple Crown. Riva Ridge won seven of nine races, $503,263 in purses, and following his last start of the year in the Garden State Stakes, was named America’s champion two-year-old in a combined staff poll of members of the National Turfwriters Association, the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, and staff members of the Daily Racing Form.

Eight days after Riva Ridge won the finale, Laurin returned to The Meadow and again saw Secretariat. Laurin said he wanted the colt sent to him in Florida sometime in January, along with other horses. That was on November 21, 1971—the day Secretariat was taken from training and turned out to pasture. Bailes had hopes for Secretariat—he liked his smooth and easy way of moving and his size and strength—even though he gave no signs of speed in excess or precocity. “He was a big lazy dude, a kind of sleepy colt,” Bailes would recall.

Life wound down for Secretariat at the farm during the cold months. He spent part of that winter in a two-acre paddock that rimmed the training track.

Secretariat was being readied for the race track on January 10. Wing Hamilton, an equine dentist, dressed up Secretariat’s teeth, knocking off the sharp edges and filing them down. For two days, January 18 and 19, he was loaded onto a van and driven around the farm to prepare him for the jolts of the journey south on January 20.

Bob and Meredith Bailes, Garfield Tillman, and Charlie Ross arose early that morning, and arrived at the training track at 6:15. They took the colt’s temperature as a precaution, rubbed his legs with a liniment to cool them, and dressed them in protective cotton bandages. He was led briefly around the walking ring outside his stall, the last chance for exercise before the long ride. Then the blue and white van rolled into the training center. The loading began when two fillies, Ask Not and All or None, were led to the front of the van. Meredith Bailes took Secretariat onto the rear, hooking a hay rack beside him in his narrow but ample stall.

Then at 7:20, with the doors fastened and the engine fired up and roaring, the colorful van and its cargo slipped off to Route 30, which divides The Meadow, and within minutes it was plunging south toward the Carolinas.

CHAPTER 8

By the morning of January 20, 1972, Secretariat had lived almost twenty-two months at The Meadow, but there was more than that behind him as the van rolled south past Richmond and more around him than the James River rushing toward Hampton Roads.

Behind him were the land, lineage, and ancestry stretching back through generations of blooded horses, rows of stone and creosote fencing, ships plunging the Atlantic, trains whistling through the Alleghenies, horsecars and vans rolling down the Catskills, straw beds, Gettysburg, the Aga Khan, gavels slamming, years of grass and snow on fields melting in a pool of a hundred Aprils draining into Stoner Creek, the ‘58 Suburban Handicap, and the passing of an old order.

Toward the end of August 1958, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt headed for Sagamore Farm to see Discovery for the last time. Through the “Iron Horse,” Vanderbilt had become an enormously influential breeder. Miss Disco was not the only daughter of Discovery to bear an American Horse of the Year at the stud. Another daughter of Discovery, Geisha, foaled Native Dancer, Horse of the Year in 1954, winner of twenty-one of twenty-two starts. Discovery, twenty-seven years old that year, was debilitated in his old age when Vanderbilt came to see him, and on the morning of August 28, 1958, he was destroyed at Sagamore and buried in the farm’s horse cemetery on a small rise of ground near the training track.

A year later, on May 26, 1959, groom Snow Fields, Lawrence Robinson, and Bull Hancock were standing in the breeding shed at Claiborne Farm. Nasrullah was in his third year as the nation’s leading sire, the year his runners would earn $1,434,543 on American racetracks. Bold Ruler, his fastest son, was standing his first year at stud at Claiborne, a five-year-old who was just getting started. Nasrullah was only nineteen, and he was expected to stand at stud several more years. Princequillo was grazing in a paddock nearby.

Snow Fields cocked his ear and listened out the door of the shed.

“You hear that?” said Snow.

“Hear what?” said Bull.

“Nasrullah’s nickerin’, Mr. Arthur. Somethin’s wrong.”

“Hell, he’s nickered before. He nickers all the time!”

Robinson and Snow looked at each other, saying nothing for a moment, and finally Snow told Hancock that Nasrullah never nickered in the paddock.

“The only time you hear him nickering is when he comes to the breeding shed,” Snow said.

Snow and Larry Robinson walked quickly past the stallion barn and the row of hedges and to the lush acreage belonging to Nasrullah. He was still whinnying but he was sweating profusely, too, obviously in distress. Someone rushed off to call Dr. Floyd Sager. Sager arrived just in time to see Nasrullah walk away from the fence and topple over. Sager rushed to him—the most valuable stallion in America—but he was dead. Sager, seeing the autopsy report, could hardly believe it.

Nasrullah died after the left ventricle of his heart, one of the chambers through which blood passes in and out, burst like a tire with a blowout, torn to shreds. The heart kept pumping, but blood continued pouring from it and filling the thoracic cavity. He died by suffocation.

As Nasrullah lay dead in the field, Bold Ruler went wild, screaming and running up and down the wooden fence that ran between his paddock and Nasrullah’s. Fields was startled: “It was his daddy lyin’ there. It’s the only day I ever saw Bold Ruler fret. He was hollerin’ and pawin’ and runnin’ up and down that fence—Nasrullah, you see, never nickered, but he nickered that day.”

Bull Hancock’s decision to bring Nasrullah to America was perhaps the most momentous ever made in the history of American bloodstock, for the rugged bay stallion altered the breed in this country, infusing the domestic strains with the Nearco fire. The Nasrullahs were fast and they could stay the classic distances, like Bold Ruler and Nashua and Bald Eagle. He represented a milestone in financial investment in racing blooded horses, the beginning of big profits from what were only the most modest investments. An original $10,000 investment in a share of Nasrullah ultimately became worth about $700,000.

Now Nasrullah was dead at Claiborne in the paddock near the stallion barn. He was buried in a grave behind the farm office across from Kennedy Creek, along a gravel walkway that runs behind it shaded by a hedge ten feet high. He was the fifth horse buried there. The other headstones next to his, each a foot and a half high, were carved with the names of Claiborne stallions who had died before him:

SIR GALLAHAD III (1920–1949)

JOHNSTOWN (1936–1950)

GALLANT Fox (1927–1953)

BLENHEIM II (1927–1958)

And then:

NASRULLAH (1940–1959)

In 1964, the year Northern Dancer won the Derby and the Preakness but faded in the one-and-one-half-mile Belmont Stakes, the little bay Princequillo had a heart attack.

Princequillo was conceived in France, born in England, raised in Ireland, shipped to America as a yearling, and raced in claiming races as a juvenile. He won at the longest of American distances—the farther the better—and even then he stood for only $250 at Ellerslie, and Bull could not get enough mares to breed to him. Chenery’s Hill Prince helped change all that. Princequillo was the leading American sire in 1957, the year his offspring won $1,698,427—a world record until Bold Ruler broke it in 1966—and in 1958, they won $1,394,540. But his impact would be felt most forcefully as a broodmare sire—as the father of mares such as Somethingroyal. He first led the broodmare sire list in 1966, when his 191 daughters produced horses that won $2,007,184. Princequillo was the country’s leading broodmare sire for seven years, at last count, and he finally cracked the 1957 record of Mahmoud—whose daughters produced offspring winning $2,593,782—when his daughters’ offspring earned more than $2,700,000.

Princequillo declined after his heart attack, but he had the poise and sense to take it easy, never galloping or exerting himself in the paddock. There was nothing anyone could do for him but feed him and hope that death would come easy. He was relieved of stud duties that year.

The son of Prince Rose–Cosquilla died on July 18, at about nine o’clock at night, falling behind the hedge where the graves were lined up, and he was buried there with the others next to Nasrullah. His was the sixth headstone, and it, too, was carved in stone:

PRINCEQUILLO (1940–1964)

Snow Fields said he first began to sense something wrong with Bold Ruler in 1970. It was the smell of decay, and thinking it might be a dead rodent in Bold Ruler’s stall, he looked around for it, but found nothing.

A foulness hung about the horse, filled the stall, and eventually pervaded the barn, making Snow wince at the thought of it years later. Snow bathed the stall with a disinfectant more than once, dousing it more heavily each time, the corners and the sides, but to no avail. It was an odor that Snow Fields would never forget. It was the smell of death.

Dr. Walter Kaufman, the Claiborne Farm veterinarian, had given the horse antibiotics, and his distress cleared up, but it came back again.

There had been bleeding, just a trickle in the beginning, then a heavier flow. Bold Ruler had undergone tracheotomy to ease his breathing. A lighted tube had been inserted in his throat, but that exploration revealed only swollen and inflamed tissue, not the cause of it. Bold Ruler was losing weight steadily when it was decided, in early August, to van him to Lexington for exploratory surgery under general anesthesia.

It was a malignancy, deep in the nasal passage and hanging just below the brain. And when Dr. Irene Roeckel told Kaufman that it was not benign—Kaufman had been waiting, like a father, at the medical school for the biopsy report—he called Bull Hancock at Saratoga. Bull told the Phippses.

Gladys Phipps, nearing eighty-seven, ordered her horse destroyed if there were any signs of pain. Those close to the stable said she had a source at the farm, an unknown source, with whom she spoke regularly for reports on the condition of her cripple. They weren’t going to fool her, not at this late hour. In an effort to relieve and finally save the horse, she and her son Ogden agreed to send him to Auburn University to undergo a series of unusual and expensive cobalt treatments. Between the time x-rays were first taken and the time Bold Ruler arrived at Auburn, the tumor had grown to the size of a tennis ball and blocked nearly the whole of his nasal passage.

Eight times in eight weeks they bombarded him with cobalt, precision bombings since the tumor lay so near the brain, and each time he was knocked unconscious under general anesthesia. Robinson stayed with him, sleeping in a trailer at the university.

Bold Ruler’s condition improved substantially. He ate well, recovering quickly from the anesthesia, and comported himself with calm throughout his two-month stay at Auburn. By the end of the treatments, the mass had diminished in size, and the horse’s weight had increased by fifty pounds. Vanned back to Claiborne Farm in October with Robinson, Bold Ruler showed new life and new vigor, his spirits lifting. While there was hope he would continue to stand at stud, there was no definitive prognosis, only guarded opinions and speculation.

Gladys Phipps lived just long enough to learn that Bold Ruler had been returned to Claiborne and that growth of the mass had been retarded. A week after he returned to the farm, she died at the age of eighty-seven on her Long Island estate.

By the late spring of 1971, a full book of thirty-seven mares had been bred to Bold Ruler. The stallion had been behaving well since the cobalt treatments. Then his illness recurred sometime in June. Though he continued eating well, Bold Ruler started losing weight. X-rays taken in May had been clear, but now in June there was trouble again.

Eight months after Mrs. Phipps died, Miss Disco was destroyed “due to the infirmities of old age,” according to the farm files. The dam of Bold Ruler was twenty-seven.

Bold Ruler continued declining through June, his general health and vigor deteriorating. An entry in the farm veterinarian log, made June 25, noted: “The horse has lost considerable weight, and appears uneasy and unhappy. Considerable foul-smelling discharge from the nostrils. Horse not moving well. Appears stiff and sore.”

A piece of tissue, cut from the horse’s neck, was sent for a biopsy to the University of Kentucky. The report, dated July 8, read in part like an order for execution: “This tumor is the same as the first biopsy specimen but appears more anaplastic and malignant.”

Nothing more could be done. Bold Ruler grew pathetically ill. One side of his face became paralyzed. By then he had reigned seven years in succession as America’s leading sire, his performers having already earned $13,067,364. He was only seventeen years old, and he should have had several more years at stud.

Finally an orange van was rolled up to the office and parked along that gentle incline of a ramp where horses load and unload at Claiborne. Bold Ruler would be destroyed there and taken to Lexington for autopsy. The spot was near the office, the horse cemetery, and the breeding shed, beneath a large grove of trees.

Bull Hancock left almost immediately, as he always did when a horse was about to be put down, getting in his car and driving out along Kennedy Creek and out the stone gate. “Don’t even tell me about it,” Bull told Robinson, before leaving. “I don’t want to know anything. Just put him down and say no more to me.”

On July 12, 1971 (three weeks after Secretariat walked in caravan toward the training center from the yearling barn), Snow clipped a lead chain on Bold Ruler and, with Lawrence Robinson alongside, walked the horse from his stall. Leading him toward the van, they walked along the path past the breeding shed—and Bold Ruler raised his head and nickered.

“That rascal thinks he’s goin’ to the breeding shed,” Robinson told Snow.

They walked him to a gate leading to a grassy patch of land behind the shed and toward the gravel surface of the unloading area. They took Bold Ruler inside the van. There, Dr. Kaufman, with a hypodermic needle containing a heavy dose of a potent barbiturate, went into the van with the horse. Dr. Kaufman injected the drug into Bold Ruler’s jugular, emptying the syringe, and then jumped hurriedly from the side of the van. For the next several seconds they all stood there—Kaufman, Snow, Robinson, and the van driver—and waited. Forty-five seconds later there was a tremendous crash, rocking the van, and then silence.

He was buried behind the office with Princequillo and Nasrullah and all the others. The stone read:

BOLD RULER (1954–1971)

There were tributes, like that from thoroughbred breeding writer Leon Rasmussen, who wrote an obituary that opened: “The king is dead….”

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.

That workout was the first time Turcotte could sense that the big clown had any ability at all, any speed. He fell against the bit and ran with two fast youngsters, handling the mud well, handling it better than Riva Ridge did that afternoon in the Everglades Stakes.

Hemmed in on the rail with no place to go, bumping the rail in the stretch, and never getting near the lead, Riva Ridge finished fourth in the race, the first time he had been beaten since the summer of ‘71. Laurin said he was grateful to get the horse back in one piece. Turcotte was sharply criticized for his ride in the race, and Penny and Lucien talked about firing him and finding another rider. But the big races were coming up, so they decided to keep him on the colt.

It would not be the last time that Turcotte nearly lost a Meadow Stable mount.

It was nearing the time of the spring classics, and Riva Ridge was shipped north to Lexington, Kentucky, for the Blue Grass Stakes on April 27, his final prep race for the May 6 Kentucky Derby. Secretariat and several stablemates were vanned north to Long Island and to Barn 5 at Belmont Park, an indoor shed with a row of stalls that abutted the fence of the clubhouse parking lot. Barn 5 lay just 200 yards from the main track, the biggest oval in America—at one and one half miles in circumference—and there the humdrum of routine began.

In their first workout in New York that year, Angle Light and Gold Bag beat Secretariat badly on a sloppy racetrack, running a half mile in 0:49. Secretariat ran in 0:501/5 with urging, not a sharp move. A fifth of a second is equal to a length, so Gold Bag and Angle Light beat him by six.

In mid-April, on a gray wet morning when the track was a mire, apprentice jockey Paul Feliciano, who worked under contract for Lucien, hopped aboard Secretariat for a routine gallop on the training track about a quarter mile away.

Feliciano had his feet out of the stirrups, dangling them at Secretariat’s side, when Laurin spotted him and raised his voice in warning.

“Put your feet in the irons!” he yelled. “Be careful with that horse! Don’t take no chances. He plays and he’ll drop you, I swear to God.”

Feliciano’s feet rose into the stirrups, which he was wearing too short, and someone dimly recalled Laurin’s calling to Feliciano, “Drop your irons.” What Laurin wanted Feliciano to do was lengthen his stirrups for surer balance.

The horses moved toward the training track, and Laurin turned to Dave Hoeffner, Henny’s son, and said, “Hey, you want to take a ride to the training track with me?” They slipped into Lucien’s station wagon.

Laurin, muttering and still peeved at Feliciano, told Hoeffner in the car, “I bet that horse throws this kid. He’s frisky and I bet he throws him. The kid’s not listening to what I’m saying.”

Secretariat, and the other horses in the set, strode through the stable area to the gap leading to the training track. They walked onto the muddy surface and began, one by one, to take off at a slow gallop. Feliciano, his reins loose, guided Secretariat near the outside rail and stood up in the saddle as the colt cantered through the long stretch toward the clocker’s shed, passed the shed, and began heading into the first bend. He heard a horse working to his left, on the rail, his hooves slapping and splashing at the mud as he drilled past on the rails.

“I heard the noise. It was a split-second thing. He stopped, propped and wheeled, and turned left and I knew what was going to happen. I think he knew I was going off, too, already slipping, because he turned around from under me. I landed on my face.”

Secretariat, riderless, his head and tail up and his reins flapping across his neck, took off clockwise around the racetrack, the wrong way, racing back toward the gap. Laurin saw him and, in an instant, was speeding out of the training track infield.

The car zipped through the tunnel and reentered the fence at the stable area. Laurin and Hoeffner saw Secretariat standing calmly at the gap by the training track, as if he were waiting for a taxi.

Dave Hoeffner climbed out from the car, walking with stealth toward Secretariat, who stood looking at him curiously. He reached out and grabbed the reins. Laurin immediately took off back to the barn, leaving Dave to walk Secretariat home alone. The colt walked like a prince for a quarter mile.

Paul Feliciano unscrewed his face from the mud at the seven-eighths pole and started walking around the oval toward the stable area.

He did not want to return to Barn 5, where Lucien Laurin was waiting for him. Paul Feliciano, twenty, born and raised on Union Street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, feared Laurin. Earlier, the headstrong Gold Bag had run off with him, as he had done with other riders, and Laurin had ranted at him. Paul had not forgotten the incident, so he had no illusions about what Lucien would say to him.

It was a ten-minute walk to the stable. By then Secretariat was standing in his stall, with blankets stacked up on his back. His back muscles were tied up so badly he couldn’t move. Secretariat wouldn’t leave the barn for almost two weeks.

“That son of a bitch ain’t worth a quarter!” Laurin howled. Paul arrived shortly after.

He would remember only bits and pieces of what was said. “You better listen to me right now, young man! You better pay attention when you’re on those horses! Wake up!” Then Feliciano saw the unmistakable sign of the Laurinian anger, the tipoff that he was in dead earnest. Lucien tilted his hat to one side as he walked away, setting it askew. Turning, Laurin said, “I want to see you in my office.”

In the screened-in porch, just at the top of the staircase by the office, Feliciano stood and listened for five minutes as Laurin reproached and scolded him. He told him at last, “You come by in the morning and pick up your contract and your check.”

“What could I do?” Paul said. “He stopped when that other horse came by and I lost my balance.”

It was no use.

Laurin had told him the same thing after Gold Bag had run away with him earlier, and the next day had acted as if nothing had happened. But this time, Feliciano thought, Laurin had raised such hell, seemed so angry, that he had to be dead serious. Feliciano took that home with him to his apartment in Elmont, despondent and confused. He believed Laurin had given him a good chance to ride all but the best horses. Laurin was known for helping young people start in the game. He certainly had been generous about giving Feliciano good mounts, live mounts, not bums. Now that was finished, and with it any good chance to make it as a jockey. Feliciano wondered where he would go.

The following morning, he walked under the shed of Barn 5, coming early to pick up his contract and look for another job. Lucien, arriving about seven, came into the shed telling Henny Hoeffner what exercise boy to ride on what horse. He looked at Paul, who was waiting for his contract, and said, “Put Paul on that horse to gallop.”

And that was the last Feliciano heard of it.

CHAPTER 10

Jimmy Gaffney drove past the Meadow Stable office in April, waving to Henny Hoeffner from his Oldsmobile, saying hello and jumping from the car and moving quickly, as always, a reedy stick of a man with a hawkish set of eyes, a fine sculpted jaw, and a love for horses.

He was thirty-seven years old. He had just returned to work as a mutuel clerk selling five-dollar place and show tickets in the grandstand section at Aqueduct. The clerks had been on strike for three weeks, but that was over, and once again Gaffney was working his artistry behind the window.

Gaffney was also an exercise boy, riding and working horses in the mornings. He had worked for Lucien briefly in 1963, and they had liked each other. They had gone fishing on Lucien’s boat, and when Gaffney left him several months later, they had parted on friendly terms. Now, seven years later, Gaffney saw Henny as he drove past the Meadow Stable. He stopped to chat, and in the course of the conversation, Henny asked him if he was working. When he said no, Henny offered him a job as an exercise boy and Gaffney took it.

Gaffney joined the Meadow Stable at a time of heightened expectations and morale raised by Riva Ridge, who, on April 27, went to the front not long after the start of the Blue Grass Stakes, shook off one challenge deep in the stretch, and ran off to win by four. That was only the prelude.

Nine days later, in front of 130,564 people at Churchill Downs and millions more on nationwide television, Riva Ridge galloped to the front in the run past the stands the first time, running easily under Turcotte, repulsed three challenges by the gritty little Hold Your Peace, and won the ninety-eighth running of the Kentucky Derby by more than three.

Turcotte, wearing the blue and white silks of the Meadow Stable, had just won his first Kentucky Derby, and he fairly glided on the colt toward the grassy winner’s circle. There was Lucien Laurin beaming, a man on the brink of retirement who woke up suddenly one morning with Riva Ridge in his barn.

There was Penny Tweedy, wearing a white and blue polka-dot dress and a choker of pearls, pivoting through the crowd like a princess newly crowned, her gestures contained but emphatic, her voice husky and assured on television, her manner courteous yet exuberant. She was too good to be true, and the press promptly collapsed at her feet.

On to the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico they went.

To this ecstatic aftermath came Gaffney, and one of the first things Henny Hoeffner told him to do was get on Secretariat. There were less than two months to Secretariat’s first race, and the red horse was just recovering from the tied-up muscles he had suffered the day he backed out from under Feliciano. Groom Mordecai Williams would put a saddle and a bridle on the colt and boost Gaffney aboard, sending both on a walk around the inside of the shed.

Secretariat, with Gaffney on him, walked to the training track that morning, taking the same route Feliciano had taken him the last time. The red horse stopped at the gap and stood there for several seconds, looking to the left and right, raising his head, as horses do when they are looking off into a distance. Gaffney did not hurry him, but let him stand there and watch the morning activity. It was a habit the colt acquired early in life—he liked to stop and see what he was getting into before he got into it—and he did that every time anyone ever took him to the racetrack.

Near the clocker’s shed a quarter mile away, Secretariat began doing his number: he dipped his shoulder and pulled, but Gaffney, riding with long stirrups, rode with him. The colt had been confined for a few weeks, and he was feeling his unburned oats. He galloped off strongly, pulling hard on the bit, but every day Gaffney gave him more rein, exerting less pressure, and after several days the colt relaxed. As he had done at Hialeah he started plopping along easily, moving smoothly and relaxed.

Secretariat soon stopped dipping his right shoulder. Gaffney, putting a special bit in the colt’s mouth with a prong on its left side, worked for days on the problem. Pressing both hands on his mount’s neck, Gaffney kept pressure on the right line, and every time the colt started to dip to the left Gaffney pressed down on the colt’s neck and exerted pressure on the rein.

Gaffney had been riding horses for almost two decades—he had ridden big and small horses, some fast and slow horses, stiff and supple horses—but in Secretariat he sensed the finest running machine he had ever straddled.

That the red horse had never run a race did not temper Gaffney’s public enthusiasm, an enthusiasm rooted in the way he looked and moved to Gaffney. “He was strictly a powerhouse—his movement, stride, and for a horse who is not supposed to know much at his age, he sure knew a lot. He would change strides just right coming in and out of a turn, and he seemed to me so intelligent for a young horse. Nothing bothered him. I had been on a lot of two-year-olds in my life, but this one really struck me.”

Gaffney’s mornings at the racetrack revolved around Secretariat. He rode the red horse steadily, building him up in his own mind, telling stablehands of the youngster’s extraordinary future, boasting about him to grooms and hot walkers and even to his wife, Mary. He began calling the horse “Big Red.”

Gaffney told his mother about the colt, too, and she replied by knitting and sending him a pommel pad—which is inserted as protection under the front of the saddle—with Secretariat’s name knitted in blue lettering across a white background. As if to flaunt his confidence and to reaffirm his instincts, translating them into something tangible, Gaffney purchased two blue saddlecloths, protective pads that prevent the saddle from abrading the colt. He took the saddlecloths—for which he paid four dollars each—to a woman in Queens who did needlework. Gaffney paid her twenty-four dollars to stitch “Secretariat” into the section that hangs, visibly, below the rear of the saddle. He took one of Lucien’s exercise saddles home—it was the saddle he always used when he rode the colt—and for several hours, with his leather-working kit, Gaffney hammered “Secretariat” into it, giving the letters a cursive flourish.

The red horse returned to serious work on the racetrack Thursday, May 18, when he went three-eighths of a mile in 0:37; yet no one but a few clockers—Meadow Stable hands and avid horseplayers—paid any attention. Lucien, for one, had his mind on things of greater moment: the Preakness Stakes, the second race in the Triple Crown series, was consuming all his energy. Penny Tweedy was confident of the outcome, feeling certain Riva Ridge would win it. This only made her disappointment at what happened all the more bitter.

The ninety-seventh running of the Preakness Stakes was a 1:553/s horror show, a mudslinger during the running and after it. Riva Ridge broke in a tangle, crowded Festive Mood on the first turn and down the backstretch, and began dueling his archrival Key to the Mint for second position. On the lead, his ears playing and pricking at the sight of the swipes and hot walkers draped over the backstretch fence, was William Farish III’s Bee Bee Bee. He was galloping along with consummate nonchalance, and neither Riva Ridge nor Key to the Mint ever got close enough to bite him, much less beat him, while veteran jockey Eldon Nelson sat chilly on him in a superbly judged piece of race riding.

Bee Bee Bee won it. Stretch-running No Le Hace was second, Key to the Mint a neck in front of Riva Ridge for third. The next day Lucien accused Turcotte of losing the race by not letting Riva Ridge move to the leader at the far turn. He said Turcotte was so busy watching jockey Braulio Baeza on Key to the Mint that he let Bee Bee Bee steal away with the race unchallenged. Elliott Burch, trainer of Key to the Mint, made no such accusations against Baeza. Turcotte said only that Riva Ridge could not handle the muddy track.

Laurin was furious with Turcotte, howling to turfwriter Joe Hirsch early Sunday morning. Laurin and Penny Tweedy talked about taking Turcotte off the horse again. “It was the second race he blew for us,” Penny Tweedy said. But again, rather than switch at a critical juncture, they decided to keep Turcotte for the Belmont Stakes June 9. Several days after the Preakness, Lucien had cooled off, and his opinion of Turcotte’s ride had mellowed considerably.

Hope for the Triple Crown was gone, just when it had seemed within their grasp.

If not for the Preakness Stakes, the bay might have won all three. For on June 10, Riva Ridge cruised to the front of the mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes, opening the bidding with a half mile in 0:48 and six furlongs in 1:12, a perfect twelve-clip, and he almost strung two more twelves together heading for the far turn. Riva Ridge reached the mile in 1:361/5 when Smiling Jack, racing with Riva all the way, began to stagger. Key to the Mint, probably overtrained for the race, spit out the bit turning for home, and Riva Ridge slowed down but galloped to win by seven in 2:28, the third fastest time of the race since it was first run at that distance in 1926, the year Man o’ War’s son, Crusader, won it.

Thus Riva Ridge reclaimed whatever prestige he had lost in the Preakness, establishing himself as the leading three-year-old in America and seemingly destined for Horse-of-the-Year honors. Then it happened.

The big mistake—one that would hound Penny Tweedy and Lucien Laurin—was deciding to take Riva Ridge to California for the mile-and-a-quarter Hollywood Derby, a race that appeared a soft touch for “The Ridge.” It was not. He carried high weight of 129 pounds, and he was desperate to win it.

He was like Olympic quarter miler Lee Evans running against a good high school sprint relay team. Finalista made two runs at Riva Ridge, Royal Champion took one close look early before calling it an afternoon, and finally Bicker ran at him in the final yards. Riva Ridge just lasted to win. The race exhausted him, leaving him dead on his feet, and many believe he never was the same horse again all year. They had no way of knowing it then, of course, but Riva Ridge would race six more times before the end of the year, losing his final start by thirty-eight lengths, and wouldn’t win another race.

Through May and June, with Gaffney galloping him and others working him, Secretariat grew in strength and ability, gained in fitness, and appeared to begin learning in earnest how to run. Other two-year-olds were appearing, too, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s chestnut colt Pvt. Smiles. On June 1 another unraced youngster headed down the path past Barn 5, walking from the stable of Bull Hancock. He was a son of Pretense, the one-time Claiborne stallion, out of the mare Sequoia, who like Somethingroyal was a daughter of Princequillo.

His name was Sham, and that morning he worked an easy half mile in 0:51⁴A Sham was growing quickly, and he would fill out one day into a rangy, good-looking dark bay colt, but on June 1 he, too, was still an ungainly youngster who hadn’t yet caught on to the game. Sham would learn soon enough.

On Thursday morning, June 6, three days before Riva Ridge’s Belmont Stakes, Secretariat wore blinkers for the first time—blue and white blocks, with leather cups partially shielding his eyes to keep his mind on the business up front—and went a half mile in 0:471/5 That was the fastest half-mile work in his life, but not fast enough to stay with Voler, a two-year-old filly who whipped him by four lengths in a rapid 0:464/5, one of the fastest moves of the day. Voler could shake a leg in the morning, and that day Secretariat pinned his ears at her precocity as she pulled away from him.

His work picked up through the last part of June. Again with blinkers, he worked from the starting gate and dashed five-eighths of a mile in 1:001/5 on June 15, with Feliciano up. It was among the fastest moves that day at five furlongs.

Secretariat was within three weeks of his first race.

On June 24, on a sloppy track, the official clockers for Daily Racing Form, the horseplayers’ scripture, noted a Secretariat workout in boldface letters on the workout sheets, meaning that his clocking of 1:124/5 for six furlongs was the fastest workout at the distance that morning. The clockers, in their eyrie near the roof of the clubhouse, watched Secretariat closely, and in the paper underneath the boldface type they wrote: “Secretariat is on edge.”

The clockers themselves had come a long way since the red horse first appeared in Florida, where they were spelling his name “Secretarial.” Not only had they learned how to spell him, they had learned to like him.

Walking the colt back from the six-furlong workout that morning, Paul Feliciano saw Lucien waiting for him by the gap in the fence. The trainer was wearing his Cheshire-cat grin, turning up the corners of his mouth.

Penny Tweedy was still living in Colorado when Lucien called her long distance one morning. He asked her if she could be at Aqueduct one day next week, telling her that he wanted her to see Secretariat run his first race.

They finally decided to enter the colt on July 4, when Penny could be there. It was an $8000 maiden (nonwinner) race for colts and geldings at five and a half furlongs, with the start on the backstretch and facing the far turn.

The red horse was no secret, not since his sharp six-furlong workout ten days before. He had since worked another three-eighths in 0:35 flat. Sweep, the nom de plume for Daily Racing Form handicapper Jules Schanzer, advised his readers on July 4:

Secretariat, a half-brother to Sir Gaylord, appears greatly advanced in his training. The newcomer by Bold Ruler stepped 6 furlongs in 1:124/5 over a sloppy Belmont course June 24 and such outstanding speed entitles him to top billing.

Members of the Meadow Stable bet with both hands, some more than others, most of it on the red horse’s nose. They thought he couldn’t lose. Gaffney, selling tickets at the grandstand window, would not bet on Secretariat because he didn’t think Paul Feliciano liked the colt or had enough confidence in him.

Lucien was sitting in a box seat with Penny Tweedy while the horses walked past the grandstand in the single-file post parade, turned, and broke into warm-up gallops past the finish line, around the first turn. In the front row of the box seats by the finish line sat sixty-year-old Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, recently appointed chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Racing Association, the organization that runs Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga.

It was nearing two o’clock. There was a wind blowing south against the horses walking to the starting gate up the backstretch, south toward Kennedy International Airport across the highway, toward Jamaica Bay. Bettors, some already moving to the rail on the homestretch, were busy making Secretariat the tepid $3.10 to $1.00 favorite.

Big Burn, jockey Braulio Baeza up, stepped into Post Position 1. An assistant starter took hold of Secretariat, who was wearing his blue and white checked blinkers, and led him into Post 2. The door slammed shut behind him. Feliciano patted the colt’s neck and waited. Strike The Line stood in gate 3 next to Secretariat, while Jacinto Vasquez sat on Quebec in Post 4. Binoculars rose to eyes.

Dave Johnson, the track announcer, looked through his binoculars toward the starting gate, clicked on the lever of the loudspeaker system, and drove his voice through the clubhouse and grandstand.

“It is now post time,” said Johnson.

It came all at once—the break, the sounds, and the collision—three seconds stitched into a triangle of time.

The gates crashed open, the bell screamed, and the horses vaulted upward and came down in a bound, Secretariat breaking sharply through one-two-three strides when Quebec sliced across Strike The Line and Vasquez hollered, but there was nothing anyone could do.

Quebec slammed dully into Secretariat, almost perpendicularly, plowing into his right shoulder. Like a fullback struck on his blind side, Secretariat staggered and fell left, crashing into Big Burn, and for several frames it appeared as if the red horse had two tacklers hanging on him. Quebec and Big Burn were leaning on him and trying to bring him down. Secretariat’s legs were chopping savagely and Feliciano heard him groaning as he was struck and worked to regain his legs. It was a wonder he didn’t go down.

He raced down the backside in eleventh place, next to Strike The Line, and Feliciano started scrubbing with his arms. Secretariat was digging, trying to pick up speed as they headed for the turn 300 yards ahead. He was not getting with it as fast as the others. Count Successor raced to the front, Knightly Dawn lapped on him in second, Calumet Farm’s Herbull third, and Master Achiever nearby in fourth.

The horses strung out charging for the turn when Secretariat started drifting aimlessly, his path a wavering line, his neck thrust out and pumping. Moving to the bend, he seemed confused as he drifted momentarily to the right, bumping a roan called Rove. Feliciano took back on the left rein, leaving the right line flapping, and the red horse leaned left to make the bend. There was nothing else Feliciano could do, nothing since the collision. Paul looked around and began seeing everything go wrong.

There was no place to run, and the rail was clogged up in front. Horses were pounding on his right, and they left no room for him to swing Secretariat out and get him rolling in the clear. A wall of four horses was shifting around in front of him. He had two horses beaten, racing for the three-eighths pole midway at the turn for home, and he had nowhere to go. The colt started to run up a hole opening in front of him, but that squeezed shut, too. He was working to get with it, as if looking for the holes himself.

Secretariat was a Cadillac in a traffic jam of Chevrolets and Datsuns, trapped hopelessly in the shifting, dimly unfolding mess around him. Lucien Laurin, looking through his binoculars, was astounded. Watching the break from the side, he missed seeing the crunch at the start. He was astounded because the red horse had always broken well in his morning trials, not slow like this and floundering rudderlessly. As the field made the bend, passing the five-sixteenths pole near the top of the stretch, Count Successor was still on the lead, Knightly Dawn beside him, Master Achiever now third, and Herbull on the outside fourth. The pace was not slow. The leader was carrying his field through a half mile in 0:461/5, brisk for two-year-olds, with Secretariat about ten lengths behind in 0:48. As the field straightened into the lane, racing past the grandstand bettors howling at them, it appeared for a moment as if Feliciano was going to swing the colt to the outside. Almost running up on horses’ heels, Feliciano had to slow the colt entering the lane, to check him.

Nearing the three-sixteenth pole, Secretariat suddenly veered on a sharp diagonal to the left, lunging for space as it opened on the rail, and took off. He was looking for spots, looking and moving for running room. Daylight in front of him, horses on the outside off the rail, scrubbing on the red horse furiously, Feliciano drove Secretariat down the lane. Secretariat gained, passing a tiring Knightly Dawn and then Jacques Who. He was gathering momentum, picking up speed, cutting into Master Achiever’s lead, from eight lengths nearing the furlong marker in midstretch to seven and then to six as Master Achiever raced for the wire.

The frontrunners were battling it out, and passing the eighth pole, the red horse appeared. He cut the lead to five lengths, then to four and a half, then finally to four lengths passing the sixteenth pole. He was in the hunt, and Feliciano was asking him for more steam, reaching back and strapping him once right-handed.

A small hole opened between Master Achiever and the rail near the wire. Feliciano drove the colt toward it. Secretariat was now running faster than all the others, closing the lane and cutting the lead to three lengths, then two lengths as the wire loomed, then one and a half lengths. Suddenly the hole on the rail closed as Master Achiever came over, and as the wire swept overhead Feliciano had to stand up and take Secretariat back again—“He gave me three runs that day! Three!”—to prevent him from running up Master Achiever’s heels. He closed about eight lengths on the leaders in a powerful run through the stretch, finished fourth, and earned $480, beaten only a length and a quarter by Herbull. As he crossed the finish line, the first thought that came to Paul Feliciano was, “God damn, I’m going to catch hell.”

Up in the press box, trackman Jack Wilson had already seen Secretariat’s run and sat down to write a brief summary of the race for the official chart, which read in part: “Secretariat, impeded after the start, lacked room between horses racing into the turn, ducked to the inside after getting through in the stretch and finished full of run.”

Down in the box seats, Penny Tweedy smiled as the colt raced across the line—she, too, was unaware of the collision—and told Lucien, “That’s pretty good for a first start.”

Lucien jumped from his chair in the box seat, kicked it, and growled, “He should have never been beaten!” His reaction startled Penny. Lucien had told her only that he thought she ought to be there for the colt’s first start—not that the colt was going to win, only that his workouts were impressive and he appeared to be learning fast. Lucien’s reaction made her realize for the first time how much he thought of Secretariat.

Feliciano pulled the colt to a halt at the bend, turned him around, clucked to him, and galloped slowly back to the unsaddling area by the paddock scale, where the jockeys weigh in after a race. As he galloped back, he happened to look over his left shoulder, toward the paddock, and as he pulled up he saw precisely what he expected—Lucien standing in the paddock waiting for him.

Jumping off Secretariat, Feliciano began preparing himself. All he could do, he thought, was tell the truth.

Feliciano weighed in at the scales, and turning around, he handed the saddle and pads to a valet and walked over to Lucien. The trainer waved a finger in Feliciano’s face. “God damn!” he said. “You sure as hell messed that one up.”

What was worse for the young apprentice was that he was scheduled to ride another horse for Lucien in a later race—Sovereign in the seventh. But between races, Lucien and Penny had seen the films, and as Paul came to the paddock for the seventh, Lucien was smiling. Quietly, Lucien apologized for yelling at him, and Feliciano recalled Laurin telling him he hadn’t seen the films then and didn’t realize the battering he’d taken at the start.

Yet, even with that, it surprised Paul when he picked up an overnight list of entries nine days later and glanced at it as he left the jockeys’ room. Under the entries for the fourth race on July 15, a three-quarter-mile sprint for colts and geldings, he read: “Secretariat … Feliciano, P.”

CHAPTER 11

Secretariat walked away from his first race staring, his eyes still wide open to the startling snap of the gate and to the collision—and no doubt to the suddenly quickening beat of his life.

Lucien did not hesitate to fuel his intensity, to keep him on his toes through July. Six days after his first start, Secretariat worked to three-eighths of a mile in 0:353/5 at Belmont Park. Four days later Lucien sent him out to zip three-eighths again, this time breezing in 0:36 on a sloppy track, the day before his second race on July 15.

Jules Schanzer didn’t abandon Secretariat July 15, writing in the Daily Racing Form:

Secretariat turned in a remarkable performance after being badly sloughed at the start of his rough recent preview. The half-brother to Sir Gaylord turned on full steam after settling into his best stride and was devouring ground rapidly through the stretch run. Today’s added distance is a plus factor that can help him leave the maiden ranks.

Nor did the bettors abandon Secretariat at Aqueduct, sending him off as the $1.30-to-$1.00 favorite over Master Achiever.

Paul Feliciano emerged from the tunnel by the jockeys’ room and walked to Lucien in the paddock. They huddled briefly. “Don’t do like you did last time. Just stay out of trouble and let him run. He shouldn’t get beat.”

Lucien then gave Feliciano a leg up on the colt, and to the sound of Sam Koza’s Aida trumpet signaling the field of eleven horses to the post, Feliciano was already thinking about what he would do. He was more nervous than usual that afternoon because he himself believed—as Lucien and thousands of bettors no doubt believed—that he should not have lost his first start, that he should not be beaten this time, and that he was sitting on a horse who needed only room to run. He thought about the opening jump from the gate, hoping the colt would break well and in the clear, not in a tangle of horses again, and he thought he would try to keep him on the outside where he would have room to move.

What made Lucien the angriest, thought Feliciano, was a jockey getting a horse in trouble and getting him beat when he should not have been beaten. That was inexcusable. So he was rehearsing what he would do to keep Secretariat in the clear, free to move when he wanted to. He decided he wouldn’t rush the horse, even if he broke slowly, but rather would let him settle into stride and move out when he put it together.

Into stall 1 moved Fleet ‘n Royal, the colt who had finished third, a nose in front of Secretariat, on July 4. The youngsters loaded each in turn. An assistant starter took ahold of Secretariat’s rein on the left side and led him into Stall 8, to the outside of Jacques Who and to the inside of the post of Bet On It, a gelding with a quick turn of foot. The instant before the red horse stepped into the starting gate, Feliciano pulled a pair of plastic goggles over his eyes. Secretariat gave no signs of nervousness at the post, no feeling that he would bust hell-bent for the turn. Secretariat stood relaxed inside the gate, Feliciano recalled, looking casually ahead.

Starter George Cassidy, standing atop a platform about ten yards in front of the gate, watched for the moment when the heads stopped turning. Then Cassidy pressed the button, the gates popped open, and the eleven liberated horses started bounding forward as one.

Secretariat broke alertly, as he did July 4, his head emerging from the gate with the others in the first jump, but with that first single stride he was already running last, already a half length behind Jacques Who at the break. Ten feet from the gate, with the others barreling for the lead and beginning to string out, he was still nearly trailing the field. This start, among others, would later give rise to the false notion that the battering he took in his first race made him timid in all his starts, made him afraid to leave the slip with his field, causing him to take himself back.

But he didn’t take himself back that afternoon. He was pumping and driving with his front and back legs, trying to move his bulk apace with the field. He was reaching for whatever ground he could grab beneath himself, but he wasn’t getting there as fast as the others.

Up in the box seats, Laurin’s mouth dropped open as the colt fell back to last, astounded that it was all happening a second time.

Feliciano sensed the colt was having no easy time finding his stride, so he sat tight on him as they started to race for the bend, not reaching back and strapping him, not hollering at him. Instead, Feliciano sat pumping with his arms, in rhythm with the stride. Through that first quarter mile, Feliciano wondered whether Secretariat would ever get it together. All he could do for the moment was keep the colt to the outside, clear of traffic, and wait for him to find himself. He began to worry in earnest as the field pounded through the first 220 yards, leaving him with only five furlongs to go and still no running horse beneath him. He was asking Secretariat to run, but without the whip, pumping on him as they raced to the bend.

Bet On It was sprinting toward the half-mile pole a length in front, zipping along at an eleven-second clip through the first eighth, with Master Achiever right behind and Impromptu third. They were rolling as Secretariat finally came alive.

As the field raced down the backside for the turn, Paul suddenly began to feel it happening beneath him, a coming together of stride and movement, a leveling out and smoothing of motion that retired exercise boy Jimmy (The Squirrel) Weininger once recalled, in tones of reverence: “It’s the oddest thing. It’s like you’re a pilot and you’re out there warming up the engine and then it shifts into that one gear that sends your ass down the runway. A horse drops down and he’s in first gear and then he’s in fourth gear and it’s sort of like flying, taking off.”

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